December 16, 2022

A Complete Guide to Understanding Salesforce Sales Cloud

In Sales Cloud
By Mikael Petersson
If you're looking to take your business to the next level, Salesforce Sales Cloud can help. The Salesforce Sales Cloud is a powerful tool to help you manage your sales team and streamline workflows. However, it's also a complex system that can be difficult to understand, so we've put together this complete guide to answer common questions about the Sales Cloud and how it works.

What is Salesforce Sales Cloud?

Salesforce Sales Cloud is a cloud-based sales and marketing platform that helps you close deals faster, collaborate more effectively, and grow revenue. With Salesforce Sales Cloud, you can manage sales opportunities, create quotes, convert leads into opportunities, manage contracts, and close deals from start to finish.
Imagine a company that sells some products. It uses a CRM to track customer interactions, including which products interest which customers, when to deliver products, and what the status is of each order. Customers can reach the sales team through different platforms like email, phone calls, text messages, asking questions, or following up on orders. However, it's difficult for salespeople to keep track of all the information they need to interact with their clients without this CRM system for storing data. For example, a salesperson might miss a meeting with a client or need to remember the status of an order. This could lead to unhappy customers—which any company should want to avoid.
So, this is where Salesforce Sales Cloud comes in. Salesforce Sales Cloud is a sales platform that helps you connect with your customers in the most efficient way possible. With Sales Cloud, you get a clear look at your customers. You can see everything in one place. It's a customizable dashboard that can tell you about customers' previous history with your company and their status on orders or if there are any outstanding customer service issues.

Who Uses Salesforce Sales Cloud?

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Companies of all sizes in all industries use Salesforce Sales Cloud. Salesforce is the main reason for the success of many thriving organizations, including Spotify, Amazon Web Services, U.S. Bank, Toyota, Macy's, T-Mobile, and Aldo.
Salesforce is used by some of the most successful companies in the world. These companies are in many different industries, including Professional Services, Banking, and Financial Services, Manufacturing, Insurance, Retail, Life Sciences, Consumer Packaged Goods, Transportation, Oil, Gas and Chemicals, Utilities, Construction, Real Estate, Education, Media Communications, Healthcare Aerospace, and Defense Non-Profit Leisure Hospitality Automotive Government.

What Are The Benefits of Salesforce Sales Cloud?

Salesforce Sales Cloud is a cloud-based application that allows you to manage your entire sales process. It's designed to help you and your team sell more, be more productive, and close more deals.
The benefits of Salesforce Sales Cloud include:
  • Helps you close more deals 

    With Salesforce Sales Cloud, you can track your leads at every stage of the sales funnel, from prospecting through closing deals. This lets you know your top performers and what they're doing that's working so well for them—so you can replicate it in other areas of your business.

  • Provides visibility into your pipeline

    With Salesforce, you'll never miss an opportunity again because you'll be able to see exactly where each deal stands at any given time—and what needs to happen next for it to move forward through the pipeline.

  • Converts leads into opportunities faster

    With Salesforce Sales Cloud, you can collect information about leads as soon as they reach out to you, so there's no need for manual entry or other time-consuming processes. This makes it easier than ever to convert leads into opportunities—which means more sales!

  • Bring together disparate data sources into one place

    This way, you can see everything related to a sale in one place. You can also use the platform's built-in tools to streamline processes and automate workflows so that they're easier for your staff to manage.

What Are The Different Features in Salesforce Sales Cloud?

Salesforce Sales Cloud is a comprehensive sales software that consists of several features. It has a lot of functionality to help your sales team be more productive, including:
  • Contact Management

    Salesforce Sales Cloud helps you manage your contacts and interactions with customers. From a single interface, Salesforce gives you access to critical data about your contacts and their interactions with your organization. You can use the social data of your customers for a deeper understanding of their behavior toward any product or service. 

    In addition, Salesforce enables collaboration in your organization by enabling you to share insights and important documents with coworkers so that you can create a knowledge-sharing workplace. Furthermore, you can track the progress of deals by accessing all contact data.

  • Lead Management 

    Salesforce helps you track the right information about your CRM leads. With Salesforce, you can see and access the most up-to-date contact information while understanding best practices and relevant documents using the sales path.

  • Mobility 

    When you're away from your office, you might need to access your salesforce account without your laptop. The salesforce mobile app allows you to do this, take conference calls, take meeting notes and collaborate with your team via instant messaging. With the app's file-sharing capability, you'll be able to work more flexibly from anywhere.

  • Reports and Dashboards

    Salesforce dashboard components give you a visual representation of your business's performance in the market. Reports created from those dashboard components give you easy access to key data insights, which help you make better decisions. It provides real-time statistics of your company's information in very little time. It is very simple to create reports and dashboards in Salesforce. You can build the dashboard by simply dragging and dropping icons into the Salesforce CRM.

  • Artificial Intelligence Integration

    Artificial Intelligence Integration, also known as Einstein Analytics, is a cloud-based analytic tool that allows Salesforce users to understand, aggregate, and visualize data coming from different locations. With embedded dashboards, Salesforce Einstein Analytics also connects users to the Salesforce Service Cloud.

