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IN THIS CHAPTER

Selling effectively with Sales Cloud

Enhancing leads with Marketing Cloud

Improving customer service with Service Cloud

Deciding what Salesforce size fits you

Now that you have a general idea about what Salesforce is, let’s delve into the various products that Salesforce.com offers. Generally speaking, the products we cover here fall into the three major categories or departments traditionally used to understand customer relationship management (CRM): sales, marketing, and service.

You may not have thought about it yet, but if you think about the basic structure of CRM, it follows the customer journey from pre-sales to sales and finally post-sales. In other words, marketing departments market the business to spark interest in a customer base and attract potential leads for your sales teams. When those leads are good and qualified, the lead is handed off to sales to close a deal. After the sale, the customer interacts with customer support for service, questions, or feedback about the product sold.

When you step back and look at the big picture, this entire life cycle centers around the customer. As you can see, we’re trying to sufficiently hammer home the fact that Salesforce.com and its products are all about enhancing the relationship between your business and your customer. Although it’s important to see this big picture, Salesforce.com also recognizes that the devil is in the details, especially from your customers’ perspective. Salesforce.com encourages its users to capture customer details and use them to improve this customer relationship.

In this chapter, we discuss three of Salesforce.com’s products and show you how they can transform a relationship between an organization and its customer base. First, we show you how you can improve your selling with Sales Cloud. Then we talk about Marketing Cloud – how it improves lead quality and automates important marketing tasks. Then we look at customer support and the features of Service Cloud that streamline it. Finally, we wrap up the chapter by helping you decide which Salesforce edition is right for you.

Using Sales Cloud to Win More Deals

Sales Cloud helps companies increase their sales success in a number of ways that we describe in the next few pages. But first, it’s important to note that any system you use is only as good as the data entered in it. This is an important point that cannot be emphasized enough throughout this book. If your data is stale and outdated or just plain incorrect, the entire infrastructure built around it is essentially worthless. And that’s why user adoption is so important. With Salesforce, it’s easy to put in place a number of guardrails to ensure that the integrity of your data isn’t compromised. Assuming that data is up to date and accurate, Salesforce is a powerful sales machine that gives organizations all around the world insight into their businesses.

Making sales groups more effective

So, how does Salesforce do it? Let’s look at a few ways Sales Cloud makes sales teams more efficient at their jobs.

Account management and contact management are the focal point of sales teams and the foundation of Salesforce.com’s products. What would a CRM tool be if you couldn’t use it to track your customers and the organizations they’re a part of? Accounts are those organizations or businesses. Contacts are the individuals that belong to those Accounts. Salesforce lets you establish and differentiate between your customers, partners, competitors, and distributors effortlessly. It also shows you valuable information about these people and organizations in one place (again, assuming someone is inputting that data).

This allows any company using Salesforce to view customer details quickly and easily. Moreover, it ensures that any department within that company is looking at the same customer details, assuming you permit it. It’s also built with the user in mind, providing a simple user interface so that inputting this crucial information isn’t too cumbersome. Of course, it can get laborious over time if you aren’t careful. But Salesforce gives administrators what they need to make entering or updating accounts and contacts easy.

Another way Salesforce boosts sales efficiency is by minimizing time spent trying to communicate across and within teams. Salesforce provides multiple tools for on-demand work collaboration, as well as quick communication. Many companies see a dramatic decline in emails after using Chatter. Tasks and events that are automatically created and synced to the digital calendars of sales teams also increase efficiency, forecasting, and opportunity management.

Improving sales productivity

Sales Cloud can be used to dramatically increase sales productivity for many organizations. Sales Cloud can increase forecasting accuracy, which has many obvious benefits. Tracking and managing leads, following up with them, and converting them with a single click of a button can help sales teams focus more on selling and less on entering data into a cumbersome Excel spreadsheet. Organizing massive amounts of data and presenting these results in a way that makes sense to users in real time is one of the most powerful weapons of Sales Cloud.

In essence, there really is no secret formula to how Salesforce boosts productivity and efficiency for sales teams. You can manage and view all customer information in one place, while updating contacts or following up with them (again, from the same single place), and track all this using powerful reporting to see trends over time and act accordingly. You can organize your tasks by priority, forecast more accurately, and respond to customers more quickly, thereby helping your business become a “customer company.”

