Today’s consumers want personalized experiences and expect companies to understand their unique needs and expectations. A single bad experience can turn your customer away. Therefore, sales teams are under a surmounting pressure to deliver customized and consultative buying experiences to win customers, turn them to loyalists, and elevate ROI and growth margins.
In fact, 78% of buyers seek help from the sales teams and consider them as advisors for a more personalized experience. This can only be accomplished if you know what a prospect needs at the moment and across which channel. And Salesforce along with its comprehensive suite of cloud solutions prove to be just the right solution for your business.
From gathering details about a potential lead, to assisting the sales reps in tailoring their interaction with them at every stage of their customer journey and providing superior customer service, Salesforce Sales Cloud strikes the right balance between improving sales efficiency and serving your customers better.
Our Salesforce sales funnel experts have put together their hands-on experience to explain Salesforce Sales Cloud features and benefits, which will change the way your sales team functions.
Salesforce Sales Cloud: Introduction
Salesforce Sales Cloud is a cloud-based platform designed for sales people to have meaningful interactions with customers, leads, and prospects. With a 360-degree view of customers across the sales funnel stages on Salesforce, it allows information to flow freely, offer timely relevant content, give partners customers data, create accurate quotes to close deals, surface AI-powered account insights, and more.
Some of the amazing Salesforce Sales Cloud features include contacts creation, product order ID creation, inputting product pricing details, triggering email notifications based on a shopper’s behavior, tracking orders, sales reps placing orders on behalf of the customers, and much more.
Since Sales Cloud is a module in Salesforce, it natively supports Marketing Cloud and Service Cloud and can be seamlessly integrated with Salesforce Commerce Cloud.
Why should you invest in Salesforce Sales Cloud?
Most often, business owners ask this question, ‘Why should I invest in Salesforce Sales Cloud?’. Regardless of whether your sales performance is rust or riches, Salesforce Sales Cloud will take it a notch up. When you have a single dashboard for all your sales rep to know about customers, orders, revenue, margins, ROI, and Salesforce sales funnel; there is hardly any need to integrate other third-party applications or systems. With Salesforce Sales Cloud:
- You gain in-depth insights about your customers- from every click, browse, product added to cart, previous buying statistics, and whatnot
- Bring together your sales and marketing teams to collaborate on client retention and customer service strategies
- Forecast your sales performance and create relevant sales strategies
- Empower your sales and customer service reps to holistically view complete details about a customer and deliver an integrated experience
- Capture more leads by automating lead entry and nurture them via personalized campaigns
- Get a consolidated view of your sales pipeline to win more deals
- Analyze and track competition to deliver a better message, improving Salesforce sales productivity
- Automate business processes to save time of your sales reps and improve sales workflow efficiency
And that’s not it! Salesforce Sales Cloud benefits and features extend way beyond the above-described. However, you now have an idea how the platform your sales funnel stages with Salesforce.
Typical pain points faced by sales rep and how Salesforce Sales Cloud solves them
Salesforce Sales Cloud focuses on the sales component of your customer/client relationship management (CRM) and how your reps handle leads, contacts, accounts, and opportunities throughout the funnel. Although it does offer customer support, that quotient is better handled by Salesforce Service Cloud.
Here are a few challenges faced by sales reps and how the excellent Salesforce Sales Cloud features remedies them.
| Pain Points of Sales Rep | How Salesforce Sales Cloud drives value | |
|---|---|---|
| Automating lead entry and assigning process | When sales receive a new lead, they spend an average of 6 minutes on inputting and assigning them to a respective rep. Initial data entry takes 3 minutes. Since this process has to be repeated for all incoming leads, it affects the sales team’s productivity and sales workflow as well. | Salesforce Sales Cloud allows you to automate this process, resulting in a 50% productivity improvement. The web-to-lead feature of sales cloud automatically consolidates all incoming leads, saving a lot of man hours, which can now be spent on optimizing the sales processes. |
| Improving the lead conversion process | Without a complete view of the lead, sales teams struggle in nurturing them with effective communication, assigning them a stage in the sales funnel, and converting them to customers. | Salesforce’s web-to-lead feature allows sales teams to quickly read information about a lead via ‘lead list view’; assign lead scores to prospects to connect with them based on set priorities; get details on the total number of incoming leads, the date of generation, and status; ask for follow ups from sales reps assigned the respective leads through ‘Chatter’. Also, you gain clear visibility in your Salesforce sales funnel performance on the dashboard, the ROI of your marketing spend, and make data-driven decisions. |
| Close more deals and win more customers | Without a 360-degree visibility into the sales pipeline, sales teams find it difficult to identify leads that are almost ready for conversion and those that require more nurturing. Due to a lack of a platform to analyze competitor insights, reps have no idea why customers turn to the products/services of their rivals. Ultimately, it impacts their final sales numbers and hampers business growth. | Salesforce Sales Cloud helps you gain every single detail about your prospect, lead, and customers on its dashboard. With features like, ‘My Stuck Opportunities’, ‘Know Your Competitors’, and ‘Opportunity Closed Lost Reason’, reps have holistic insights into lead behavior, track competition, identify areas of improvement, and plan the next course of growth accordingly. |
| Improve sales rep efficiency | Most days, sales reps spend their time taking charge of manual processes that kills their productivity and hampers creative growth. | By automating manual tasks, Salesforce Sales Cloud boosts your sales team’s efficiency. It allows reps to connect and consult with product/service experts on how to sell the solutions and onboard more customers. Reps can quickly access all information consolidated on a single dashboard to get more visibility. Through ‘roll up summary fields’, reps can view the Open Opportunity and Closed Won Opportunity scores for an account.
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Reducing sales rep ramp time
| Often, sales leaders fail to identify which assets are being under-utilized and which teammates are able to close deals sooner. This results in increased employee turnover costs with unclear and directionless expectations. | Salesforce Sales Cloud assists sales leaders to track rep progress and provide them guidance on the next steps in real-time. It empowers new sales hires with required information, sets realistic expectations, and facilitates consistent communications via a Chatter group. |
How is the Sales funnel changing with Salesforce Sales Cloud?
In today’s dynamic digital environment, buyers are increasingly looking for one-to-one interactions with product/service experts. Salesforce Sales Cloud features and tools empowers your sales team to handle every interaction for success. With a Salesforce sales funnel, your marketing and sales teams can track, interact, and nurture with leads, prospects, and customers.
To keep a track of consumer journey, Salesforce provides several built-in features and tools like lead management, data and analytics which improves decision making for sales and marketing teams.
Here is a visual representation of Salesforce sales funnel stages depicting customer journeys.
Competitive Salesforce Sales Cloud features and tools that drive sales efficiency
With the change in a modern approach to selling, businesses are leveraging the Salesforce Sales Cloud to create powerful buying experiences through automation, data transparency, and advanced intelligence to prioritize and optimize customer relationships. Salesforce Sales Cloud comes with powerful tools that allow the sales team to win more deals and build deeper customer relationships through tailor-made interactions. These include:
1. Salesforce Sales Cloud Automation: Automation is cutting down low-value repetitive tasks and letting salespeople focus on selling instead of administrative work. Salesforce Sales Cloud enables you real-time view of your customers, including automatically capturing new contacts from email, activity history, key contacts, and ongoing communications. This increases the number of calls and emails a team can make to boost process and workspace productivity.
2. Salesforce CPQ & Billing: There are several touchpoints in a customer’s journey. For example, the marketing team sending personalized messages, sales people calling into accounts, and finance professionals getting involved in quoting and billing.
Through Salesforce CPQ and billing, you can transform your business model from transactional product sales to recurring customer relationships, which helps sales reps to select the right products and services for your customers. The process of CPQ and billing eliminates recalculation and duplication, enabling faster data flows. Billing is integrated with Salesforce CPQ to generate invoices, payments, and revenue records. With Salesforce Sales Cloud, you unify your configuration, pricing, quoting, billing and payment collection on a single platform. The integration between CPQ and billing empowers you with the following:
- Generate error-free bills
- Simplify billing for subscribed users
- Improve sales performance
- Strengthen customer relationships
3.Sales Cloud Partner Relationship Management: 75% of the world’s commerce is sold via an indirect channel that is through partners or franchise. Companies depend on sales reps to attract, acquire and serve their customers. How salespeople interact with customers is equally important as it reflects on your brand. Companies must equip them to become trusted advisors.
Here comes Sales Cloud Partner Relationship Management which:
- Simplifies onboarding, recruiting, training and supporting your salespeople with features like configuring lead distribution, deal registration, and marketing development funds with the interactive wizard of Salesforce
- Provides the information they need to close deals and makes them more productive
- Salesforce PRM (Partner Relationship Management) delivers performance insights across devices and channels to help track KPIs and explore opportunities for cross-selling and up-selling
- Prevents lead conflicts, automate lead distribution, registers deals, and more with prebuilt PRM solutions
4. Sales Cloud Einstein: Every business needs to capture leads, build lead pipelines, track and manage opportunities, close deals faster, manage customer relationships post-sales, and keep track of their sales team’s performance.
To monitor all these activities, Salesforce has an AI-powered tool called Sales Cloud Einstein. Einstein offers you all the insights and data to stay informed about business developments and other key moments that affect your relationship with customers. With the implementation of Salesforce Einstein, brands gain email content recommendations, practice engagement scoring, etc. Sales Cloud Einstein boosts decision-making and productivity with AI and automation by:
- Building pipelines faster with Einstein Lead Scoring
- Identifying customer sentiment, competitor involvement, and overall prospect engagement with Einstein Opportunity Insights
- Eliminating manual data entry and save time with Einstein Activity Capture
- Enhancing relationships with Einstein Account Insights.
5. Salesforce Marketing Account Engagement: Merchants expect marketers and salespeople to engage customers with tailored content. Doing it manually is extremely tedious, hence suggesting marketing automation. Marketing automation aligns the marketing and sales team with selling more efficiently. Here is how your business can benefit from Salesforce Marketing Account Engagement :
- Attract and generate high-quality leads
- Get real-time alerts of prospect’s activity during sales calls
- Build stronger connections with personalized outreach
- Through Salesforce Customer Segmentation, launch tailor made campaigns
Leverage Salesforce Sales Cloud benefits with certified experts
When it comes to buying, today’s customers expect more than knowledgeable sales people. If you want to automate workflows, unify data, and boost productivity in reduced time, Salesforce Sales Cloud is the right solution and with Ranosys certified experts team you can achieve productivity in reduced time.
