Salesforce Sales Cloud Implementation - Complete Guide

Complete Guide For Salesforce Sales Cloud Implementation

March 28, 2023 eye-glyph 78

Table of Contents

Today buyers prefer optimal ways to shop and expect ease of purchasing with just a few clicks. To cater to these expectations, businesses can integrate multiple add-ons, customization tools, and other functionalities in advanced CRM platforms like Salesforce Sales Cloud.

It is quite a popular CRM that combines all the essential features to help businesses tap into different marketplaces and acquire new customers while managing customer data, executing result-driven sales strategies, and improving conversions.

Whether you’re a small business willing to start with Sales Cloud or an enterprise with large-scale operations looking to optimize your sales processes, this guide is the one that you can rely on. So let’s dive in and start your journey to excel with the power of the Sales Cloud!

Be it knowing what is Salesforce Sales Cloud in-depth exploring its features getting insights about its implementation process, or how it is better than others. This blog is the answer to all of them.

What is Salesforce Sales Cloud?

Sales Cloud is a cloud-based application by Salesforce developed specifically for empowering the sales team and centralizing the entire customer database. With Sales Cloud, managers get a hold of every interaction the business has with the customers and implement automation on mundane tasks.

What is Salesforce Sales Cloud?

The platform offers sales representatives a common ground to monitor customer-related activities, communications, and purchase history.

Salesforce Sales Cloud consists of different tools for pipeline management, tracking deals, auto-quote generation, forecasting sales, and customer behavior that ultimately guide sales reps in closing more deals.

By implementing automation with Sales Cloud, sales managers can stir sales processes that drive more efficiency and productivity among team members.

An upstanding CRM strategy is the key to succeeding in the competition and always staying ahead. This is the only way companies can contour their core business practices instead of wrestling with manual sales and customer handling processes.

Salesforce sales cloud CTA

Keep exploring what else Salesforce Sales Cloud offers.

Salesforce Sales Cloud Features

Sales Cloud is a magic box with tools for sharpening even the tiniest of the sales process/activities and goals. For each purpose, the Salesforce Sales Cloud has a tailor-made feature that perfectly aligns with your business models, style, needs, and language.

Here are some primary business goals aligned with Sales Cloud features:

features of sales cloud

1. Obtain More Deals

To maximize sales, getting more deals is what you should plan for. With the continuous optimization of campaigns depending on the market response and closure interaction with channel partners, it is easier to get more deals.

  • Lead Management: Build your own ‘lead machine’ to improve conversion rates and increase revenue with Sales Cloud. Track your leads from click to close, optimizing campaigns across every channel. Make smarter decisions by investing marketing money with complete calculations.
  • Sales Data: To facilitate critical decision-making, get the sales data at the right time. Seamlessly plan territories, and increase your sales and marketing productivity with the latest and most accurate data.

2. Closing More Deals

More the sales, more will be the revenue. To ensure that your sales team can close as many deals as possible, you need these components of Sales Cloud.

  • Account and Contact Management: Take a detailed view of your customers, including their activity history, key contacts, customer communications, and internal account discussions. Also, gain insights from popular social media websites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn within the Salesforce Sales Cloud.
Account & Customer Management
  • Opportunity Management:
    1. View your sales team’s deals with Opportunity Management.
    2. Access the various stages in the sales lifecycle, products, competition, quotes, and more features in the cloud.
    3. Stay updated with the people and information you need to close every deal.
    4. Users can add chatter collaboration to close deals by getting team members’ input.

3. Closing Deals Faster

For quickly closing a deal, your teams can use these functionalities:

  • Mobile: The Salesforce mobile application turns your mobile device into a portable office, enabling teams to access the cloud anywhere. Enhance productivity as the teams will work according to their convenience, with the liberty to log calls, respond to hot leads & work opportunities, and check dashboards as required.
  • Workflow and Approvals: Visual Workflow allows you to design and automate business processes with drag-and-drop simplicity rapidly. Sketch flexible approval processes for deals, discounts, expenses, and more.
  • File Sync and Share: Share and discuss files, publish the best ones, and track your content in real-time with File Sync and Share. Instantly locate what you need now, share it securely, and subscribe to receive alerts when changes are made.
Close more deals with automation
  • Automation: Sales Automation makes sales processes smooth by deploying sales automation software and building workflows. It simplifies the sales process and cuts down the manual tasks for sales representatives. Also, contact, opportunity, and charges are well-planned, giving reps access to the data and customer interaction history in one place. Businesses can also benefit from marketing automation to provide the quality of customer services to new heights.

