Salesforce Sales Cloud: Modules, Features, and Benefits
Introduction
Salesforce has a bunch of different offerings. But they all serve the same purpose: to organize, automate, and optimize businesses’ sales processes. These “offerings” are called Salesforce clouds. You can think of them as houses full of tools that help your business perform its best. In this post, we’ll focus on the Sales Cloud, which is one of those clouds.
This blog post covers the following information:
- About Sales Cloud
- What Does The Sales Cloud Do
- Importance of Sales Cloud
- The Sales Cloud Working Methodology Example
- Modules and Features of Sales Cloud
- FAQs
About Sales Cloud
Sales Cloud is a fully integrated Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform that allows a sales team to efficiently manage all of the day-to-day tasks of running a business. It can do everything from keeping track of contacts, leads, and accounts to automating workflows and tasks, setting up call center features, and generating reports.
Fig.1 shows the main features of Sales Cloud (source)
What Does the Sales Cloud Do?
The platform offers a suite of tools that help businesses manage their sales teams, track progress, and identify new opportunities. It’s also integrated with the rest of Salesforce’s products so you can use it in conjunction with other solutions to expand your business.
The foundation of Salesforce Sales Cloud is its CRM software, which allows users to create profiles for contacts and leads. The platform then gathers data from various sources (such as emails or phone calls) and uses artificial intelligence (AI) to analyze it in one central place. This means your sales team can easily find out who their best prospects are and how best to reach them—saving time on manual research.
In addition, Salesforce Sales Cloud gives managers access to various analytics tools that provide insights into their company’s performance at any given time. They can see what’s working well or where improvements need to be made so they can make changes before it’s too late.
As part of its suite of services, Salesforce Sales Cloud offers marketing automation capabilities, social media integration, an email client with templates for mass mailing campaigns, and more.
Importance of Sales Cloud
Sales Cloud is Salesforce’s flagship sales software that can help you make the most of your sales force. In fact, 41% of Salesforce revenue comes only from Sales Cloud sales.
You can use it to track important information about your clients and leads, so you’ll always have everything you need to know at your fingertips. You’ll be able to easily nurture your leads and convert them into customers—and then keep those customers coming back for more.
You can use Sales Cloud to:
Close more deals faster — Sales Cloud is filled with tools to help you manage your team more effectively, give them the training they need, and help them stay organized so they can sell smarter.
Connect with customers in a whole new way — Get deeper insights into your clients’ needs so you can provide the best customer service possible.
Stay one step ahead no matter what — Get instant access to all of the information and documents you need right inside of Salesforce so you’re always ready for anything.
Understanding The Sales Cloud Working Methodology with an Example
Here’s an example of how Salesforce Sales Cloud can help streamline your sales process:
Say you’re a business that sells audio equipment to small children. You’re looking for new leads.
An interested parent, Sally, comes to your website after seeing a link on Facebook, and she fills out your contact form with her name and email address.
When she submits the form, her data is automatically sent to Salesforce and categorized appropriately—she’s now in your database as a lead who is interested in buying audio equipment for small children.
You can then send emails or texts directly from within Salesforce to try to close the sale!
If Sally decides she wants to buy one of your products, you can easily turn her into an active customer: when she responds positively to your outreach or places an order, you can update her record in Salesforce so that it shows her as a contact or customer instead of a lead.
So Salesforce gives you a central hub where all of your customer information is stored in a single location, so it’s easy for you to pull up customer records and past interactions with the click of a button.
You’ll also have the ability to create customized lists of customers that can be sorted by any number of variables: big spenders, frequent buyers, first-time purchasers, and tons more. With Salesforce’s Customer Success Platform as a Service (PaaS), your company will have everything it needs to manage customer relationships over time.
Additionally, Salesforce allows you to track your reps’ progress towards their goals—and see which ones are falling short or exceeding expectations. You’ll also be able to see which products are selling best, which customers are most likely to buy again, and what trends emerge as time goes on.
Therefore, with Sales Cloud your team is no longer wasting time tracking down documents or playing phone tag with each other—they have everything they need at their fingertips. All they have to do is just focus on selling—and close the deal.
Fig.2 shows the process flow of Sales Cloud (source)
Modules and Features of Salesforce Sales Cloud: Explained With Their Benefits
Sales Cloud includes many modules for companies to utilize for multiple communication, collaboration, or sales processes. Different modules in this cloud work best for different companies. Here we cover the basic features of Salesforce Sales Cloud and how they could be used to benefit your company.
