How Admins Can Take Advantage of Einstein to Build a Smarter CRM

What do the words smart cities, smart homes, artificial intelligence, and Einstein have in common? They are trends in technology that are coming your way faster than you may think. You’ve heard us talk about a smarter CRM, the many great possibilities of Salesforce Einstein. But what is it all about and how will it effect your day to day, or even your career?

As an Admin, you can champion the use of AI, get your org ready to become “smart”, and setup key features. You’ll be a key player in helping your company create a transformational customer experience using real AI.

What is Salesforce Einstein?

Before we dive into setup and how-tos, let’s review Salesforce Einstein. Salesforce Einstein is artificial intelligence (AI) for CRM. Einstein makes every Admin a data scientist. We’re infusing AI into all our Salesforce applications to make customer interactions smarter. Let’s take a look at an example in Sales. Einstein helps Sales reps by scoring leads intelligently using machine learning – a core component of AI technology. The rep then prioritizes their day by focusing on the leads that Einstein has predicted are the most likely to convert. At the end of the day, the reps converted more leads by working smarter with Einstein.

So how does Einstein work? Capture, Learn, Connect. It all starts with capturing data – admins, keep this in mind, it’s important and we’ll come back to this later. Einstein uses all the customer data you have in Salesforce as well as data from the IoT, email data, calendar data, and data from social media. It then learns from the data and discovers insights, predicts outcomes, recommends next steps, and automates all these processes to increase productivity. Finally, Einstein allows you to connect with your customers by delivering these insights and predictions back in context for all your users to take advantage of. Make sense? Lets dive deeper with Sales Cloud Einstein.

How Einstein makes Sales Cloud smarter

Sales Cloud Einstein is now generally available as of our Spring ’17 release. It’s an add on product to Sales Cloud and is composed of four main pieces of functionality.

First of all, there’s Einstein Lead Scoring. This feature scores all your leads automatically using the data from the fields (both standard and custom) on the lead object. It uses automated machine learning to find the best model to predict the success of conversion for each lead.

• There are a few reasons this is so powerful: It happens automatically – with traditional rule-based lead scoring someone goes in and creates the formula or rules that make a good lead – Einstein does this for you.
• Because of #1, there’s no human bias and Einstein might surface top indicators for good leads that you never would have thought of.
  It regularly retests itself to make sure you always have the best model. For example, if something changes in your industry that impacts your sales process, Einstein will detect it, create a new model and automatically rescore all your leads.

The second and third big features are Opportunity Insights and Account Insights. Insights are designed so Account Executives can track the status of their deals and always have the latest context for their accounts. While similar in design and function, these insights actually use completely different models for each type of insight surfaced. We can categorize the insights into a few different types that we can surface.

The final feature of Sales Cloud Einstein powers it all – Automated Activity Capture. This feature connects directly to your email (Gmail or Office365) and logs relevant activity history on accounts, contacts, opportunities, etc. Have you ever had trouble getting Sales reps to log their activities in Salesforce? This is your solution. It’s a major productivity booster saving reps a ton of time, but it’s also a must for Einstein. Einstein learns from all the activities this feature logs using natural language processing, allowing us to surface all the incredible insights mentioned above.

What Admins can do today

So with all of that, what can you really do today as an admin? I’m going to break it down into three categories – data, setup, and education.

Data
You need clean, quality data to have good predictions and insights with Artificial Intelligence. There’s no getting around this – garbage data in = garbage predictions out. Start thinking about your lead object and the fields you’ve built on there. Are people filling everything out correctly? Are they leaving important fields out? If data is inconsistent or simply not filled out, it won’t break the model from Einstein, but it simply won’t be used. Make sure all your most important fields are filled out, and come up with a strategy to ensure clean data moving forward.

Setup
Einstein is very quick and easy to setup. Turning on Lead Scoring, Opportunity Insights, and Account insights just requires adjusting user permissions and flipping a few toggles in setup. Where you will spend more of your time is configuring Automated Activity Capture. Still very easy to setup, you must enable this for the entire org and turn it on for the appropriate users. Then each user will have to log in and authenticate using their Office365 or Gmail login to approve the connection. Finally, there are sharing settings with the logged activities to educate users about.

Education
It’s important to understand AI and Einstein as a whole as well as the finer details of the functionality. At a high level, Einstein makes it really easy for your company to get started using AI today. Products like Sales Cloud Einstein are pretty much turn key, ready for you to start generating predictions and creating magical customer interactions right away.

To educate yourself further, take the Get Smart with Salesforce Einstein Trail on Trailhead.

To inform and educate your stakeholders and executives, share things like the “Meet Salesforce Einstein, AI for everyone” video and the “AI for CRM: A Field Guide to Everything You Need to Know” eBook.

Other important details to educate your users about:

• Features like Automated Activity Capture often bring up questions about privacy and sharing concerns. It’s important to explain that Einstein will only log email content relevant to open opportunities, account records, etc. in Salesforce.
• Users can go in and edit the sharing settings within each record so it could be visible to just them, to a selling group, or to everyone.
• Einstein also has a developer component to it. If you want to leverage AI within your own custom apps, you can use APIs like our Einstein Vision API for image recognition.

With these tips, you can get yourself ready to take advantage of AI in your Salesforce org. Be the champion of Einstein so you can enable your company to create a transformational customer experience.