What's New with Sales Cloud?

Salesforce has made some big changes to Sales Cloud this year, so let's look at what's new!

Sales Cloud Unlimited

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Salesforce announced Sales Cloud Unlimited, a unified platform for sales teams to streamline their workflow and drive revenue from day one. The company also announced three new tools that make it easier for sales teams to speed up workflow and turn their sales reps into trusted advisors.


Sales Cloud Unlimited helps you make smarter sales. It's an all-in-one platform for sales where Einstein and automation come standard, enabling every rep to be more efficient. Enhanced coaching and strategic collaboration across teams for top clients. Manage patient communications and build trusted relationships across communication channels. Transform your revenue model to offer subscriptions for products, parts, and maintenance. Get visibility into business trends and make informed inventory decisions based on purchase patterns and insights.

Accelerate HLS

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Salesforce recently launched the HLS Solutions Portal, which includes solutions, components, and automation accelerators to speed up customer time to value. Solutions are a set of components, automation assets, data models, and more that can be used to solve a specific user journey. Components are sets of Lightning Experience and Lightning App Builder components used to extend the functionality of Experience Builder and Lightning App Builder pages. These components include documentation and source code available on GitHub.

Automation components (e.g., Flow, Omniscripts, and Flexcards) to increase productivity, reduce redundant work and manual data errors, and improve customer satisfaction. Automation components include documentation and source code available from GitHub.

What's the Difference Between Sales Cloud and other Sales Software Tools?

Sales Cloud is the only sales software tool that combines data, analytics, and technology so you can close more deals. The table below shows the comparison between Salesforce Sales Cloud and other sales software tools.

Criteria

Salesforce

Oracle

Microsoft Dynamic

HubSpot

Cost

starts at $25/monthly/annually

starts at $65/monthly/annually

starts at $65/monthly/annually

Free

Implementation

4

5

3

4

Integration

4

5

3

2

Ease of Use

5

4

3

5

Customization

5

4

3

3

Features and Ad Ons

5

3

3

2

Customer Support

5

5

5

2

4.67

4.33

3.33

3.00



  • Salesforce is the number one customer relationship management platform many fortune 500 companies use. It has a customer base of over 150,000 companies comprising all large, medium, and small-scale enterprises.
  • Sales Cloud is a platform that includes tools to help you manage every customer-related activity, from contact management to pipeline monitoring and leads nurturing to performance analytics. Salesforce has the capacity and ability to scale up to meet the needs of your growing customer base.
  • Salesforce offers customers a supportive community that's always ready to help. The community offers great support and provides great customization services. Customers have access to a wide range of developer talent.

How Long Does It Take To Implement Salesforce Sales Cloud?

Depending on the level of customization needed, Salesforce Sales Cloud can take anywhere from two to eight weeks to implement.
Before you start with Salesforce, consider your organization's vision, the problems your users have, and how you can help them reach goals faster.
  • What is Salesforce's place in your organization’s overall vision? In what way can it help?
  • What are your sales goals, and how can Salesforce help you achieve them?
  • What are the most important measurements of success for your company's sales goals?
  • How should these goals be prioritized?
You should also know your organization's sales process so that you can decide which Salesforce features will help users close deals.

How eClouds.co can help?

Eclouds.co helps you build and run your Salesforce cloud from the ground up. The eClouds.co team has Certified Consultants for all Salesforce Clouds, including Salesforce Sales Cloud. We work with new and existing clients to expand their use of the platform. eClouds.co has an innovative approach to implementing Salesforce implementations, and we complete projects on time and within budget.
After launch, we offer free 30-day support so all customers can become comfortable using their system. Virtually all of our clients see increased revenue as a result of our work with them, expanding their usage of the platform.
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Citation/References:

Salesforce Implementation: What you need to know. Retrieved from Company (20 January 2022).  https://ecloudstrans.wpenginepowered.com/salesforce-implementation/ 

Industry transformation at the speed of innovation. Retrieved from Salesforce (n.d). https://www.salesforce.com/solutions/industries/

Learn more about Accelerate HLS and how to get started. Retrieved from Accelerate HLS (n.d). https://www.acceleratehls.com/acceleratehls/s/getting-started

26 Sales Statistics That Prove Selling Is Changing. Retrieved from Salesforce (25 January 2019). https://www.salesforce.com/blog/15-sales-statistics/

What to expect from the Salesforce Sales Cloud platform. Retrieved from TechTarget (n.d). https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/feature/What-to-expect-from-the-Salesforce-Sales-Cloud-platform

Salesforce vs. Oracle CRM Software. Retrieved from IT Business Edge (08 April 2019). https://www.itbusinessedge.com/applications/salesforce-vs-oracle/

Breakdown of Salesforce CRM customers worldwide in 2022, by selected country. Retrieved from Statista (15 August 2022). https://www.statista.com/statistics/1251119/salesforce-crm-customers-by-country/

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Mikael Petersson

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