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Sarah Warsaw
In a first-of-its-kind SaaS solution, Sales Cloud was the first product launched by Salesforce back in 1999. The goal was to transform software from needing an expensive on-premise infrastructure to a web-based solution that could be easily accessed by companies of all sizes – not just the big corporates.
The success scaled from there: the simplicity, accessibility and price point paved the way for Salesforce’s entire ecosystem of products and solutions. Each one brings a new perspective to the customer journey, to customer relationship management and helps the sales team deliver more revenue and drive business growth.
Let’s dive into what Salesforce Sales Cloud is, and how it can help your sales team…
What is Salesforce Sales Cloud?
Salesforce Sales Cloud is a customer relationship management (CRM) platform that helps sales teams manage and optimise their sales processes. The solution helps users with lead management, opportunity tracking and sales forecasting. Sales teams can utilise the data captured within the solution to enhance their efficiency, improve sales performance and get real-time insights into their sales pipeline.
Salesforce Sales Cloud integrates with all other Salesforce solutions, offering organisations a 360-degree view of their sales, operations, marketing, data and overall business health. Recently, AI has been integrated into all of these solutions, giving users access to automation, autonomous agents and personalised services for customers.
Salesforce Sales Cloud is designed to streamline the entire sales process, and when integrated with their suite of marketing solutions, it offers an end-to-end solution from the moment a prospect comes across a business, to closing a deal and ongoing customer relationship management.
What is Sales Cloud used for?
Salesforce Sales Cloud is used throughout the entire sales process and helps sales teams get the most out of their time and their pipeline. The solution is designed to tackle challenges that many organisations and sales teams, like yourself, face:
1. Fragmented tools and data silos
With data in multiple spreadsheets or on individuals’ computers, decision-making is often inefficient and deals can be lost along the way.
Salesforce Sales Cloud brings together the entire sales process into one view and provides a single source of the truth. Team members can see how the pipeline is progressing, all interactions with prospects and customers are captured in one place and deals can be handed over when colleagues are absent. With the data all in one platform, sales managers can forecast and analyse more easily.
2. Inefficient lead and opportunity management
When leads and opportunities are not tracked properly, they can get lost or missed during a busy day in sales.
Salesforce Sales Cloud helps sales reps manage their leads and opportunities, with reminders and prioritisation features to ensure timely and relevant follow-up.
3. Long sales cycles and confusing pricing
For some organisations, the sales cycle is long and pricing up a product or solution is complex. This can lead to a delay in deal signing or even customer frustration, and ultimately impact revenue.
Salesforce Sales Cloud can help teams easily create professional and simple quotations directly from the tool – no more copy, paste, rewrite needed in Word. Salesforce can also quote for bespoke and complex customer solutions utilising the add-on, Revenue Cloud.
This helps sales teams with complex pricing using ‘Configure, Price, Quote’ guardrails, helping onboard salespeople quickly when they join new, complex organisations. The model speeds up the quoting process and maintains updated product pricing catalogues. Ideal for bespoke solutions, subscriptions and configurations with many parts.
4. Lack of personalisation in customer interactions
There’s no excuse these days not to personalise any messages or communications to customers. Generic approaches disengage customers and can lead to missed or lost opportunities.
Sales Cloud offers AI integrations that offer insights into customer behaviour, preferences, their challenges and even their journey through marketing content and assets. Helping sales teams personalise interactions and tailor sales strategies.
5. Increasing data security and compliance requirements
With many regulations and privacy requirements, handling customer data appropriately has never been more important than it is today. With siloed data and contact spreadsheets shared across the sales team, this can be difficult to manage.
Salesforce Sales Cloud follows industry best practices to ensure that customer data is protected, managed properly and regulatory requirements are met.
What are the key features of Salesforce Sales Cloud?
1. Lead and Opportunity Management
Track prospects and potential customers throughout the buyer journey. Convert leads into opportunities, assign tasks to yourself or colleagues, set reminders, and monitor the progress of deals.
2. Sales Forecasting and Reporting
Based on data and trends, Sales Cloud helps you predict future sales performance. Build customisable reports, get detailed insights into individual and team performance and use the data to make better decisions.
3. Workflow Automation
Streamline repetitive tasks with automation tools that save time and offer consistency. Send follow-up emails, assign leads to specific tasks or sales reps and trigger alerts based on predefined criteria.
4. AI-Powered Insights
Salesforce Einstein powers the predictive analytics you can access within Sales Cloud. Teams can receive smart recommendations, opportunity scoring and insights into customer behaviour. Plus, the solution can analyse trends and historical data to predict the likelihood of a deal closing, so sales teams can prioritise effort towards those that have a higher chance of success.
5. Customisable Dashboards and Reports
Get an at-a-glance view of relevant, key performance metrics on your personalised dashboard. Sales reps, managers and executives can tailor report downloads and dashboards to their specific needs, allowing for deeper insights into the sales pipeline, revenue projections and team performance.
6. Mobile Accessibility
Log in to Sales Cloud on the go. You can access customer data, manage opportunities and collaborate with your team whilst you’re out and about. The app ensures that sales teams can work from anywhere, improving flexibility and responsiveness.
7. Integration Capabilities
Integrate other Salesforce products and third-party applications seamlessly into the platform. Bring together multiple solutions for a 360-degree view of your customers by linking sales, service and marketing data in one unified platform.
Sales Cloud in action
Harrods Aviation: Improved GDPR compliance and revenue data insight
The sales team at Harrods Aviation wanted to retain and generate new business. With Salesforce Sales Cloud (and other solutions), they can now access key insights about customer service, revenue and new opportunities. Salesforce Account Engagement replaced Mailchimp for outbound lead generation and ongoing lead nurturing. Plus, this all-in-one solution meant that the team were able to ensure full GDPR compliance for their customers —essential!
Duo Group: Scrap siloed little ‘black books’ in favour of Sales Cloud
Duo Group, which offers a ‘one-stop shop’ for all material processing plant solutions, has worked to consolidate its data and benefit from the efficiencies that CRM can bring. Duo’s Dominic Critchel explained to us that it’s making a huge difference in the construction industry, one which can traditionally be cautious in adopting technological change.
Virtuoso Partners: Predictable Forecasting & Simplified Channel Management
Before implementing Sales Cloud, the sales team at Virtuoso Partners were finding it difficult to track reseller performance, onboarding new partners was long-winded and sales were spending more time doing these tasks than actually selling. With Sales Cloud, they were able to more easily track partner sales, offer a streamlined onboarding process and plan for scaling in the future.
And many, many more happy Simpala customers, read our reviews!
Looking to improve your sales processes and drive revenue growth? Choose Salesforce Sales Cloud and partner with Simpala for expert implementation and support.