Groove, a sales engagement platform for enterprises using Salesforce, has announced the general availability of their first industry-specific product, Groove for Salesforce Financial Services Cloud. The new sales engagement platform is currently in use at a multi-national bank to help them accelerate sales productivity and build stronger relationships across their retail and commercial banking operations in the United States.
According to the Salesforce State of Sales 2020 report, 82% of salespeople in Financial Services say that their digital transformation has accelerated since 2019. The Covid-19 pandemic has further fueled this trend, as banks and wealth management advisors look to quickly transform their old way of doing business into a digital-first world, with fewer in-person meetings, fewer branches, and fewer retail locations.
“2020 will be remembered as a watershed moment when B2B buying and selling changed forever,” said Mary Shea, principal analyst for Forrester Research in the recent Wave report on sales engagement. “While the digitisation of the buying and selling process has been underway for some time, the hardships from Covid-19 have dramatically accelerated this trend.” According to the report, “sales engagement is poised to meet the moment.”
Salesforce Financial Services Cloud comes out of the box with all the core features of its Sales Cloud, plus new custom fields and objects modelling financial accounts, assets, liabilities, and goals for both individual clients and across entire households. This means advisors no longer have to spend time and money customising their CRM to speak the language of their firm.
“Salesforce Financial Services Cloud provides an integrated platform that can be tailored to any financial services organisation’s high-touch relationship model,” said Chris Rothstein, co-founder and CEO of Groove. “We are aligned with Salesforce Industry Clouds’ vision to help their customers accelerate digital transformation and realise time-to-value as quickly as possible. This is why we are bringing to market the first sales engagement platform that has been tailored to meet the specific needs of the financial services industry.”
Groove for Salesforce Financial Services Cloud aligns with the custom data model and hundreds of industry-specific workflows in this cloud, so that banks and wealth management advisors can quickly realise time-to-value, without a heavy lift from their IT team
Key capabilities of the new platform include:
- Information technology teams can centrally manage an automated system for multi-channel communications around loan disbursement programs, mortgage lending, and other common workflows. Unlike marketing automation systems, all communications can be highly personalised and 1:1 in nature.
- Relationship managers, advisors, and teams can deliver personalised advice at scale across any channel or device, surfacing real-time CRM information in the inbox.
- Sales management benefits from real-time visibility into activity levels and outcomes, instantly logging emails, calls, SMS messages, and LinkedIn correspondence to custom objects and industry-specific workflows.