4. Quicker Decisions & Strategy Making

Various tools, when combined, make the decision-making process effortless and meticulous.

  • Reports and Dashboards: Get hands-on real-time information about your business at a glance with the help of Dashboards. Create detailed reports and retrieve them from any device connected to the Sales Cloud.
  • Sales Forecasting: Get real-time updates on the team forecasts, use editing, override visibility, get multi-currency support, and more such features to stay on top of your business.
  • Sales Cloud Einstein: It is a predictive and analytical tool that leverages the power of sales representatives to take calculated steps and increase conversion rates. Provides analysis based on previous data from established data models and offers precise sales forecasts for informed business decisions.

Industries & Companies using Salesforce Sales Cloud

With recent research, Salesforce Sales Cloud has successively shown a market share of 40.6% against Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales in 2022. Having set its foot rightly in various industries, Sales Cloud is steadily serving these industries:

Industries using Sales Cloud

On top of this, Salesforce Sales Cloud has served thousands of customers so far. In compilation with the functionalities of Sales Cloud, they all achieved their prime business objectives.

The top companies snowballing in their respective industries are City National Bank, Amazon.com, Reece USA, Walmart, Western Union, The Coca-Cola Company, Lenovo Group, U.S. Bank, etc.

These customers didn’t belong to a specific business domain. Yet, the potentialities of Sales Cloud fit with all to help them smoothen their sales activities and strategy developing and devising process.

Steps for Implementing Salesforce Sales Cloud

After knowing what it offers, figuring out how to implement it on your own might take a lot of work. Follow this step-by-step guide to get started with the Salesforce Sales Cloud implementation:

Salesforce Sales Cloud Implementation Process

1. Add Users and Provide Appropriate Permissions

Start by adding or creating users to your organization’s Salesforce account. Developing users before importing your data is essential to match later owners with the correct information set and the required permissions to access the records.

2. Fine-Tune Pre-Existing Features

Next, align the objects in Salesforce to go well with your organization’s structuring and business practices. Change the existing ones or modify the stock setup, be it standard or custom fields, objects, tabs, or records.

3. Import your Data

Steps to implement sales cloud - import data

Once the users and records are set, import existing data into Salesforce. Execute the import process with various tools listed in Data Import Wizard.

4. Set Up Basic Reportings

Now, it’s time to automate actions based on changes made in the Salesforce data, like sending records for approval or sending notifications for the differences in records they own.

reports dashboard

Derive powerful analytics from Reports and Dashboards for Standard and Custom objects and enable both users & stakeholders to monitor activities based on predefined metrics.

5. Addition of Automation and Validations

Automation based on business requirements and rules, validating records, fields, and values are available in Salesforce. Automation can update records and send them for approval. Furthermore, Salesforce also provides various other types of automation including flows, triggers, etc.

You can also read here in detail how Sales Cloud Automate and Boost Sales.

6. Roll it Out

Formulate a rolling-out strategy to ensure all users feel comfortable adopting the Salesforce Sales Cloud in their daily operations. Plus, with every quarter, Salesforce keeps upgrading Sales Cloud with advanced features and improvements to existing ones; this allows the team to comprehend their skills and meet the target.

7. Post-Implementation Duties

Train your staff with proper guidance and instructions. Establish connections with fellow administrators, learn newly launched features of Salesforce, and find gateways for recurring errors.

Best Practices for Sales Cloud Implementations

Salesforce Sales Cloud offers several benefits. Salesforce Sales Cloud renders and implementation should be done correctly, ensuring the full use of each function of tools available. However, it’s never easy, i.e., introducing new sales tools in current practices. But with proper expert guidance and best practices, businesses can free themselves from strategy re-evaluation.

