According to one of Salesforce.com’s latest market studies, enterprise sales professionals spend only about a third of their time interacting with prospects. The rest of their work day mostly consists of administrative tasks such as gathering lead data, time that the cloud giant is working to free up.

Salesforce today released new features for its flagship Sales Cloud aimed at helping workers find the information they need to be productive faster. Most of the capabilities use Einstein, the company’s artificial intelligence system, under the hood.

The first major enhancement is arriving in Salesforce Inbox, a mobile app that enables users to view emails, appointments and customer data in one place. It now integrates with Einstein to alert salespeople when important new information emerges about a deal they’re pursuing. The app can, for instance, notify a representative when a key executive joins the negotiations or if a prospect requests a meeting.

Salesforce Inbox now also doubles as a kind of preparation tool. “Reps can now see key customer information, including account details, contacts, and opportunities for their next meeting within the corresponding calendar event, so they can get up to speed for their next meeting without needing to manually search through old emails,” Robin Grochol, Salesforce’s senior vice president of product management, wrote in a blog post.

In the same spirit, Salesforce wants to make it easier for users to access sales data from sources outside their work applications. To that end, it’s releasing Social Intelligence Module, a newsfeed that enables salespeople to aggregate tweets and articles related to prospects. Users can click on contacts’ social profiles to add them to their company’s Salesforce database.

Another new addition is Einstein Campaign Insights. It can analyze a representative’s past customer interactions to find patterns that may help them close more deals in the future.

“For example, if directors in IT in the manufacturing industry show high engagement with a campaign asset, reps know that piece of marketing material will resonate with similar prospects and understand this may be a new audience to reach out to,” Salesforce’s Grochol wrote.

The AI features are joined by several other productivity-focused enhancements. A broadened integration with Quip, Salesforce’s alternative to Office 365, lets users attach documents and spreadsheets to records in their customer database. And new collaboration features will make it easier for managers to communicate guidance to representatives through the Salesforce interface.

Photo: Salesforce