Salesforce is the world’s most popular CRM platform, offering its customers a complete growth platform to develop their own applications and market their products.  A cloud computing SaaS that accounts for over 19% of the market, Salesforce has a wide range of products to help organizations improve their efficiency and to better connect with their customers. 

If you are considering Salesforce for your organization, you are in great company. Google, Amazon and Facebook are some of the companies that use Salesforce in some form or the other. Among other benefits, Salesforce also offers a strong partner ecosystem for companies to create and distribute bespoke software applications. 

One of the biggest advantages offered by Salesforce is that organizations can access all industry offerings on cloud, through a common platform. With this platform, your company can build process automation into your business and create seamless workflows. 

Part of Salesforce’s massive appeal is that it pluralises its specialized solutions for different types of industries. For instance, if you are working with Financial Services Cloud, segments like retail banking or insurance is further divided into sub verticals such as wealth management, commercial banking, retail banking and insurance. Salesforce also boasts of industry-specific processes and data models, boosting the capabilities of AI and analytics.  

Here are the different types of Salesforce Clouds, with information on how these platforms manage your company’s sales, marketing and customer relationship management. 

Types of Salesforce Clouds

In its initial days, Salesforce gained popularity as a CRM and sales automation platform. It was also the first company to take CRM to the cloud. This opened the floodgates for businesses everywhere. They could enable their clients to access their services anytime and anywhere in the world. Today, the company has stayed relevant and dominated the market by adapting to current technologies, with an eye on trends that will drive the future. The result — Salesforce created the Customer Success Platform that has cloud services, all ready for production.  

Salesforce Sales Cloud

Salesforce Sales Cloud automates the sales process. It helps achieve customer coordination and communication across multiple channels. A cloud service that is designed to drive lead generation and increase sales, Sales Cloud is used by both sales managers and representatives to bring more value to sales. It caters to both the B2B and B2C business segments.

What does Sales Cloud do? 

As a company, you need to have well-planned and structured processes in place. You need all the information and data about your customers, and you need a common platform to communicate with them through multiple channels. Sales Cloud delivers the goods on all these fronts.

With a Sales Cloud, a company can customize it to suit their requirements and get real-time as well as accumulated data in a single place. 

According to the Salesforce Customer Success Metrics Survey, Sales Cloud shows a 28% increase in sales revenue and 38% increase in sales productivity. If you are a business that struggles with disorganized customer data and if you are unable to mine that information or use it to track your business, then Sales Cloud is perfect for you. It is not just about managing sales once you have made them. An integrated CRM like Salesforce can improve conversion rates by 300%. It can also keep your customers happy. Some of the important features of the Sales Cloud are:

Customer 360: The Customer 360 Data Manager from Salesforce connects experiences across customer departments and channels. It helps to build a complete and connected profile of every customer. With such attention to detail, it is easy to offer very specific and personalized engagement.  

Account Data and Contact Management: Traditionally, leveraging contacts means sharing data with your team. With today’s technologies, contact management with Sales Cloud makes your work more powerful. With Sales Cloud, you can make your entire team part of the way you handle your relationship with your contacts. With real-time data and information from across your organization, you can keep the customer the center of your operations and ideas. With an internal social network like Chatter, you can involve teams across the company.  

 Lead Management and Tracking: With Sales Cloud’s automatic lead scoring, you can handle accounts and campaigns from various channels, making sure that you do not lose out on any leads. By checking your sales pipeline and developments in real time, you can make key decisions.

Sales Path: When you set up Sales Path for your teams, it automatically helps sales managers qualify every single lead, close each one and shorten the process significantly, eliminating unnecessary steps that slow down the sales process. 

Campaigns: With a Sales Cloud campaign, you can work on your company’s outbound marketing solutions, garnering excellent insight and data to help the rest of the team.  

Opportunity and Product Management: Opportunity products are examples of how Sales Cloud can truly give your sales efforts a boost. Opportunity products are those that you sell from a catalog for a specific deal. With opportunity products, you can turbocharge your information management on reports and dashboards, making them do the work for you. You can increase pipeline visibility, identify development needs and get the best out of Sales Cloud.  

