Salesforce.com Inc. today introduced new capabilities, including some powered by artificial intelligence, to make the salespeople and marketers using its services more productive.

The two biggest additions are rolling out for the company’s flagship Sales Cloud. Work Queues, the first new tool, uses machine learning to determine which leads should be prioritized based on their likelihood of becoming paying customers. Users can then engage those contacts with the help of Sales Cadences, the other new capability.

Sales Cadences enables companies to create what are essentially visual blueprints for interacting with prospects. A workflow created in the tool can display recommended times to call or email a lead, as well as tips on what to say.

Displaying best practices in a visual form can bring more consistency to the sales cycle, at least in theory. A representative new to their job, for instance, might benefit from having easy access to guidelines. Salesforce also sees Sales Cadences being useful for veteran salespeople, who might from time to time need to consult best practices as well to ensure they handle every customer interaction consistently.

Another service being updated today is Salesforce’s Pardot business-to-business marketing platform. A new tool, Einstein Behavior Scoring, introduces lead ranking features similar to Work Queues that will enable companies to prioritize prospects based on campaign engagement. It assesses the way each person interacts with email and website materials to determine how likely that person is to make a purchase.

Another new feature, Campaign Insights, uses collected engagement data to provide information about overall campaign performance. It places a particular emphasis on measuring the efficacy of marketing content and email subject lines.

After a company successfully engages a prospect, there’s another set of details that need to be sorted out before the deal can close. One of the most important of the bunch is billing, which is what Salesforce hopes to simplify with the third update it announced today.

The company has introduced new features for Salesforce CPQ, its quote-to-cash platform, to address the growing adoption of subscription-based business models. Companies can now automatically renew payments, invoices, billing reports and related items at fixed intervals. Salesforce is also moving to ease usage-based billing with a feature that automatically files changes such as a contract renewal under the relevant customer account.

Most of the new billing capabilities will launch in October, while the sales and marketing automation tools are set to become generally available next February.

Image: Salesforce