Generating Better Leads with Marketing Cloud

We could write a separate book about Salesforce Marketing Cloud and do a deep dive into the various features it offers, but you can get the big picture from this section. Marketing Cloud is really a suite of multiple product offerings, but in this section we focus on email campaigns, marketing automation, and lead management, and how Marketing Cloud can improve your organization’s ability to execute on all of them.

Managing email campaigns with Marketing Cloud

How can you drive online commerce, as well as sell to and build customer relationships, without email? Email is the engine behind these forces. Marketing Cloud gives companies the tools to quickly create and automate attention-grabbing emails to customers throughout the customer life cycle. It’s essentially a user interface for managing communications and content to a wide customer base. The platform maintains mailing lists and schedules and can modify email messages based on what recipients read, click, and forward. You can easily filter your subscriber base so that you’re sending specific, targeted emails based on criteria or events of your choosing. You don’t want certain customers to be bothered by email campaigns? No problem. All of this can be set up and monitored as you desire.

ExactTarget is the name Marketing Cloud used to go by, so if you see ExactTarget in documentation somewhere, don’t get confused.

Improving marketing automation

How much time have you wasted tracking down customer activity, emailing potential buyers that weren’t even interested, or trying to understand who clicked your links? Marketing automation is a general term for platforms that enable the automation of repetitive tasks, as they relate to marketing on multiple online channels. In other words, automating marketing communication. So, via multiple channels, a company that uses marketing automation is able to manage and automate the targeting, timing, and content of outbound messages. What’s more, it can do this intelligently, using cues from prospective actions and behaviors on the customer side.

Think of this like responding to body language. In today’s world, consumers do their homework and visit the websites of multiple competitors before deciding which product they want to buy. Email blasts are no longer acceptable means of capturing a large piece of the consumer pie. More personalized and sensitive communications must be sent out, based on various criteria such as the buyer’s role in his or her organization or the buyer’s purchase readiness. It’s more important than ever to send the right message at the right time.

Marketing Cloud includes a host of features that assist in automating these marketing processes. Even better, Marketing Cloud is already part of the Salesforce network, meaning that you can leverage all the information in one database, instead of worrying about complex integration of various systems feeding into one another. Now it’s easier than ever to manage these interactions and deploy online campaigns from a central platform.

Identifying qualified leads with Pardot

Leads are the lifeblood of your business. The more leads you generate and pursue, the greater the chance that your revenue will grow. We already know that with Salesforce, you can plan, manage, measure, and improve lead generation, qualification, and conversion. You can see how much business you or your team generates, the sources of that business, and who in your team is making it happen. What about the step preceding that, though? There’s no use in filling your pipeline with leads that won’t actually follow through. So, how do you make sure your leads are qualified?

Pardot, Salesforce’s marketing automation tool, ensures that you fill your pipeline with the highest-quality leads. You can use the tool to create custom landing pages, lead capture forms, and targeted personalized emails. This helps your business shorten the sales cycle and close deals faster. You can set up personalized lead scoring based on criteria that you decide, to evaluate how qualified prospective buyers are. You can control which marketing content and messaging goes out to those leads based on that score criteria. Finally, you can add those leads that aren’t quite ready to buy to your nurture campaigns, so that you can spend more time “nurturing” them into high-scoring leads that will more likely purchase your product. This, in turn, accelerates your pipeline and ensures that team effort is being spent where it will pay off most, all from a central place.

Providing Excellent Customer Service with Service Cloud

When the sale is closed, good companies don’t say sayonara. An organization should still keep tabs on customers, or have relevant purchase history ready on the off chance that the customer will reach out with questions or issues. This is the foundation of customer support. Salesforce Service Cloud is a tool that helps call centers and customer service agents track customer interactions after point of sale.

This section provides an overview of what you can do with Service Cloud. For a lot more information, see Salesforce Service Cloud For Dummies, by Jon Paz and TJ Kelley (Wiley).

Managing customer interactions with cases

Remember when you used to call a toll-free number about a broken product that you bought? Maybe you emailed a support email address or filled out a web form. Whichever method you chose, chances are, you weren’t at your happiest at that moment. And who can blame you? It’s critical that customers receive world-class customer service from companies. Today, customers demand satisfaction more than ever before. If they aren’t satisfied, they can easily turn to competitors, or even worse, create smear campaigns against a company with bad customer service on social media networks.