 Sales Cloud Einstein: Sales Cloud Einstein is the AI-driven module that makes lead scoring possible for Sales Cloud. Salesforce Einstein can turn projections and forecasts into data that you can actually use to follow up on the right leads and increase conversions. Einstein can also help contact centers to access real-time customer insight using the power of AI and machine learning.  

Salesforce Marketing Cloud

Marketing Cloud is Salesforce’s marketing automation SaaS platform. One of the most popular Salesforce platforms, Marketing Cloud has four different base versions with varying levels of use. With Marketing Cloud and Salesforce, you can engage with customers real-time, automate your email/marketing/social media channels and use SMS/push notifications to reach customers and enhance their journeys. Marketing Cloud also has a powerhouse analytics system that can automate journeys across channels, personalizing them at scale. 

For instance, your team can check how a customer has interacted or progressed in his/her journey. Each journey branches off and goes in different trajectories. It is especially important to create interest in your customer across the journey and make purchase an easy, fulfilling task. Some journeys take longer than the others, through multiple touch points. You can map decision-making based on the data and use predictive analytics to see who will open a mail or who is a potential lead. Marketing Cloud also helps you construct journeys across channels and can also enhance post-purchase communication, right up till the shipment, order fulfilment, and beyond.  

With the Marketing Cloud platform, you can use the Einstein tool too and personalize your communication.  

Salesforce Marketing Cloud, formerly known as Exact Target, helps marketing teams deliver the optimal message to potential audience. Not only can this platform help you maintain one-to-one relationships with customers but it also uses AI to manage these relationships to scale.

 Marketing Cloud is an omni-channel marketing platform that also chooses the right time to reach and target customers. You can use data, both of current and potential customers, and create visual real-time representations of your marketing journey across different channels.

Where Marketing Cloud especially comes in useful is when you want to create personalized customer journeys at scale. Marketing Cloud has a solution named Journey Builder that enables you to visualize journeys, understand important touchpoints in the customer’s journey, and gives you data on how to craft a high-performing marketing campaign. A journey visualization tool helps you personalize your campaign.

Some of the other tools that Marketing Cloud boasts of include:

Email Studio: The Email Studio has a range of exceptional cross-channel features, apart from the regular email services. From driving large email campaigns to creating targeted customer strategies and driving content production using the Content Builder, the Email Studio can help you create personalized, targeted emails that can be designed to maximize engagement. 

Data Studio: The beauty of Salesforce’s Data Studio is that you can collaborate with marketers, data buyers and companies to create best-case scenarios wherein they can find their customers. With Data Studio, you can discover your audiences, acquire them and monetise your data and take full control of it.  

Salesforce DMP: The Data management Platform creates a customer profile that it populates with real-time data. It also links to sources and gathers intelligence from different channels – sales, advertising and marketing.

Social Studio: The Social Studio helps marketers connect social data with marketing activities to create a digital focus group. The Social Studio connects marketing, customer service and social media teams through social channels.  

Advertising Studio: The Advertising Studio helps you engage with your customers by using social media, customer service channels and sales channels. You can reengage dormant users and organize your audiences so that you can use your data to target users specifically.  

Mobile Studio: SMS personalization is the way to your customer. The Marketing Cloud Mobile helps you manage push notifications, customize chat messages and align your SMS marketing with all your other marketing channels.  

Interaction Studio: True to its name, the Interaction studio connects online touchpoint with your offline touchpoints. You can connect customer experience channels with offline channels such as ATMS, call centers and stores. 

Salesforce Commerce Cloud

The Commerce Cloud is an e-commerce platform that Salesforce improved over many years, redefining e-commerce as a SaaS service and adding multiple functionalities to keep the service contemporary and adaptable. The e-commerce boom especially changed the way businesses function and the Commerce Cloud is an optimized platform that gives complete e-commerce support. It is perfect for companies that are looking at cutting-edge and scalable B2C functionality.  

Here are some of the top features of Commerce Cloud:

Effective channel management: With Commerce Cloud, brands can manage marketing and eCommerce across digital, mobile, offline and social channels.  

Constant upgrades: Salesforce offers many upgrades that can be updated on the administration panel easily.

