Salesforce offers many products to start with based on the Industry you're targeting and the area of business you're looking to grow like Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Community Cloud, etc. Based on your need, you can always pick the right product for you. But, when you go through the product catalog on the Salesforce website, isn't it overwhelming to go through so many concepts and jargons? To fix it, I'll try to explain some of those products by explaining the business use case of the technical entities that the product offers.
I'll talk only about Sales Cloud in this blog and cover the basic objects related to Sales Cloud here.
Salesforce sales cloud is basically a module in salesforce where the entire sales process is handled and revenues are generated. It helps a businessman to grow their accounts, find customers, and close the deals faster. More leads get generated and it accelerates productivity by providing Insight decisions.
Let me give you an use case for the same.
One of my friend recently started a business of Gems and stones, on both online and a brick and mortar platform. She wanted to scale up the business from where it was then. Now, any business obviously needs customers. So, let's see how Salesforce could solve her problem.
1. Campaign : To take any business to the market, one needs to publicize the business and the product. How do you do that? Through newspaper, online media platforms like Insta, Google AdWords, Website, etc. In Business terms, this is called Campaign
2. Lead : Now, that her campaign is out, customers notice her Product. They may just click on the link on their Instagram feed out of curiosity or sign up for the newsletters on her website or drop in at the store for a casual look while they leave their numbers to stay updated on offers. So, these people may be potential customers to her business, also called Leads, which are generated through the campaigns that are created.
3. Accounts & Contacts : We click on a lot of ads, signup for a lot of newsletters, but do we buy every product that we sign up for? Not really, right? May be 40% of those who signed up on the newsletter found the product interesting. These guys now visit her website again, display their interest, sign up and create an account on her website as customers. These people could either be Jewellery companies that may use the product as raw material or individuals. The company and the information will be stored in Salesforce as Accounts. The information of the individual contacts from these companies who'd be the point of contact would be stored as Contacts.
4. Opportunity : Now, one of those leads/accounts come in and show further interest in the product for a purchase. We can track and manage the potential deals with Salesforce opportunities. Opportunities are deals in progress. Opportunity records track details about deals, including which accounts they’re for, who the players are, and the amount of potential sales. An opportunity is created when a lead is converted. Opportunities can also be created directly for accounts you’re working.
5. Products : Owning a business with multiple products may be difficult when the tracking of each and every product is needed. That's when the "Product" object comes in handy. Products are a base catalog of all the items and services you sell and their standard prices. In this case, there are a list of products like Pearl, Ruby, Sapphire, etc.
6. Quotes : Quotes in Salesforce represents a formal proposal for products and services that you are offering for a specific opportunity. You create a quote from an opportunity and its products. Each opportunity can have multiple associated quotes, and any one of them can be synced with the opportunity.
7. Tasks, Activities : Now that there's a lot going on in the business, the sales people may be overwhelmed with a constant need to keep track of their To-Dos - What's the next action? When to call Customer A? Customer B answered the call, but wants a follow-up discussion to do, etc. With Salesforce, you can keep your to-do list in Salesforce and stay right on top of your deals and accounts. It gives you different tools to maximize productivity—quick ways to create and update tasks, pre-filtered task lists, and task notification options.
We have learnt about the basic objects present in Sales Cloud. In the next blog, we'll deep dive into some of the other objects that Sales Cloud has to offer.
Stay Tuned!! And don't forget to leave your feedback, comments or queries!
Reference: