What is Salesforce Sales Cloud? A Guide to Its Applications, Real Business Impacts, and Pricing

Salesforce Sales Cloud is a cloud-based AI-powered CRM for sales teams. It is a single source of truth for managing an entire sales pipeline from the time a sales rep learns about the leads to the final closure.

It is a part of the broader ecosystem of Salesforce CRM and can be easily integrated with other Salesforce products like Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, and more.

salesforce Sales cloud features include lead and opportunity management, contact and account management, sales forecasting, real-time reporting and analytics, and more. Beyond these core functionalities, it supports meta-data-driven customization, enabling businesses to configure the platform workflows, page layouts, workflows, and more to adapt tailored business requirements. 

Put simply, it is a customizable, and comprehensive customer relationship management platform for the sales team, enabling them to do their job more efficiently. 

So, this is the overview of what is Sales Cloud, this blog will help you with a detailed understanding of its applications, real-world business impacts, and pricing. 

Salesforce Sales Cloud Applications 

1. Configure Pricing and Quote (CPQ)

Salesforce CPQ helps the sales team to generate accurate quotes for complex products or services. Here is a detailed understanding of how Salesforce CPQ can help:

• Dynamic pricing strategies allow you to configure pricing rules to ensure more accurate pricing tailored to the needs of customers. 
• Discount controls help to apply volume-based or proportional discount strategies when specific thresholds are met to incentivize buyer decisions. 
• Cross-functional approval processes ensure that the quotes are timely approved by all the parties involved. 
• Product configurator enables the sales team to bundle the product feature according to the customer’s needs, and dynamically adjusts the pricing accordingly. 
• CPQ plays a major role in B2B Commerce Cloud scenarios where product bundling, dynamic pricing, and custom deals are common. CPQ supports different pricing models like metered services, consumption-based or tiered usage to allow buyers to pick the most appropriate one. 

2. Sales AI

Sales AI governed by Einstein Trust Layer brings generative AI capabilities grounded in sales and customer data. Here is how Sales AI can help:

• Automating low-touch activities like scheduling meetings, outreach, sending personalized follow-ups, answering product questions, and more. 
• Sales reps training: It acts as a personalized coach for each sales rep helping them to practice writing pitches, negotiating contracts, and more to boost their confidence in real customer meetings. Constructive feedback helps them to identify the areas of improvement, and provide the resources to boost their efficiency. 
• Call summarizations to maintain the notes of important conversations, and insights that might help to close deals. 
• Lead and opportunity scoring to identify the most promising deals and quickly create an automated personalized close plan to capitalize on them.
• Predictive forecasting to gain insights into accurate revenue predictions, sales estimates, potential gaps, and most viable opportunities.

3. Sales Analytics

Sales Analytics is a visualized tool that helps sales teams with real-time dashboards and reports from all the sources at a centralized place. Here is how Sales Analytics can help:

• Real-time data management helps sales reps with the likelihood of winning a deal at each stage on the sales funnel with forecast categories like pipeline, best case, commit, and closed. These categories can be easily customized according to the sales process to ensure more precise forecasting. 
• Opportunities health signals ensure the early identification of bottlenecks before they impact revenue and prevent any potential losses. 
• Contextual AI-powered insights enable the identification of the most promising leads, so sales reps can prioritize them to win more leads. 

4. Partner Relationship Management (PRM)

It is a comprehensive, and flexible platform to manage and organize partner relationships, tracking the performance of each partner, their sales portals, incentives, and commissions. Here is how it can help the sales team:

• Seamless partner onboarding for faster deployment and effortless collaboration.
• Incentive & commission tracking to keep partners motivated and engaged throughout the partnership.
• Deal registration and lead routing ensure that the right partner has the right lead matching their qualification to work on. 
• Salesforce Experience Cloud allows the development of the web portal experience for partners using declarative tools, and pre-built templates. 
• AI-powered partner self-service ensures that the partners are equipped with the knowledge needed to serve the buyer. 

5. Sales Performance Management

It is a Sales team performance management tool helping organizations to align their sales professionals towards the strategic goal from the planning to deal closure. Here is how it can help to boost the sales team’s performance:

• Automate incentive compensation management to eliminate the manual process with real-time dashboards, and reporting to ensure the sales team has visibility into the incentives. 
• Territory visualization allows you to assess the geographical coverage of the sales team.
• Field optimization helps the field sales reps with information related to nearby customers and prospects, so they can schedule their visits more efficiently. 

6. Revenue Intelligence & Lifecycle Management

Revenue intelligence uses real-time sales data to help sales reps meet quotas, monitor their pipeline, track opportunities, and manage contracts. A clear dashboard with graphs and charts highlights priority tasks, while AI-powered recommendations and predictive analysis guide decisions and reveal selling or upsell possibilities.

It simplifies revenue generation with AI automation, offering tools like personalized quote creation, AI sales agents, automated order and invoice processing, and streamlined contract and obligation management.

7. Salesforce Maps

Embedded business, property, and demographic data into a mapped view, Salesforce Maps make it easy for sellers to geographically locate opportunities, leads, and accounts. Additionally, the visualization makes tracking and interacting with mapped-out entities way more efficient and simplified than those complex spreadsheets.

Maps automatically plan the most efficient routes for field reps based on customer locations, traffic, and priorities, so sales reps spend time with customers to close deals instead of planning. 

How Salesforce Sales Cloud is Helping Businesses? Real World Examples

Kraft Sports & Entertainment (KSE): From Data Complexity to Personalized Fan Journeys

Kraft Sports & Entertainment (KSE) manages the sports events and concerts in New England. The organization’s sales, and service team were looking for a consolidated view of fan profiles disconnected across the multiple platforms. Driven by this challenge, they turned to Salesforce Sales Cloud, and experienced the following results:

• The sales proposal creation time was slashed from 7 days to 2.5 days thanks to faster and easier data access. 
• 1000+ sale and service campaigns implemented in 18 months with personalized micro-campaigns for targeted fan segments based on their behaviors.
• 42% Increase in Centralized Email Case Management with the help of a singular center point for all kinds of fan inquiries, earlier divided into ticketing, parking, and merchandising. 

Salesforce Sales Cloud Pricing

Sales Cloud offers different editions that are differentiated by the features they offer. Here we have compiled a list of the editions available to purchase with the features they offer:

Final Take:

Salesforce Sales Cloud is a comprehensive CRM for sales teams of organizations of all sizes from startups to enterprises. With automation it is taking out the scope of low-touch manual activities, enabling sales teams to focus on high-touch activities to close deals. 

Ready to capitalize on the capabilities of Sales Cloud? It is a customizable platform that requires the technical expertise to ensure the successful implementation of its features tailored to support your business’s unique needs. At Smart IT Staff, we’re a team of more than 400+ IT professionals enabling organizations of all sizes to realize the capabilities of technologies in their business operations. You can hire Salesforce developers with profound expertise in Sales Cloud to help you leverage the capabilities of this platform.