Some of the workable Salesforce Sales Cloud Implementation Best Practices are:

Best practices of Sales Cloud Implementation

1. Customize as per Requirements

Customization of CRM promotes the scope of scalability of sales processes and increases efficiency, and decreases response time. A wide range of intuitive apps, profiles, dashboard layouts, and UI customization allows the creation of complete processes, the display of specific data, and permission sets to tighten security.

Customize reports

Custom Objects and apps can help in the effective tracking of deals present in the pipelines. Furthermore, a Sales-support app can be designed that enables representatives to access information across the platform.

2. Devise Salesforce Central in Accordance with Team’s Functioning

To ensure that implementation is successful in your organization, make its usage the epicenter of the department. Every minute detail involving the customer’s presence should flow through Sales Cloud, which later will become in evaluating the rep’s performance. Centralization of Salesforce also facilitates accountability through the quality of dashboard set-ups on Salesforce. Make all kinds of meetings and potential ideas a definitive source of information for everyone on the team.

3. Automate all Sales-Oriented Processes

In a recent survey of Salesforce, Sales representatives spend 28% of their time performing core selling activities and the rest in other deal management and data entry jobs. By implementing Automation in sales-oriented processes, businesses can enhance productivity. When tedious tasks are filtered out, teams clearly understand what and how they must strategize selling. Automated workflows and approvals enable quicker and more efficient decision-making.

4. Utilize the Power of Sandboxes

Before you introduce a new chapter in your organization, test it first, and Sandboxes are the best environments to perform this testing. Sandboxes ensure that your existing system remains untouched as they are the identical twin of the functioning system allowing uninterrupted, secure testing. Endorse the usage of such sandboxes to ensure that implementation doesn’t harm your existing infrastructure.

5. Empower the Sales Team with Data Science Tools

Data Management is quite a science and art and an overwhelming process. Finding a balance between managing and analyzing data that entitles the sales team to make wise decisions is arduous. Sales Cloud Einstein eases it all out by using AI to decipher factual data. This processed data creates a network of leads, helping managers and leaders take steps precisely. With Sales Cloud Einstein’s intelligence, identify the high-priority leads and work on their conversions. With the above-mentioned features, Salesforce Einstein AI helps in growing your business.

How Sales Cloud Stimulates Business Growth?

Everyone loves the discussion that can lead their business to maximization of profits, scalability, and efficiency in their business operations. When the Implementation of Sales Cloud is done, here are some possible benefits it could give your business:

How Sales Cloud helps in business growth

1. Reliable Reporting

Every business has a giant pool of data that needs to be managed, sorted, and sifted to drive meaningful insights and later put into strategy formulation. Data collection and management are accessible, but the analysis requires intelligence. By working on eliminating errors, Sales Cloud organizes and documents data after processing it through various analytical degrees. Managers can plan the next best action step with valuable reports and dashboards.

2. Automated Personalized Outsourcing Activities

To create personalized marketing campaigns, one must know what activities their audience mainly indulges in. This aids in the personalization of messaging and data-driven campaigning, irrespective of manual or automated campaigns. When outsourcing gets a personal touch, it makes the customer more valued and increases retention.

3. Improved Customer Engagement & Quality of Service

Salesforce collects data that guides the sales team in focused outreach. And when efforts are made in the right direction, it brings out more customer engagement and service efficiency. When the Sales team fully knows customers’ interests, they proactively deal with them.

4. Boost Productivity with the Power of AI

The AI capabilities of Salesforce Sales Cloud offer better insights from different sales channels with machine learning and AI technology. Analyzing previous efforts allows them to assess a strategy’s effectiveness. It further empowers the team to automate operations, manage leads, and assist teams in closing them in the shortest period.

How is the Salesforce Sales Cloud Better than other Alternatives in the Market?

Among all the options available in the Market, Salesforce’s core product, Sales Cloud, is the only tool with a good blend of data, analytics, and technology.

Take a look at this comparison of Salesforce Sales Cloud with other alternatives in the Market: 

How Salesforce Sales Cloud is better than its competitors

Don’t forget to check the detailed Salesforce Sales Cloud pricing and license:

Sales Cloud Pricing

Salesforce Sales Cloud Use Cases

We are quoting two everyday use cases to know how Sales Cloud can help your business deal with existential challenges. These cases comprise some general business problems restricting their organizations in defining their success metrics and reaching their goals.

