Introduction to Salesforce Sales Cloud
Salesforce is by any metric the number one CRM (customer relationship management) platform in the world. Founded in 1999 by Marc Benioff, Dave Moellenhoff, Parker Harris, and Frank Dominguez, the San Francisco-based software company is now the CRM of choice for well over 150k businesses including names like Facebook, L’Orel, Coca-Cola, Philips, Intuit, Spotify, Vodafone and many more. Salesforce’s revenue in 2022 was over $30 billion and it had a market cap of over $132 billion.
Salesforce Sales Cloud revolutionized the CRM market by delivering its products in a SaaS (software as a service) format at a time when most other CRMs needed to be installed in an on-premise server. Salesforce products were built for the cloud and so were able to take advantage of the increasing demand for highly scalable cloud software products.
In this article, we will explore the range of Salesforce products and how they can be used to enhance the productivity and sales cycle of your business. Blue Whale Apps is a Salesforce consulting service and Salesforce-certified partner that helps businesses integrate Salesforce products into their business to gain maximum benefits and minimum disruption to business operations during the integration. If you would like help with your Salesforce integration, optimization, and customization, we would be happy to provide an initial free consultation to explore your requirements. In the meantime, let’s take a look at the most important parts of the Salesforce ecosystem.
Key Benefits of Using Salesforce Products
Companies that use Salesforce typically see an increase in revenue of 25%. This should not be surprising because tracking sales leads will inevitably reduce lost opportunities, increase efficiency, improve team collaboration, invigorate stagnating customers, increase sales lead follow up and much more.
Customers also report an increase in satisfaction of 35%. This can be caused by more efficient problem resolutions, reduced department clashes and simply keeping in touch with customers more regularly. After all, what customers don’t want and deserve some of your time and attention?
Salesforce Features That Knock it Out Of the Park
Account and Contact Management
Gone are the days when one person has critical business contacts only on their phone. Now it is expected that important supplier, operations, and customer contact information be available at the touch of a button to anyone in the business that needs access to it. And now the data is much richer to include multi-channel contact records and detailed transaction history. Over time this will become a rich source of new leads and a vital record to get new staff up to speed.
Opportunity Management
This is one of the original core features of Salesforce Sales Cloud and is what arguably sets a contact management system apart from a CRM. Tracking the distinct stages of a sale and keeping a record of everything that has happened has enabled large teams to get this vital information out of a spreadsheet and into a live data set that the entire business has access to. This empowers management to assess the performance of individual customers, marketing teams, and sales reps and allows them to provide accurate forecasts that are now required by senior management.
Sales Pipeline Visualization
One of the features that salespeople love about Salesforce is the pipeline dashboard that allows you to visualize the business’s entire sales pipeline on a single screen.
Workflow Management
Salesforce allows regular workflows to be recorded in the place they are needed to prompt staff in what their next step should be. This ensures that everyone is working to the same script and that when needed tasks are automatically assigned to the next person. This reduces significantly the time required to train new staff and ensures that they are recording the correct information at each stage and taking the next steps in a timely manner without direct management oversight at every stage.
Data Management
Over time Salesforce will become an invaluable resource that can be mined for not just sales data but, support history, customer behavior analytics, and product performance. Looking back it sometimes makes you wonder how we ever did without it.