Sales Cloud is one the Cloud service which is provided by Salesforce to automate and manage sales pipeline. It is the basic service/product of Salesforce which company can purchase the license for and use it for manage their sales process.
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In sales cloud, there are different object, tabs, things that are used for managing the sales process of the organization. Before understanding the Sales Cloud, You have to understand the Sales Process.
Let's Understand What is Sale?
According to the formal definition, A Sale is a deal or we can say transaction between two or more parties, in which goods and services are exchanged for money.
I will explain you it in simple terms, think that you have small business of something like Clothes, smart phone, etc. and you want to sell it to someone through which you are going to make some money. So, For this purpose you have to clear on some points discussed below:
- What exactly you want to sell?
- To whom you want to sell / your target users?
You need to get the potential customer that we call as Leads in order to sell them something.
Lead is one of the Standard Object or we can say that Prebuilt Object in Sales Cloud which is used to store the information about potential customer(who are interesting in buying you product/service). Now, the Question is that how to get the leads? Think of the answer first and then go ahead.
We do the Marketing of our product to generate the leads. Salesforce also provide the Marketing Cloud for that purpose. Advertisement. Promotions, Brand creation, generating leads and etc. are comes under Marketing. We need to store the information of the Marketing which we done. So, for that purpose there is an Standard Object called as Campaign which help us to do that.
In Campaign Object, we can store the information about the campaign we are running, the advertisement, the promotion and all other marketing things that we are doing.
There is two types of leads which we get after campaigning which is B2B and B2C leads.
B2C (Business to Customer): If you are directly selling something to the one who is going to use it then this is called as B2C Lead.
B2B (Business to Business): If you are selling something to the organization, means there is a business transaction between two businesses.
Now, the leads which we is interested into buying our products or the leads who already bought our product gets converted into Account, Contact and Opportunity and populated with lead's data. The process of converting a lead into Accounts, Contacts and Opportunities are called as Lead Conversion.
Account, Contact and Opportunity are also an Standard Objects in Sales Cloud. Lets go through one by one :
Account Object: An account is a company or people, we're doing business with. Accounts should be created for Organization as well as for Individuals. There are mainly three types of Account:
- Customer: The one who is basically purchase the product directly from us and use it.
- Prospect: Person or Organizations who are interested in buying our product/service. Now, You think that What's the difference between Leads and Prospect?
- Lead is an unqualified customer while Prospect is a qualified customer.
- Take an example, We have some unqualified leads and to check that whether that lead information is legitimate or not and whether that person is interested in buying are product/service like if you want to qualify those leads. So, you are going to call or email them and if the one show interest or you get the revert back those are your Qualified Leads / Prospect Account and then also attach that prospect account to organization/company account.
- Partner: Those accounts whose something we are used in our product or service to make our product is our partner. like Huawei uses HiSilicon Kirin processor. So, HiSilicon Kirin is a partner account.
Contact Object: Those person who are working inside the Organization of those we have related information is comes under contact. Take an example, Some College is our Account. So, the information of the faculties who are working their is comes in Contact. So, One Account can have multiple Contacts. The relationship between account and contact is One-to-Many as well as One-to-One but not Many-to-One.
Opportunity Object: Opportunity is used to store information about sale or deals. Opportunity are the deals in progress. It represent a transaction between your company and an Account and you store information like Deal Amount, Different Stages through which the opportunity can go through and in last either you Won the deal or Lose the deal. So, We track all related information with the help of stage field which is on this object.
Now, I still have one question is we are selling products to customer and store information about deals in Opportunity but Where to store the Products or the Service Information?
There is an Standard Object called Product which is used to store the information of the product or services which you are selling to your customers. But we don't sell our products on same rates to every customer like you sell smart phone to direct customers at some price and if you selling it to some other company then you sell it on some other price. So, There are different prices for same product as well.
So, for that purpose we have another Standard Object named as Price Book and you use that object to store information of different prices of same product which you have.
There is one more object called as Quotes. It is the combination of Products, Quantities, and Pricing. It shows the proposed prices for products and services. Sometimes Customer ask for more than one Quote based on different quantity discounts or based on some offers. With Quote object, Sales people can record and track the various product and price combinations given to the customer. It's the best way if you are not sure about the customer's budget.
Hurray!! You got the deal and now, there is business agreement signed by both parties on that deal. So, for this also Salesforce give us an Standard Object which is called as Contract. It represents the business agreement between parties. It stores information related to contract like Contract Start Date, Contract Term, Contract End Date, products and services that you provide at some rates, terms and conditions.
Sales Cloud is not ended here. There is lot more left which is Reports, Dashboards, Users, Tasks, Event and many more.
Reports are used to generate the data and display in the form of row and columns. You can also set the columns in the reports which you want and you can also set the criteria on any field according to your business case. Reports are stored in Folders and we can set the folders to hidden, shared, read-only or read/write.
Dashboards are the pictorial or graphical representation of the reports which you have in salesforce which can be displayed using Charts, Graph, Tables, Metrics, Funnel Chart, Donut Chart, Pie Chart, Line Chart, Vertical Bar Chart, and Horizontal Bar Chart.
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User are the employees at your company such as manager, IT Specialist, Marketing Lead, who need access to the companies records. Every user has a user account. So, that they can logs in into salesforce.
Task is an activities or to-do items that needs to be completed by a user to whom the task is assigned.
Event is a calendar event scheduled such as meeting, conference for a specific day or time and it also includes all other users who here are called as invites.
This all for today. In next blog, We will go through in details of Service Cloud in Salesforce.
Thank You!!
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