1). Campaign Management
Campaign Management is a module of Salesforce Sales Cloud that enables your business to track, manage, and analyze the results of campaigns.
You can use Campaign Management to create campaigns to promote new products and reactivate old customers. You choose the campaign type—email, direct mail, or both—and then define a variety of factors, like the expected response rate, the number of responses you hope to get, and the actual cost per lead. The goal is to identify which campaigns are most effective at getting results. You can also see how much revenue your campaigns bring in.
In addition, a business can run reports on their campaigns by creating custom report types and report formats. This way, they can compare campaign results side-by-side.
2). Lead Management
Lead Management is a feature of Salesforce Sales Cloud designed to help your business stay organized. It helps you collect leads, filter them into targeted lists, and then convert them into sales opportunities. It also helps you prioritize those leads based on their quality, estimated value, and the likelihood that they’ll convert.
Lead Management can help businesses categorize leads by many different aspects, including their rank, source, geography, industry, and more. You can then use this information to determine which leads are most likely to become customers and dedicate more time and energy to those specific leads.
In addition, this feature also helps you track the progress of each lead and the steps they’ve taken toward becoming a customer. This can help you see which stages of the sales process are working for your business, and what strategies have been most effective so far.
3). Account Management
The Account Management module allows you to create an account for each customer to keep a record of all their interactions with your company and all the information about them you have on file. This includes details like phone number and email address but also notes like what sales reps they’ve met with, who their main contact is, and so on. The sales team can update this information at any time and it will be displayed next to the customer’s name when they’re called or emailed.
You can also use this module to keep track of the customer’s interaction history, including purchases made by them or on their behalf through your company’s website or other channels such as telephone support calls or in-store visits. This makes it easy for customer service representatives (CSRs) who handle inquiries from these customers; they’ll know exactly what products they own without having to ask each time.
4). Contact Management
The Contact Management module of Salesforce Sales Cloud is a database that contains the complete contact information for all of your customers and prospects. The module can store information such as names, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, and other data points associated with each person or business.
In addition to storing contact information, you can use the Contact Management module to create activities—like phone calls or meetings—and track them in your calendar. You can also link contacts to leads, accounts, opportunities, and cases within the Contact Management module.
Finally, you can use the Contact Management module as a jumping-off point for email marketing campaigns by choosing which contacts are included in each campaign.
5). Opportunities Management
Opportunity management is one of the most important facets of the Sales Cloud. It provides a central location for you to organize, manage, and assign the leads that come into your system. You can also track their progress towards a close, and create forecasts based on your opportunities’ current stages.
The benefits of using this module include:
- Visibility into the sales pipeline
- Tracking of individual activities at each stage of the pipeline
- Insight into which sales strategies are working and which are not
For each opportunity, you can also add a stage and probability. A stage defines where the opportunity is in its lifecycle—for example, whether it’s just an idea or an actual deal about to be closed. The probability describes how likely the opportunity is to close—for example, whether you think there’s a 100% chance of closing the deal or only 10%.
You can also add custom fields to track data specific to your organization—for example, if you want to know what type of product someone is interested in buying. With all of this information on opportunities at your fingertips, it’s easy to prioritize your work and keep track of everything.
Fig.3 shows the major benefits of Sales Cloud (source)
6). Case Management
Case management is a powerful feature of the Sales Cloud that allows you to track your customers’ needs, questions, and issues. It also helps your team provide follow-up and scheduling so that your customers are satisfied.
Let’s say you’re working at a cosmetics company and have just released a new lip gloss line. You get a notification that one of your customers has a question about her order. Now, instead of having to go find the right member of your team (not to mention digging through emails or trying to decipher notes in a meeting), you can simply create a Case in the Case Management module. The Case will notify the right person on your team automatically, who can then take care of the issue ASAP.
Cases Management is an important module within Salesforce Sales Cloud because it allows you to give each customer the attention they deserve and be as responsive as possible, which builds loyalty and trust with your clients.
7). Einstein AI
This module of Salesforce Sales Cloud provides artificial intelligence technology, including machine learning and predictive analysis, to help salespeople be more efficient and effective in prospecting. The AI helps users determine the best time to reach out to leads, what their needs and priorities are, and what products or services can best meet their needs.
