Want to understand more about the different Salesforce Clouds? For those who don’t know a lot about Salesforce and what it does, you might be mistaken in thinking that Salesforce provides a single product in the form of a CRM tool. Read on.....
For those who don’t know a lot about Salesforce and what it does, you might be mistaken in thinking that Salesforce provides a single product in the form of a CRM tool. In reality Salesforce provide a variety of tools that help you and your business make your sales, service, and marketing processes so much easier, market and sell effectively to prospective and existing customers, build lasting relationships with your clients, collaborate with your partners, customers and employees, and analyse all of this data and more. Salesforce clouds focus on a key area of productivity and related functionality that will help you with different parts of your business.
Here is a brief overview of the five primary ‘Clouds’ that Salesforce offers to you:
The Sales Cloud has been designed to help your sales team with the entire sales process, start to finish. This Cloud will help to produce a greater revenue by enabling you to connect with your customers and help you focus on what is important. It helps to cut down administrative tasks and automates your business processes. Your users will be able to effectively manage their client relationships, their pipeline, as well as forecasting. Administrators can customise your application using the Force.com platform. You can find the full list of features available in the various editions of the Sales Cloud here.
Here is a great short demo to give you a taste of what you can get with the Sales Cloud:
Service Cloud gives you the tools to provide a better customer service and experience for your clients. The Service Cloud license is actually an add-on to the Sales Cloud license, effectively meaning that if you purchase only the Service Cloud, you automatically get all of the Sales Cloud features as well. The Service Cloud license gives you the ability to work within the Service Console - this is a tab which provides you with access to data from multiple tabs in the one screen, enhancing agent productivity. Additional features that are exclusive to the Service Cloud include service level agreements, entitlements and computer telephony integration. If you haven't used Knowledge yet, you should definitely look at adding this feature to the Service Cloud. It comes at an extra license fee, but only for those users creating the articles. All users viewing articles do not need a license. The beauty of Knowledge is the automatic filtering on existing articles when your service agents create a case, allowing you to easily locate and attach your resolution, and the ease in sending those articles back to your customers.
Take a peek at the Service Cloud here:
The Marketing Cloud is a marketing automation tool that creates the ability to manage all of your interactive marketing activities on various devices. You can communicate with your prospects by triggering timely and personalised content to them at strategic points in their customer journey, this can be done through email, social or mobile.
The Marketing Cloud is a combination of a number of companies purchased by Salesforce.com and merged to form the product we see today. Exact Target, Radian6 and Buddy Media form part of the new Marketing Cloud, extending the capabilities to include advanced marketing automation and campaigns, social listening, and connecting with your customers across social networks.
The Marketing Cloud can be integrated with your Sales or Service Clouds using a connector.
Watch a short demo here:
The Community Cloud is the online collaboration and business process platform that allows you to connect customers, partners and employees through public or private experiences. This is where they can access files, groups, topics and collaborate direct with one another. Through this your customers can interact more with you, share experiences and find information that they need easily. Partners can view, create, and update data that allows you to have a connected view of all of your sales activities. Communities are customisable, and allow you to integrate parts of the Salesforce platform that you see in other clouds, for example, Chatter, Knowledge and Ideas.
Here is a sneak preview of the Community Cloud:
This is newest of all of the clouds in Salesforce and has created a lot of excitement in 2015! The Einstein Analytics Cloud, allows you to explore and visualise your data in an intuitive way. Through this cloud you can pull through millions of rows of data very easily, apply several filters and build fantastic graphs and charts to share with your colleagues across various devices. The best part, data doesn't just come from your Salesforce database, you can analyse data from any source! This is a real game changer, and I hope you will be as excited as we are!
Here is a short demo of the Einstein Analytics Cloud:
Thanks for reading!