Whoa there! Did you really just ask the question what is Salesforce Sales Cloud, everyone knows that don’t they? No, of course they don’t and it’s a perfectly acceptable question to ask, especially if you are looking at a new CRM and the Account Executive or Consultancy you are working with are just throwing words, acronyms and jargon at you that make no sense what so ever!
Let’s take a look…
As the name suggests Sales Cloud is designed to help your teams focus on their Sales, and there are a few key building blocks contained within it:
As the name suggests the Account object (everything that holds data in Salesforce is referred to as an object, think of it as an easily customisable spreadsheet) will hold all of the information about the Companies you are working with, be they Customers, Competitors or Partners. That’s the great thing about Sales Cloud, the solution can be tailored to your requirements not the other way around!
Let’s think about this logically, you have a myriad of Accounts, you want to know who is the right person to speak to in a particular company, that is where Contacts are kept and you associate them with an Account.
You have the company, you have the people, now you want to keep track of what they are potentially going to buy from you (or they may have already done so, again Salesforce is customised to your processes, not your processes having to change to the way Salesforce does things!) Leads and Opportunities are used to keep track of your Sales team’s pipeline.
There’s a lot more to the Sales Cloud than the areas I mentioned above, however, these three alone are game changers for any organisation. Think about where your data is at the moment - whenever we work with a customer, the different storage locations used are quite staggering, here are just a few:
You may read this list and place a virtual tick by the side of each one, maybe shrug your shoulders and say to yourself ‘it’s the way we’ve always done it and we’ve done alright out of it’
BUT, and it’s a big BUT, what if you could do better? It’s not just about capturing data, it’s about sharing it, collaborating on it and reporting on it. This is where Salesforce and the Sales Cloud come into their own.
As well as the three main areas mentioned earlier, the Sales Cloud allows you to capture information about your team’s Activities such as Tasks (their to-do lists) and Events (their meetings), and allows collaboration through Chatter, a professional collaboration tool that allows your teams to work as one. Even better, you can link your email client to Salesforce so you have visibility across systems, and take advantage of the mobile platform to use Salesforce on the go – wherever you are.
Oh no far from it, we are really just scratching the surface, it allows you some other great functionality that allows you to not only sell smarter but also provide that awesome customer experience that we all want to deliver.
Imagine if your customers were able to notify you of their interest in doing business with you? That’s what Web-to-Lead is for. Think of this as a simple Contact Us form on the website, but those Leads come directly into Salesforce and can be automatically assigned to the correct Salesperson to take it forwards.
What if your customers wanted to let you know that something wasn’t working exactly the way they wanted it to? Web to Case covers that. This will automatically create a new Case in Salesforce and again, assign it to the most appropriate Agent. It can even send an email back to your customer to acknowledge their enquiry.
You’d like your customers to visit a community to find out the answers to common questions. Public knowledge and Communities are ready to save the day!
There are so many great pieces of functionality in the Sales Cloud and elements of it can be automated, think about how you currently do things, your best Sales person tells you about their biggest sales deals when they remember to do so, or maybe it eventually comes up at a meeting? How about you get sent an email automatically from Salesforce when that Opportunity is added to Salesforce? Mind well and truly blown!
To wrap up, The Sales Cloud within Salesforce contains everything you and your teams need be able to sell smart and win big, Salesforce as an overall product can be customised to meet the requirements of the way that your team sells, it should never be the other way around!
If we were to give a detailed breakdown of everything you can do in the Sales Cloud, this page would be far too big to fit on the website, so if you need more information then why not contact us?
And if you want to take a sneak peek at some of the features in the Sales Cloud and the platform overall, take a look at our Salesforce tutorials here.