Salesforce Sales Cloud is one of the best tools to streamline and boost your sales performance. Along with Service Cloud, it stands out as one of Salesforce‘s main solutions, specifically designed to meet the needs of sales representatives and managers.
With a focus on the sales funnel and deals, Sales Cloud centralizes all essential aspects – businesses, prospects, customers, leads, opportunities, and purchases – in one accessible platform.
This tool not only makes handling data easier but also helps sales teams get what customers really want. So, if you need a more effective sales process, read on.
The Benefits of a Powerful Sales CRM
You might already be familiar with some of the Salesforce Sales Cloud features. If not, read on, because we’ll introduce you to them. But how exactly do those features translate into benefits?
Improved Sales Performance
In 2023, 54% of sales pros shared that selling has been more challenging. To support your team, providing real-time insights into their sales pipeline and tools for smarter process management is crucial. This not only helps identify areas for improvement but also empowers everyone to make data-driven decisions, ultimately leading to more closed deals.
Better Sales Collaboration
When you allow your sales team to collaborate on deals, you create a more cohesive environment. After all, two heads are wiser than one, and you want your whole team aligned on the key accounts.
Enhanced Customer Experience
When your team has a full picture of each customer, they can create a more personalized experience and build stronger relationships. And it’s a big deal – 86% of consumers say personalization is a factor when choosing providers.
Ultimately, if you’re looking for the central HQ for all your sales-related activities, with the potential for expanding into marketing and customer success, you found it!
Key Salesforce Sales Cloud Features
Salesforce Sales Cloud comes with many features to help you manage the sales process from start to finish. Some of them include the following:
Lead Management in Salesforce Sales Cloud
With the lead management feature, you can capture leads from different sources and smoothly guide them through the sales pipeline until they become happy customers.
Capturing Leads
With Sales Cloud, you can use lead capture capabilities like web-to-lead forms, which allow you to create a form on your website that visitors can fill out, and they automatically become a lead in Sales Cloud. You can customize the fields on the form, too.
If you have a list of leads in a spreadsheet or other format, don’t worry. You can import them into Sales Cloud using the Lead Import Wizard.
Plus, if you’re using Salesforce Chatter, capture leads by creating a post and including the #lead hashtag. Sales Cloud will automatically create a lead record based on the information in the post!
Assigning Leads in Salesforce Sales Cloud
Once you’ve captured a lead, you need to assign it to a sales rep who can follow up and convert the lead into a customer.
With this feature, you can create rules that automatically assign leads to specific sales reps based on criteria such as geography, product interest, or lead source. It helps you assign leads to sales reps in a round-robin way, ensuring that each rep gets an equal number of leads.
Or, if you prefer, you can manually assign leads to sales reps. Whichever works best for you!
Closing Leads
The ultimate goal of lead management is to convert leads into customers. To get there, you’ll need high-quality leads that actually can convert. This is where Sales Cloud’s prioritization comes in. Use lead scoring to prioritize leads based on their level of engagement and likelihood to convert. That way, your sales team can focus their efforts on leads that are most likely to say “yes” and drive revenue.
Opportunity Management
Get a 360 view of all your deals! Opportunity Management lets you track all the information you need about a deal, such as size and expected close date. You can use it to track your team’s progress and make informed decisions about where to focus your efforts next.
If you want to make tracking deals even easier, customize the Opportunity object to fit your specific needs. For example, you can add custom fields to track additional information about your deals.
Pipeline management is another important aspect of Salesforce Sales Cloud. With this feature, you can manage your pipeline more effectively by tracking deals and their stages. You’ll get a complete overview of deals that are in progress, deals close to closing, and deals that need more attention.
This is great for every rep’s monitoring, but it also helps you as a sales manager because you’ll know exactly where the bottlenecks are. If you notice patterns, you can train your team on the improvement areas!
Sales Process Automation
Tedious tasks may drain your energy, but they also suck up the time you could be investing in other tasks. That’s why the most effective sales teams are the ones with solid automation processes in place. Features like Workflow Rules and Approval Processes come in to ensure you’re only spending your energy on high-impact steps.
You can use Workflow Rules to automate tasks such as sending email notifications, updating fields, and creating tasks. For example, you can create a Workflow Rule that automatically sends an email to a sales rep when a lead is assigned to them. This makes sure that follow-ups are quick and helpful.
With Approval Processes, you can speed up the approval of records such as opportunities, quotes, and contracts. You can create Approval Processes that require approvals from specific users, roles, or groups.
For example, you can create an Approval Process that requires approval from a manager before a sales rep can close an opportunity worth more than $10,000. The manager, in turn, can sign off on this deal before it’s properly closed.
Analytics and Reporting
Sales Cloud brings the power of Salesforce Analytics to any device. With intuitive visualizations based on your Salesforce data, it lets you move from insight to action quickly and helps you turn data into smarter sales.
Here’s a tip: customize your dashboard to fit your current needs to focus on the metrics that matter most to your business. You can track key performance indicators (KPIs) such as pipeline size, win rate, and average deal size. You can also create charts and graphs to visualize your data and identify trends over time.
Ever wondered how you can accurately predict future sales and keep tabs on your goals? You can use the Cloud to create custom forecasts using past and current pipeline information, so you can effortlessly track your progress against forecasts and adjust your strategy.
Best Practices and Tips
Keep Your Data Clean
Over time, information can become unreliable due to changes like people switching jobs or companies going through mergers. If someone makes a mistake while entering data, inconsistencies, duplicates, and missing details pop up. So if you want to sell effectively, you’ll need to regularly clean your Salesforce data.
Schedule periodic data reviews and updates to perform data cleansing and de-duplication. This will help you avoid errors and give your team accurate information to work with. Common culprits are enrichment tools and improperly set up integrations.
It’s like tidying up your workspace – keeping things organized makes everything run smoother.
Use Reports and Dashboards to Monitor Your Progress in Salesforce Sales Cloud
The reports and dashboards in Salesforce Sales Cloud can help you track your sales performance and identify areas for improvement. Beyond your pipeline and forecasting, you can create custom reports and dashboards to track metrics like win rate and sales cycle length.
You can see reports by teams, regions, pipeline stages, and more. Essentially, go as granular as you need to – you’ll seamlessly switch from a bird’s eye view to micro details on activities and tasks.
Integrate with Other Tools in Your Stack
Sales Cloud integrates with many other tools, including marketing automation (HubSpot, Marketo, Pardot), accounting (Quickbooks, Xero), and customer service software (Zendesk, ServiceNow, Freshdesk). Just make sure you’ve built out your Salesforce integration architecture, so your stack doesn’t spiral out of control.
Easily Train Your Team
Training your team on Sales Cloud is the only way to make sure everyone: 1) understands, and 2) enjoys working with the platform. Fortunately, you’ll find plenty of training resources inside Salesforce, including Trailhead modules, webinars, and certifications.
If you’re up for it, you can also create your own training materials and conduct in-house training sessions.
Drive Revenue Growth with Sales Cloud
Whether you’re in the tech industry or retail, Sales Cloud’s high level of customization adapts to any sales lifecycle to match your business goals. Plus, you’ll never work alone – Salesforce Sales Cloud offers even more features like Teams, Share, and Opportunity Split to ensure every rep stays connected and focused on closing deals.
The truth is, Salesforce Sales Cloud is such a powerful machine that we could go on singing its praises endlessly. But the simplest way to explain it is: if there’s an all-in-one software for sales, it’s Sales Cloud.
