The compendium to the sales contact centre cookbook

1. Successful Selling:
Getting more from Oracle Service Cloud
About the Author
Mark Kehoe is a former RightNow / Oracle Service Cloud (OSC) Principal Consultant
who joined the company way back in 2006. He has since gone on to create his own
consultancy company based in Australia. He has been a regular contributor to the
OSC conferences both in Europe and Australia.
About this Document
The audience for this document is an OSC client is seeking to value-add their service
delivery. The document will describe the strengths and weaknesses of the key
functionality. It will give an overview to the sales components and what each part
as to play.
It is the what and why to the how I’ve written in “Sales Contact Centre Cookbook”.
Oracle Service Cloud does sales?
I’m often surprised when I show people what the sales module does. They have two
reactions; firstly, they didn’t know it existed and secondly they didn’t realise it worked
as well as it does.
The sales module comes with a wealth of functions, features and reports for
managing a sales team (more of which later). It can create an opportunity from an
incident or marketing campaign and allow you to nurture the lead (which is the
sales name for a contact) until a conclusion; either they bought a product or
agreed to a service or decided it’s not for them.
What does the sales module do?
Remember when you first saw incident management within OSC and thought that it
looks easy to use and simple to configure? Sales is the next evolution in that process.
It’s simple to use and simple to implement.
The important thing to remember is that opportunities are not like incidents; where
incidents will be an open and shut case, opportunities take time to finish. The
analogy I like to give is that enquiry management (I try to avoid the word incident) is
for short-duration interactions over hours or days. Opportunities are long-duration
interactions over days, weeks or months.

2. 2 Successful selling using Oracle Service Cloud
Created by Mark Kehoe mark.kehoe@outlook.com 0487 335311
To summarise some of the benefits and weakness of the sales module I’ve bulleted
what I think is relevant below:
Sales Contacts
Strengths Weaknesses
ü No integration required; works
with service, knowledgebase,
social and marketing
û Additional maintenance
overhead
ü Extensible; new fields work as well
with sales as with any of the others
ü A single workspace to show sales,
service, marketing, social and
knowledgebase interactions
Enquiries and Knowledgebase
Strengths Weaknesses
ü Offer advisor: “Why fix a broken
product when you can sell a new
one?”
û It’s an additional burden on a
busy service delivery team
ü Customers purchases can have
targeted knowledgebase articles
ü Sales advisors can make prospects
from genuine enquiries
ü Chat becomes more prescriptive
Sales Opportunities
Strengths Weaknesses
ü Simple to use for tracking the life
of the sale
û Can’t sent emails; you need to
use enquiries to do this
ü Centralizes all interactions in one
workspace
û Reporting is overly complicated;
you end up writing your own
ü Opportunities can be created
from enquiries or marketing
û Marketing can only create an
opportunity; it can’t update it
ü Quotes can do mail merging and
produce letters
û Quotes don’t support enquiry
fields
ü Sales products can connect to the
knowledgebase and to service
products for enquiry management
û Sales products can’t calculate
local taxes
Tasks
Strengths Weaknesses
ü System can auto-create tasks û A task can’t update an
opportunity without some effort
ü Tasks are fully extensible û Reporting needs additional effort
to get the most from it

3. Kehoe Consulting
Successful selling using Oracle Service Cloud
3
Created by Mark Kehoe mark.kehoe@outlook.com 0487 335311
Why should I use the sales module?
The sales module is a basic tool to manage the sales cycle. If the people who wish
to use the sales module consider themselves a ‘sales team’ then I would suggest
looking at integrating Oracle Sales Cloud. The sales module isn’t for those hard-
charging reps who’re knocking down doors and looking to win at all costs.
My expertise is in higher education I typically deliver solutions for student advisors
who I’m sure you would agree aren’t the most cut-throat of sellers.
If the team thinks they are ‘offering’ rather than ‘selling’ then you should consider
using the sales module.
Conclusion
The sales module adds measurable value to Oracle Service Cloud and to your
service delivery:
• Helps a cost-centre become a profit-centre
• Supports the sales team by identifying a market need
• Generates high-quality leads based on a customer enquiry
• Gains the trust of the customer with knowledgeable responses
• Offers feedback to a customer about a purchased product or service
By placing a sales team into the heart of your service delivery you’re offering a low-
risk, high-return option to your organisation or institution.
For further information contact Mark Kehoe at mark.kehoe@outlook.com, at
LinkedIn or mobile (+61) 0487 335311.
Marketing
Service
Delivery
Knowledgebase
Social
and
Chat
Sales