If you don’t actually know what Salesforce does you are not alone. It is safe to estimate that every six months, a tweet like this goes viral from someone in the tech world:
Salesforce is massive
If you go to Salesforce’s own website to figure out what they do, you may feel quickly overwhelmed by the many offerings in the a la carte menu.
This is because Salesforce does many, many things:
In the 25 years since Salesforce was founded in 1999, the company’s product suite has continued to expand with in-house product innovation and outside product acquisitions. Slack, Tableau, Mulesoft, and Heroku are all products under the Salesforce corporate umbrella and as of 2023, a shocking 79,390 employees work at Salesforce.
Salesforce’s first product, Sales Cloud, still stands as its main product offering. Once you understand Sales Cloud, you will have a foundational understanding of what Salesforce does.
What is Salesforce Sales Cloud?
Salesforce Sales Cloud is a CRM platform which stands for Customer Relationship Management. A CRM is a place where sales teams store all the information they need to sell products to new and existing customers. This can get complex but let’s imagine a very simple scenario: a three person sales team selling one product, a computer.
In this scenario, there are three sales people selling their computers to tech companies. Those sales people try to talk to employees of tech companies that may want to buy these computers for their company. Pretty simple.
With no CRM in place, the sales people can begin to sell and bring in customers but the sales team will not have any way to keep track of their sales efforts. It will be difficult to answer these questions:
- Who are the points of contact employees at every tech company?
- Which tech companies are buying our computers?
- What deals are happening now and what deals have happened in the past?
- How do you keep track of issues that may arise with customers once they start using the computers?
- How much money is each sales rep bringing in? How much money is coming in from every tech company?
- How can we learn from past sales successes and failures?
With a CRM like Sales Cloud, this sales team can track their entire sales process easily in one central system that everyone can view:
- Sales reps can save the points of contact employees at tech companies interested in computers as Leads in Sales Cloud.
- Sales reps can save the tech companies interested as Accounts in Sales Cloud.
- Sales reps can save deals they are working on with tech companies as Opportunities in Sales Cloud. In these Opportunities, Sales reps can track the stage of each deal as well as the money the deal brings in.
- And Sales reps can convert Leads to Contacts once a tech company becomes a customer.
- Sales reps (or support reps) can create Cases to record issues that need to resolved once customers start using the computers.
- Sales reps can look at data and learn insights about their sales team success with Reports.
Leads, Contacts, Accounts, Opportunities, and Cases are core elements within Sales Cloud that come preconfigured that sales teams can build their sales processes around. A single customer likely requires at least one record of a lead, a contact, an account, an opportunity, and a case from the time the sales team begins the sales process to the end of the sales process. CRMs are systems because all of these elements need to be connected to each other for the full process. Reports come preconfigured but custom reports, dashboards, and other Salesforce offerings, like Tableau, can be set up to view data about the sales process in many different ways to surface insights.
This can be viewed as the essence of Sales Cloud, which is the foundation of all of Salesforce. On top of this basic model of a sales process, companies can customize and automate their sales process to boost productivity and sales success with additional internal tools as well as a vast marketplace of third-party tools sold on the Salesforce AppExchange (such as Match My Email).
So why does the Salesforce product seem so confusing then?
While these six elements offer a simple view of the way CRMs can be thought about it, the reason Salesforce is confusing is because Salesforce is highly flexible. Salesforce is highly flexible because every company is different, every sales team is different, and every sales process is different.
Our example was for a sales team of 3 people with one physical product. Imagine how complexity can be introduced when there are larger teams selling a larger number of unique products to many potentially different types of customers.
While every company may have Accounts in their Sales Cloud CRM, they all likely want to store slightly different information about their accounts. For a company selling a physical product like our example, geography and region may be very important for taxes and logistics. For a company selling digital products, they may only care about what country or state for tax purposes.
When companies implement Salesforce, lots of work is required to make sure the way data is captured in these elements are relevant and helpful to actual sales success for the company. Salesforce is a leader in the CRM space because it offers a simple generalized model of the sales process but is extremely flexible as a platform to ensure it can work for any sales team. Just about everything can be customized in Sales Cloud to be optimized for each individual sales team. Things you can customize in Salesforce:
- What information is collected for records like leads, contacts, accounts and cases.
- What information is collected for things like opportunities such as the deal stages of a company’s sales process.
- How information is displayed on any page within any Sales Cloud implementation.
- Automations can be configured to streamline manual repetitive task.
Conclusion
Salesforce Sales Cloud is a place where sales teams store all the information they need to sell products to new and existing customers. This system is built around: Leads, Contacts, Accounts, Opportunities, and Cases. These core elements come preconfigured in Salesforce Sales Cloud and any sales teams can build their sales process around. Reports come preconfigured but custom reports can be set up to view data about the sales process in many different ways. The reason Salesforce and Sales Cloud seem confusing to people not in the space is that the much needed flexibility of the system introduces complexity to the product that leads to just about every Salesforce implementation to be unique to every organization.