Have you ever heard a customer service representative say, “One second while I pull up your record”? Those records are what we call cases in Service Cloud. Cases are related to contact records, so when a customer calls in, an agent can quickly pull up her record and see not only her purchase history, but also a record of every issue and interaction that customer has had with your organization. Cases, and the ability to clearly see what’s going on with customers, make both your customer service reps, as well as your customers themselves, much happier. Nobody wants to be transferred to another agent, only to have to repeat the issue for the third time.

Service Cloud uses case management to expedite and streamline customer service, creating a much more efficient experience for everyone involved and bringing your service organization into the 21st century.

Interacting with the customer across multiple channels

Service Cloud has an added benefit: the ability to interact with customers across multiple channels. Or perhaps it’s better said differently: Service Cloud gives your customers the choice of how they want to connect with your company.

Not only can customers choose to contact you anytime, anywhere, and from any device, but they can also choose the medium through which they do so. Some customers are old-fashioned and prefer calling a toll-free number. Other customers dread long hold times and would rather chat with an agent online. Giving your customers the choice to contact you the way they see fit will do wonders for their perception of your company. Service Cloud gives you many different ways to do this, and it will pay off in terms of satisfaction, as well as reduced operational cost.

Deciding Which Salesforce Edition Is Best for You

If you already use Salesforce, this topic may be a moot point. At the very least, you know which version of Salesforce you have.

If you’re not sure which edition you have, look at the top of your browser after you’ve logged into Salesforce.

All versions have the same consistent look and feel, but each varies by feature, functionality, and pricing. If you’re considering using Salesforce, consult with an account executive for more details about edition differences, pricing, and upgrade paths. Here are four versions of Salesforce.com’s service:

❯❯ IQ Starter: This edition has replaced the Group and Contact Manager editions. It’s a basic, out-of-the-box CRM system that offers basic account and contact management for up to five users.

❯❯ Professional: A thorough CRM system for any size organization that’s starting to nail down processes. Again, you can track the full sales life cycle from a new lead to a closed opportunity. Dashboards allow managers to track key metrics at a glance. Some optional features for businesses with more detailed process needs (such as managing marketing campaigns, creating contracts, tracking various products sold, or accessing Salesforce while offline) come at an extra cost.

❯❯ Enterprise: More sales and service functionality for more complex organizations, including the ability to integrate with other systems within your company, and the ability to create custom solutions with code. This edition provides more value than if you were to pay extra for certain add-on features in more basic editions. If you absolutely need your business processes to look and act a specific way, this edition provides more ways to make that happen for you.

❯❯ Unlimited: Even more customization capabilities for extending Salesforce to other business uses. You need a dedicated (and usually technical) administrator to take advantage of all the options that this edition delivers.

❯❯ Performance: This edition offers bundled pricing for Sales and Service Cloud licensing. It has everything the Unlimited Edition provides, but also includes features such as Live Agent Chat, an integrated knowledge base, as well as additional sandboxes.

Salesforce.com also provides another edition, Developer Edition, which is a free instance of Salesforce with which developers can test and build third-party solutions. It has full functionality but a very limited license count and storage space.

Whichever edition you choose, the good news is that every edition of Salesforce is rich with features that can help companies of every size address their business challenges. You can choose a more basic edition today and upgrade later, as needed. Upgrades happen in the background and are easy, so you can focus on the business processes that drive the need for new functionality. And when Salesforce.com rolls out new releases of its service, it provides product enhancements for the different editions wherever relevant.

PROFESSIONAL OR ENTERPRISE EDITION?

Most companies tend to make a decision between using Professional or Enterprise Edition. Budget may be an issue, but the decision usually boils down to core business needs. Consider these questions:

• Does your company have different groups with distinct sales processes, customers, and products?

• Does your company have a lead-generation or service team that relies on a call script when initially speaking with prospects or customers?

• Does your company plan to integrate Salesforce with other applications?

• Does your company require complex data migration into Salesforce?

• Does your company need greater control over users, what they see, and what they can do?

• Does your company sell in defined teams with specific roles?

• Does your company require consistent, specific workflow or approval steps to further automate processes?

If the answer to any of these questions is a definitive “Yes,” your company should probably at least evaluate Enterprise Edition, and possibly Performance Edition.