Salesforce is one platform that offers multiple functions grouped into products called Clouds that break down into specific industry uses. With a constantly growing suite of products, it’s hard to know which Salesforce products you need for your business.
Start with a basic assessment by asking yourself these questions:
- What are my goals for this year?
- What are the obstacles to achieving them?
- Which tools will open the ways to the solutions I need?
Maybe you’re hyper-focused on increasing revenue this year. Perhaps you want to show your customers how much you care about them. Or maybe you’re trying to understand all of the data coursing through your systems.
Most businesses start with Sales Cloud for their industry and then add on other Clouds to fit their needs, like Service Cloud or Marketing Cloud. Salesforce also offers products that embed within your existing Salesforce instance, like Einstein for AI automation.
Here we identify which Salesforce products to choose for your business goals with our selection of top 10 recommended solutions.
Increase revenue and retention
1. Sales Cloud
The flagship Salesforce CRM brought business into the 21st century and into the cloud. If you aren’t using Sales Cloud as your customer relationship management tool, it’s time to catch up.
Having all your sales information stored in one central location means that you can rely on hard data, not gut instinct or a hopeful outlook, when making decisions.
Your sales team can track, nurture, and convert leads through built-in lead management. And when a prospect is ready to buy, go ahead and convert your lead into an opportunity, where you can track its progress. Sales forecasting gives leaders a bird’s eye view to track every deal, its stage in the sales funnel, and which rep is handling the sale.
2. Revenue Cloud
Sales Cloud is all about helping sellers but there’s a lot more to managing revenue than just sales leads and opportunities. Revenue Cloud is an end-to-end revenue management tool that’s built on the same Salesforce platform as other Salesforce Clouds.
It includes configure, price, quote (CPQ) software so sellers deliver accurate pricing to their customers for complicated product configurations like add-on features, discounts, quantity bands, and customizations.
The billing functionality helps automate and expedite cash collection across any charge type or payment schedule through an automated recurring billing engine. If you’re a subscription based business, make use of Revenue Cloud’s subscription management component so your go-to-market teams have the insight they need to renew customer contracts.
Improve decision making
3. Analytics Cloud
Every year, the amount of data that flows through businesses grows exponentially. Without the right software, it’s hard to process and analyze so much information. That’s where the Salesforce Analytics Cloud comes in. This business intelligence tool helps companies improve their performance and productivity by crunching large amounts of data into strategic insights.
It’s also optimized to be mobile-first, so your team can pull together data visualizations right on their mobile phones and tablets. Native collaboration functionality helps your employees review data trends, sales performance, and other insights as a team.
4. Einstein
Einstein is a Salesforce layer that embeds AI into the rest of your Salesforce platform, no matter which Cloud you’re using. It’s baked into each tool with free and paid add-ons. Smart bots can answer frequent customer service questions, recommend next best actions, and help with intelligent case classification. When AI identifies solutions and makes recommendations for common situations, your reps can focus on more complex sales deals and support issues.
5. Slack
Slack was acquired by Salesforce in 2021. Founded in 2013, it was already a very popular tool for internal business communication and collaboration. Things really kicked into gear when companies shifted to fully remote during the pandemic. Once acquired, Salesforce built capabilities for Slack to connect to the larger Salesforce ecosystem.
Today, Slack is the “Digital HQ” for Salesforce, providing a centralized virtual space where people and tools can connect to improve productivity and efficiency. You can save time, increase ROI, and never miss an opportunity. Slack channels serve as dedicated spaces focused on specific teams, products, and initiatives where people can find the information and support they need.
If you work closely with partners and customers, use Slack Connect to create private channels (with limited access to the rest of your Slack instance) to improve your relationships and replace long email chains. New features are added all the time, like the Run Screen Flows feature in the Spring 2023 release.
Deliver the best customer experience
6. Experience Cloud
The Experience Cloud lets your business create hubs and resources to better support your customers, partners, and even employees. The best part? It’s low code, so you can drag and drop to create portals, websites, help centers, forums and more. This frees up developers to focus on other projects instead of spending months on customer experience updates.
Just like with other Salesforce products, Experience Cloud connects to all of your CRM data. You can expose any information you want to your customers and make it easy for partners and employees to provide excellent customer support.
7. Loyalty Management
If your business runs a loyalty program, like tiered memberships or a point-based reward system, try out Loyalty Management, a Salesforce product that integrates with the rest of your Salesforce platform, especially Experience Cloud and Marketing Cloud.
Because this product operates on clicks not code, you can create loyalty programs at scale. Combining your sales, service, and loyalty data helps improve how you target valued customers with the right content at the right time.
Speed up development
8. Commerce Cloud
Are you looking to scale up an online retail business? Commerce Cloud is designed especially for your needs, whether you’re managing a single brand or multiple ones. It’s built for headless APIs, which means that instead of having a head (your front end experience layer) coupled with backend services, you can separate the two and deliver your preferred functionality through APIs.
Commerce Cloud has templates, composability, merchandising rules, and AI-based recommendations. Since this tool works on a single framework, you can manage multiple brands, sites, geographies, and devices all in one place.
9. Marketing Cloud Personalization
The Salesforce platform is a hub that uses APIs to connect all of your cloud, legacy on-premise, and open source systems and tools. With Marketing Cloud Personalization, you can accelerate integrations with prebuilt modules and drag and drop components.
Speed up the process of integrating your ERP and POS systems with Salesforce and tap into open source development tools like Git and Jenkins You can also create a consistent customer experience across all of your channels by pulling in marketing data, sales data, and service data.
Upskill your employees
10. MyTrailhead
If you’ve used Salesforce before, you’ve heard of Trailhead. It’s a free, user-friendly, and effective enablement platform to learn the ins and outs of Salesforce and improve your skills. Salesforce took this free tool a step further by creating MyTrailhead, a product that lets you create your own customized version of Trailhead based on your Salesforce instance.
You can build, from scratch, bite sized learning trails for your employees to train them in new workflows and Clouds. You can even gamify the learning experience. If you want, you can expand your trails to help customers and partners learn too.
Need help?
Need advice on which tools are relevant to your business? Contact us to talk to the experts. No matter what your industry, Salesforce can meet the needs of all types of businesses with tailored CRM experiences for financial services, government, automotive, supply chain & logistics, and more.
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