Einstein’s most important feature is its automation. The AI gathers data about your customers’ habits and patterns to create a predictive model—a set of predictions about what they’re going to do next. This allows you to know what actions to take with each customer to retain them and improve their experience.
Without this AI, salespeople would have to spend hours analyzing data by hand. This module saves you time and money while making you more effective as a salesperson or sales manager.
8). Salesforce CPQ
The CPQ is a Sales Cloud tool that allows businesses to create quotes and proposals, generate contracts, and handle product configurations in one simple system.
This module gives you the ability to easily configure product and pricing options for your quotes, as well as calculate tax and revenue recognition. You can set up approval processes so that you can be sure your quotes will be reviewed and approved by the right people in your organization before they are submitted. You can also add custom fields to your quote, and these fields will automatically populate when a quote is generated from an opportunity.
If you have products with a lot of different pricing models or options for configuration, Salesforce CPQ lets you set up these models in advance so that it’s easy to consistently apply them to all of your quotes. And when you’re ready, you can generate contracts directly from your quote documents.
9). MuleSoft Accelerator
MuleSoft Accelerator is an integration solution that enables point-and-click integrations to Salesforce with no coding and no need for a full MuleSoft project. Use the point-and-click tool inside the Salesforce dashboard to connect your organization to other applications, databases, or APIs. You can perform integration with all of the platforms and cloud-based applications that are integral to your business—like Dropbox, Gmail, Facebook, and Zendesk—so that you can access them from one place: the Salesforce Sales Cloud.
This product is the perfect platform for enterprise businesses looking to connect their sales and marketing teams, as well as their systems on a comprehensive, holistic level. It’s because it provides pre-built integration templates so you can connect all your endpoints, as well as a host of tools that let you manage your integrations via an easy-to-use interface.
10). Sales Cloud Lightning
The Lightning Experience is a new take on Salesforce’s classic CRM, with a simple interface and super-fast navigation that helps your sales team maximize their productivity and close more deals. With features like Kanban boards and custom dashboards, you can easily keep track of which deals are pending, what the hold-ups are, and how to overcome them. Plus, you’ll never waste time searching for info again with Lightning’s streamlined search (and no more duplicates!).
With access to Einstein Activity Capture and Lightning Dialer, Sales Cloud Lightning makes it possible to analyze every email, event, task, attachment, and call to get a holistic view of your customers—no matter where they are in the buyer’s journey. Plus, there’s even an AppExchange for one-stop shopping for all your app needs.
Fig.4 shows the implementation process of Salesforce Sales Cloud (source)
FAQs
What is the Sales Cloud in Salesforce?
Sales Cloud is a CRM (customer relationship management) platform in Salesforce. It has tools for sales forecasting, sales process automation, activity management, sales performance tracking, marketing campaign management, contact and account management, document creation and sharing, customizable dashboards, visual reports, and analytics.
What is the difference between Sales Cloud and Salesforce?
Salesforce is a company that makes software for businesses to manage their sales and services. And Sales Cloud is one of the main tools offered by Salesforce. This tool, which is within the Salesforce family, provides modules that enable businesses to manage their sales process.
What is the difference between Sales Cloud and Marketing Cloud?
Sales Cloud, Marketing Cloud, and Service Cloud are part of the Salesforce CRM platform, but with different functions.
Sales Cloud is designed to help you sell more, faster. It has lead, contact, and opportunity management tools that allow you to track sales activities and collaborate with your team. You can also create reports and dashboards for forecasting.
Marketing Cloud helps you reach, engage, and understand customers. It has tools to help you manage campaigns in social media, email, mobile channels, apps, and the web. You can send personalized messages based on customer behavior data that you collect.
Service Cloud is built to help service teams connect with their customers better and provide those customers with excellent support. You can use Service Cloud to deliver an omnichannel customer experience across the web, social media, mobile devices, phone, email, and chat. The cloud also allows agents to get more work done in less time through case management.
Contact Us for Salesforce Implementation
BlueSkySol works with you to make your Salesforce implementation a breeze. Whether you need help setting up your Sales Cloud, or have questions about how to use it, we’re here for you. Our team of experts are always available to answer your questions, and we’ll work with you until you feel totally confident in the system you’ve set up.
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