Introduction to Salesforce Sales Cloud
Salesforce is by any metric the number one CRM (customer relationship management) platform in the world. Founded in 1999 by Marc Benioff, Dave Moellenhoff, Parker Harris, and Frank Dominguez, the San Francisco-based software company is now the CRM of choice for well over 150k businesses including names like Facebook, L’Orel, Coca-Cola, Philips, Intuit, Spotify, Vodafone and many more. Salesforce’s revenue in 2022 was over $30 billion and it had a market cap of over $132 billion.
Salesforce Sales Cloud revolutionized the CRM market by delivering its products in a SaaS (software as a service) format at a time when most other CRMs needed to be installed in an on-premise server. Salesforce products were built for the cloud and so were able to take advantage of the increasing demand for highly scalable cloud software products.
In this article, we will explore the range of Salesforce products and how they can be used to enhance the productivity and sales cycle of your business. Blue Whale Apps is a Salesforce consulting service and Salesforce-certified partner that helps businesses integrate Salesforce products into their business to gain maximum benefits and minimum disruption to business operations during the integration. If you would like help with your Salesforce integration, optimization, and customization, we would be happy to provide an initial free consultation to explore your requirements. In the meantime, let’s take a look at the most important parts of the Salesforce ecosystem.
Key Benefits of Using Salesforce Products
Companies that use Salesforce typically see an increase in revenue of 25%. This should not be surprising because tracking sales leads will inevitably reduce lost opportunities, increase efficiency, improve team collaboration, invigorate stagnating customers, increase sales lead follow up and much more.
Customers also report an increase in satisfaction of 35%. This can be caused by more efficient problem resolutions, reduced department clashes and simply keeping in touch with customers more regularly. After all, what customers don’t want and deserve some of your time and attention?
Salesforce Features That Knock it Out Of the Park
Account and Contact Management
Gone are the days when one person has critical business contacts only on their phone. Now it is expected that important supplier, operations, and customer contact information be available at the touch of a button to anyone in the business that needs access to it. And now the data is much richer to include multi-channel contact records and detailed transaction history. Over time this will become a rich source of new leads and a vital record to get new staff up to speed.
Opportunity Management
This is one of the original core features of Salesforce Sales Cloud and is what arguably sets a contact management system apart from a CRM. Tracking the distinct stages of a sale and keeping a record of everything that has happened has enabled large teams to get this vital information out of a spreadsheet and into a live data set that the entire business has access to. This empowers management to assess the performance of individual customers, marketing teams, and sales reps and allows them to provide accurate forecasts that are now required by senior management.
Sales Pipeline Visualization
One of the features that salespeople love about Salesforce is the pipeline dashboard that allows you to visualize the business’s entire sales pipeline on a single screen.
Workflow Management
Salesforce allows regular workflows to be recorded in the place they are needed to prompt staff in what their next step should be. This ensures that everyone is working to the same script and that when needed tasks are automatically assigned to the next person. This reduces significantly the time required to train new staff and ensures that they are recording the correct information at each stage and taking the next steps in a timely manner without direct management oversight at every stage.
Data Management
Over time Salesforce will become an invaluable resource that can be mined for not just sales data but, support history, customer behavior analytics, and product performance. Looking back it sometimes makes you wonder how we ever did without it.
Salesforce Products
Salesforce Sales Cloud
This is the original core product, designed for sales teams to record customer data and track sales opportunities. Even today it is the most important part of Salesforce and the element that all other products are built on.
Salesforce Service Cloud
Once you have customers the next most important mission is to hold on to them. So a support ticket system that tracks problems through support agents until completion will ensure that there is no risk of forgetting someone. It also provides vital stats to track response time, touchpoints, and close time, this ensures that any weak points in the support operation are addressed as quickly as possible.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud
This is a multi-channel marketing platform that helps businesses publish content and engage with potential customers across a range of social media and communications platforms. Automating processes, building campaigns, and analyzing the results on the fly.
Salesforce Commerce Cloud
Manage your eCommerce shop directly in the Salesforce Commerce Cloud platform. Designed to help businesses grow revenue fast with a set of tools for automation, and intelligent recommendations, build trusted customer relations in B2B and B2C environments. The platform also has tools for order fulfillment and order management with the bonus of ‘Commerce Marketplace’ that allows platforms to add products to their store that are fulfilled by third-party suppliers, creating an instant store with no need to hold stock.
Tableau
Tableau is a data analytics and visualization application that can work hand in hand with Salesforce and other applications. Using it you can collect and analyze big data to find patterns and make predictions of future outcomes using AI. Tableau is owned by Salesforce since 2019.