Case 1: Lead Management and Business Opportunity

An Ed-Tech startup sells courses & virtual lectures for all kinds of entrance exams. Students across the nation buy courses from them, and they also have a dedicated sales team that reaches out the prospects and sells courses to them.

Problems Faced

  • Inability to follow marketing trends: Designing campaigns to attract more customers requires skills and creativity. After spending most of the time on routine tasks, teams were finding themselves in a fix to follow ongoing market trends and bring more students to enroll in the courses.
  • Difficulty in Managing Leads and Opportunities: With the heavy demand for courses throughout the nations, the manual assignment of leads to a specific agent was getting cumbersome. Response time was also long, because of which a lot of students left without initiating the purchasing.
  • Delayed approval of Uploaded Courses and Invoice Clearance: Trainers uploading courses must wait a long time to get their content approved by in-house experts. Once a course was submitted, executives manually assigned courses to the experts according to skill set and availability. The delay in approval was causing late payments to trainers.

Solutions Offered

With the introduction of some capabilities of Sales Cloud in their existing business approaches and operational methodologies, a lot of challenges were eliminated:

  • Creative Designing and running of Marketing campaigns: Campaign Management allows sales teams to create, design, and run creative marketing campaigns that grab the attention of many students. When marketing is done correctly, the ed-tech business gets a good number of leads who are interested in buying their courses.
  • Seamless Lead and Order Management: Lead & Order Management helped agents identify convertible opportunities and helped them decide their next best action step to ensure conversion. With everything managed on one single platform, the queries raised by customers started getting answered efficiently.
  • Automatic assignment of Courses and quick approval: Once a Trainer uploads a course, Automation coded in the Sales Cloud directly assigns it to the available expert based on skill set and availability. Further permission sets and approvals stimulate the approval process, allowing trainers to receive monthly payments for their submissions.

This way, only a few features revitalize the typical issues and stabilize their operational processes.

Case 2: Streamlining Assignment of Jobs to Field Service Agents

Let’s take another case on Canvas. This business deals in Cloud Computing services. Their major service segments included the development of intelligent automation, networking applications for software-defined wide area networks, and high-security & high data transfer capacity applications.

Even though they are equipped with highly qualified technology experts, their teams were still in a fix in establishing an equilibrium between several processes.

Problems Faced

  • Common Database for all Teams: Managers needed to access information from departments such as sales, service, delivery, finance, and executive teams. Earlier, all the teams maintained data in their respective database system, creating complexities in data processing when required.
  • Customer Data Management: Whatever customer data enters the system should be processed to drive better calls to action. The sales team also needed a system that let them create, manage, track, and report the inquiries raised by customers. Another tool for creating and sending Service Level Agreements (SLAs) was previously consuming hours and days of reps.
  • Performance Tracking of Sales Representatives: Assessing the performance of each sales representative without any measurement tool is not an easy pie task. Managers could use a tool containing dashboards for live performance tracking.

Solutions Offered

Here are the ideal solutions for each of the problems:

  • A Holistic view of Databases and Processes: Sales Cloud has its own Sales Console that allows agents to update themselves with every minute of data, regardless of the department it is fetching from. This cut down the labor of hopping back and forth between inter-department databases.
  • Real-time Data Processing and Quote Management: Sales Cloud empowers agents with real-time data processing and keeps them updated. Creating, managing, and tracking customer inquiries is a very unchallenging job.
    Quote Management was responsible for drafting and sending sales quotes per the customer requirements and product/service data. Agents can now focus on closing more deals and providing better customer service than spending hours and days on creating a quote.
  • Performance Evaluation Made Easy: By using the sales cloud, managers can now generate reports and dashboards with just one click of a button, allowing them to track each representative’s progress from time to time easily.
    As the Salesforce Sales Cloud is designed for the Salesforce Lightning Experience, costs were minimized with acceleration productivity, and satisfactory ROI started generating.

Now if these businesses decided to implement Salesforce Sales Cloud by hiring a Salesforce Implementation Partner, then what is stopping you from getting one?