Top functionalities and cloud services: You can choose from many marketing and CRM functions on the cloud. Also, being a Cloud product, you can scale your operations significantly and work towards growth.
Product roadmap: Salesforce’s Commerce Cloud roadmap is an excellent feature, giving you the necessary direction when it comes to planning customer journeys and giving you ample time to concentrate on sales and conversions.  

Commerce Cloud is constantly updating its features! It is now connected to Instagram and connects Commerce Cloud with Marketing cloud for trigger mails. Salesforce’s LiveMessage is also now available on Commerce Cloud and automates functions like tracking orders or resetting passwords.  

Salesforce Service Cloud 

Service Cloud is the customer service management SaaS platform from Salesforce. Service Cloud works as a help desk and a cloud customer service platform, helping companies resolve cases and giving personalized customer support. Service Cloud’s add-ons truly power its performance. Here are some of them you can use:

Einstein Reply Recommendations: You can suggest replies to agents with Einstein Reply Recommendations. Using natural language processing and Artificial Intelligence (AI), the Einstein Reply Recommendations can be used to recommend replies in real time, across various chat and messaging platforms.  

Case management: You can use a multifunctional dashboard to keep a record of customer interactions and help sales agents understand the full context of all cases. The omni-channel routing matches cases with the agent who is best suited to handle them.

Service Cloud Voice: While social media and messaging channels are crucial, the phone is still a primary means of communication with customer care agents and centers. To fill this gap, Salesforce Service Cloud’s latest offering is the Service Cloud Voice, which integrates telephony into the Service Cloud system and the agent’s console. This feature records phone conversations and notes, giving agents context to their follow-up calls. With Service Cloud Voice, agents can use a unified and single console, reduce manual data entry work considerably, and leverage Einstein AI to provide the analysis. 

Lightning Service Console: Agents service your customer care needs but who will service the agents? Lightning Service Console helps agents remain productive, connected and armed with analytics to work on customers and their diverse needs. This link ensures that you get a comprehensive outline of workforce management. With an excellent interface and a data model to track customer calls, many Salesforce users swear by this feature.

Custom reports and dashboards: The Salesforce Service Cloud has custom reports and dashboards that give a 360-degree view of the customers, their orders, customer care support history, and their entire activity.  

Service Cloud offers many benefits with its scalable and high-functioning SaaS model. Some of these benefits include customer satisfaction scores, live agent support, social media support, reduced budget to maintain the service, and increase in agent productivity.  

Salesforce Community Cloud 

It is a connected world and SaaS platforms today need communities that drive their adoption. The Community Cloud is Salesforce’s very own social platform, connecting customers, employers, partners and agents together. Community Cloud offers the data to help everyone contribute to the ecosystem and boost customer service. The benefit with Community Cloud is that you can tap into the data in your CRM and reach out to third-party agents and other members in your community. This online social platform is located on top of the Salesforce Sales Cloud Instance. It provides essential use cases of partners, investors and customers. 

You can use Community Cloud with HR people and IT help desks. Partners and investors can use it to connect to the company that uses it.  The Community Cloud service gives you a platform for customers to send data in real-time. It doubles as a help forum and a support site too, helping customers connect with the backend team and complete their tasks efficiently, giving each customer a personalized experience. 

Here are some of Community Cloud’s best features:

Flow automation: With Flow Automation and Salesforce’s latest AI updates, you can build applications called Flows, which collect and update information on Salesforce. These power packed tools can guide users in collecting data, cut through the noise and get actionable results.  

Community management tools: Community Management tools enable a company to complete administrative tasks, collaborate with teams and make sure that all processes are in place.   

Lightning Bolt: This includes apps, templates, processes and elements of branding, helping companies create specific use cases in a short span of time.

B2B Commerce Solution: This robust cloud-based tool helps you meet your e-Commerce needs and offers superior, seamless purchasing functionality. When you combine this with the Digital Storefront, you can personalize products, customer journeys and significantly raise your profits.   

There is a reason why Salesforce is the top CRM in the world. Along with its cloud presence, scalability, and superior multi-tenant architecture, the company keeps adapting its products to suit the unprecedented changes taking place in today’s industries.