Sales Cloud
Sales Cloud
Sales Cloud was the pioneering CRM product launched by Salesforce. Chances are, if an organisation uses Salesforce, they began their journey with Sales Cloud – but what does Sales Cloud actually do?
In essence, Sales Cloud is a tool to manage your end-to-end Sales process with no black books, spreadsheets, loss of knowledge or single points of failure. Essentials Sales Cloud comes with some standard objects:
Leads
Leads (sometimes referred to as prospects), are people who have engaged with you or your content. Sales Cloud provides a way to store, amend and track data about these individuals.
Opportunities
Once Leads are converted to Opportunities, this means that there is a potential sale on the cards. You might have hundreds of Leads but a handful of Opportunities, and this is where you can go into the detail – tracking the quotations, decisions and sales activity.
Accounts
Converting a Lead to an Opportunity will also create an account. You can link multiple opportunities and contacts to an account and record all detail for the client organisation.
Contacts
Once a Lead has become an opportunity, they will be added to the customer account as a Contact. This helps you keep track of all decision makers and relevant individuals, record their contact details and even their hierarchy in the organisation.
These standard objects allow the user to collaborate with their team, record activities and events and dynamically update details as their lead progresses all the way through to the first sale. Email integration with Gmail or Outlook is available for all Sales Cloud users. Your Salesforce Admin will easily be able to set up email integration, and this feature allows you to send and record emails in your Salesforce instance.
The Professional License adds two more helpful functions to your Salesforce – Pipeline and Forecast Management.
Pipeline Management provides a real-time visual representation of where prospects are in your sales process to help you understand when your revenue is due to flow in. You can also filter this information by team, rep, or territory to drill down to the route of any potential issues.
Forecast Management enables you to build accurate forecasts linked directly to your Opportunities and Products in Salesforce.
With this feature, you can track how your leads and opportunities funnel into profit and quickly visualise your revenue stream. With the Sales Cloud Professional License, you also get access to the popular Service Cloud functionality of the standard Cases object. This means you can track and resolve either internal or customer queries or issues all on the Salesforce platform.
Automation is one of the most powerful benefits of Salesforce. Available through Enterprise Licences, Workflow and Approval Automation can drastically reduce admin burdens for an organisation.
Workflow Rules allow users to automate processes within Salesforce, for example, perhaps you would like an email to be sent to a client when they make a purchase to say thank you and provide them with an offer or other complimentary products.
Approval Processes in Salesforce enable sign-off activities to be granted by specified approvers. For example, perhaps your company sends an additional product once a certain amount has been spent by a client, and the Sales Manager requires final approval of the gift. This can be built in as a button for the Sales Rep to request or even be completely automated.
It is important to note that, without an Enterprise License, you cannot create your own custom Apex Code & Lightning Components. This licence type also allows your organisation unlimited automations.
Sales Engagement and Insights grant your organisation access to a centralised selling hub with cadences, strategic automation, premium activity capture, rep-centric email functionality, and to-do list tools. The Unlimited License provides a higher level of real-time intelligence with intuitive lead and opportunity scoring, plus insights from calls and interactions exploiting a suite of AI functionalities.
Salesforce’s Premier Success Plan, available for companies operating on an Unlimited License, provides users with tailored, expert guidance and resources and 24/7 support from Salesforce.
If you would like to find out more or take a look at Sales Cloud in action, Reach out to our friendly team of experts by emailing hello@performa-it.co.uk Or give us a call on 0117 230 2390
Sound interesting? You might be wondering “where do Performa IT come in?”, take a look at this page to find out why you need a Salesforce Partner.