Let us help you in making your call with some solid reasons:

Reasons to Hire a Salesforce Implementation Partner

Outsourcing Salesforce implementation services from a trusted partner can bring several benefits to businesses, such as:

Why Should you hire sales cloud implementation partner

1. Expertise and Experience

Salesforce implementation partners usually have a team of experienced and certified professionals who deeply understand the platform and its capabilities. By practicing the best business approach, they provide businesses with the best implementation solution.

2. Time and Cost Savings

Save time and money by hiring an implementation partner instead of training your internal team. Teams with a development partner work efficiently and effectively to implement a Salesforce solution in a shorter time frame and at a lower cost.

3. Customized Solutions

The partners provide customized solutions tailored to business requirements and goals. They also analyze business processes, identify gaps and opportunities for improvement, and design a solution accordingly.

4. Reduced Risk

Partners reduce the risks associated with implementing a new Salesforce solution, manage complex projects, and identify potential risks and issues before they become problems. This can help ensure a smoother implementation process and minimize disruption to your business operations.

5. Ongoing Support

They provide ongoing support and maintenance to ensure your Salesforce solution stays current and meets your evolving business needs. They, too, provide training, technical support, and advice on optimizing your Salesforce solution to achieve your business objectives.

Hire Salesforce Implementation Partners for your business

Still, looking for a reason to hire?

Why not consult your concern with our Experts and get the most reliable solution for your sales team?

The Closing Words

Salesforce Sales Cloud can truly aid businesses in smoothening their operational and sales processes and empower the entire sales team to focus on attracting more customers to their business.

With its specialty of offering lightning experience, Sales Cloud Implementation will allow businesses to take full advantage of the platform, its latest features, functionality, integration, and add-ons, which can be sources of getting a real return on investment.

Cyntexa, one of the certified Salesforce implementation partners, has been there for all its clients who are set to adopt Salesforce as their primary CRM platform. And for those unsure whether to take Salesforce, we provide Salesforce Consulting Services to canvas your business’s issues.

Whatever your business needs are, we are here to cater to them. You only need to schedule a call with our experts today.

Frequently Asked Questions

Salesforce Sales Cloud is a CRM platform with all the required tools for sales teams. This platform suits any business size, including B2B and B2C. Being a SaaS model, it offers sales force automation, sales forecasting, contact management, reports, dashboards, etc. Salesforce Sales Cloud allows sales managers and reps to manage the entire sales cycle, manage customer relationships, prioritize tasks, and take advantage of smartly processed data of both businesses and competitors.

Sales Cloud implementation sets up and configures the Salesforce Sales Cloud platform for your business needs. It involves defining business requirements, designing and customizing the platform, and training users.

Businesses can benefit in several ways from implementing Sales Cloud, such as improving sales productivity by providing sales teams with a holistic view of customer data and automating sales processes, freeing more time for sales representatives to focus on selling. Additionally, Sales Cloud enables businesses to forecast future sales more accurately by providing real-time data and insights into their sales pipeline.

The duration of Sales Cloud implementation can vary depending on the complexity of your business needs, the size of your organization, and the level of customization required. Typically, it can take several weeks to a few months.

A Salesforce consultant can help guide your organization through the Sales Cloud implementation process, provide best practices and recommendations, and assist with customizing and configuring the platform.

To ensure a successful Sales Cloud implementation, it is crucial to define precise business requirements, involve key stakeholders, follow best practices, and provide adequate training to users. Working with a certified Salesforce consultant can also help ensure a successful implementation.

Sales Cloud is a cloud-based platform that helps different types of organizations achieve their goals. For sales organizations, it provides tools to track leads, manage opportunities, and close deals. For customer service organizations, it enables them to track customer interactions, resolve issues, and provide excellent customer service.

Sales Cloud provides a central repository for customer data, which helps businesses make better decisions. It also helps sales, marketing, and customer service teams track, manage, and improve their activities. It can automate many tasks, freeing up employees to focus on more strategic and value-added activities.

Yes, Salesforce Sales Cloud is a SaaS (Software as a Service) application. SaaS applications are hosted in the cloud and delivered over the internet. This means that you don't need to install any software on your own computers. You can simply access Salesforce Sales Cloud from any internet-connected device.