Salesforce Analytics Cloud
Also known as Salesforce Wave analytics, it is a BI (business intelligence) platform that is optimized for mobile devices. It provides data visualization from large data files and creates charts, graphs, and other representations of data directly from Salesforce.
Genie
Genie is another part of Salesforce’s customer data analytics and AI strategy with real-time decision-making, machine learning, event processing, and analytics at the app level.
MuleSoft
MuleSoft is an automation API platform that speeds up business processes and reduces human intervention. It can connect with Salesforce and many other cloud applications to seamlessly integrate them and speed up the flow of data between them. MuleSoft is owned by Salesforce since 2018.
Slack
Slack is a business instant messaging and collaboration platform, it is owned by Salesforce since 2017 and integrates with it and a wide range of other cloud applications to form a highly functional working environment that is ideal for remote workers and office staff alike.
Pardot
Salesforce Pardot was acquired in 2006 and provides marketing automation services that focus on lead generation via email marketing and social media marketing. It includes customer behavior tracking, web form management, website tracking, SEO, digital marketing campaign creation, and landing page creation.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud
Includes ‘Email Studio’ which is intended for enterprises to design and manage customer email journeys. Audiences can be segmented based on profile data and interactions with resources to deliver a highly personalized and targeted automated email conversation with potential customers. Fully automated journeys mean that business owners don’t need to waste time analyzing reports. Comes with a wide range of tools and features suitable for enterprises.
Salesforce Experience Cloud
Salesforce Experience Cloud is a CMS (content management system) for marketing teams that gives the ability to build beautiful websites and landing pages as part of their customer journey to capture prospects, generate leads, and increase sales. As you would expect, Salesforce Experience Cloud comes tightly integrated with Salesforce Sales Cloud to simplify the process of publishing website pages that seamlessly function with emails, banners, social media, and blog posts.
Salesforce Revenue Cloud
Salesforce Revenue Cloud is a subscription management platform that provides an all-in-one automated billing platform that plays well with accounts applications on one side and tight integration with Salesforce Products on the other. It includes a bewildering range of features for business and customer management of all aspects of recurring billing. It also contains industry-specific modules for many verticals from airlines and financial services to hospitality.
Salesforce Apps Cloud
Salesforce Apps Cloud is a selection of development tools that provide developers with an intuitive way to build mobile applications that run on Salesforce with no need to write code. However, unless you have a highly technical background you are still likely to need your Salesforce-certified partner to develop solutions on Apps Cloud if you are going to take advantage of some of the more advanced features. For a better understanding of what is involved speak with your Salesforce Consulting Services provider at Blue Whale Apps.
Salesforce IoT Cloud
Designed as a backend for the rapidly growing construction of IoT devices. It is powered by ‘Thunder’ event logging platform Salesforce IoT Cloud is designed to scale to huge volumes of real-time data that is generated by IoT devices like sensors, applications, websites, partners, and customers. It can be used to initiate real-time actions based on sensor results.
Salesforce Net Zero
Net Zero is a sustainability management tool for Salesforce. It allows businesses to track carbon accounting data and other sustainability metrics. In addition to data management, it includes emissions forecasting and simulations, supplier management, and executive stakeholder reporting.
Salesforce Partners
There are 3 main types of Salesforce partners, ISVs (independent software vendors), Salesforce cloud resellers, and consulting and integration partners. This last type of Salesforce Certified Partner represents the Salesforce Consulting Services that Blue Whale Apps provides. We are authorized by Salesforce to design and build Salesforce applications, integrations, and other types of solutions.
Single Source of Truth Overview
The main advantage of building a wide range of business management tools in Salesforce is to avoid using multiple software vendors that all have independent databases. Using multiple databases will inevitably lead to some data becoming out of date, then conflicting with other data sources in your organization. The single source of truth model means that the Salesforce main database is always up to date and so everyone in the organization is working with the most recent dataset.
Overview
Get started and discover what Salesforce can offer us.
Each organization has different requirements, yet they share similar end goals like gaining loyal customers, achieving greater team productivity, and bigger cost savings. And with Salesforce, it becomes easier and faster.
Though using Salesforce can sometimes be a bit complex, it’s not unworkable. You can easily overcome the hurdles with the help of a Certified Salesforce Partner during your initial years. Hiring them will help you save a lot.
These experts will analyze your goals and implement the right Salesforce product to automate and unite your businesses around the customer.
So, what are you waiting for? Get ready to transform your operational model by unleashing the full potential of your Salesforce products with our experts. We help you with end-to-end Salesforce implementation, integration, and customization needs that maximize your revenue growth and steer your business in the right direction.
Talk to our experts and figure out the best-fit Salesforce products that can transform your business.
