Oracle expands Customer Experience platform with Oracle Digital Sales

Oracle last week introduced Oracle Digital Sales, a CRM tool aimed at reducing time for data entry and enabling sales reps to find and update CRM records more quickly.

Oracle Digital Sales features a UI that brings tasks frequently carried out by sales reps -- such as finding a lead, making a call and adding notes -- into one place to reduce data entries and clicks.

By the end of 2019, sales enablement platform vendors will generate approximately $566 million in revenue, an increase of approximately 9% from the previous year, according to the Gartner for Sales Leaders Sales Opportunity Survey. Some vendors in this sector report year-over-year growth rates as high as 55%.

Leading vendors in the market offer AI-based recommendations within opportunity records and use algorithms that deliver real-time recommendations to customers based on sales stages, opportunity data, geolocation and buyers' interaction with the content, Marc Brown wrote in Gartner's Market Guide for Sales Enablement Platforms.

According to Oracle, other features offered by Oracle Digital Sales include:

• Oracle Digital Assistant: This AI-powered chatbot, aimed at helping Oracle applications users improve productivity, is available throughout the entire Oracle Digital Sales UI. Sales reps can use the digital assistant to query key information like which new leads have been assigned, add a product or update prices for a lead.
• Notifications on home screen: Digital Sales continuously updates to alert users of items requiring attention. The home screen also houses quick links that direct sales reps into records to start working.
• Gamified dashboard: Managers can create and track challenges for their team while sales reps can see their progress against peers as well as get insight into what tactics are working for teammates.
• Record of newsfeed: Interactions are displayed within the record in one thread, including past emails, conversations, email metrics, call transcripts, recordings, follow-up tasks and appointments.
• AI-powered recommendations offers suggestions like which leads to tackle first, next best actions to take or to schedule follow up tasks automatically. 

"It's not like a workspace that gives you all the work you need to do, and makes you go through it … It's a very different paradigm, it allows you to drill into data and explore past interactions," Kate Leggett, vice president and principal analyst serving application development and delivery professionals at Forrester, said of Oracle Digital Sales.

She added that Oracle has aimed for and focused more on inside sales roles and the high velocity sales use case compared with its competitors, which offer broader offerings with additional marketing and customer success capabilities built into the platform.

When it comes to assessing a sales enablement platform, Leggett suggests organizations look at what tool has the best adoption and user experience that fits their team's needs. "The biggest criterion that I say, is being able to support the job function end-to-end, but as well make sure that whoever's using the tool … what user experience resonates with them the best, and is able to facilitate them getting their work done."