6 Salesforce Sales Cloud Questions & Answers

Salesforce Sales Cloud is a powerful tool that helps sales teams sell smarter and faster by bringing all customer information together in one platform that combines marketing, lead generation, sales, customer service, and business analytics.  The power of the platform allows teams to make data-driven strategies that drive their business.

With a robust platform comes a need for powerful knowledge and skill. Skills that the Digital Mass Salesforce consultants bring to clients every day. In this article, we will share six of the most common questions our Salesforce consultants get asked and their candid answers.

If I have Service Cloud, do I need Sales Cloud?

The out-of-the-box architecture of each cloud is tailored to support the foundational building blocks of their team's processes. At a high level, Sales Cloud is used to track the sales pipeline of your business and track seller activities; Service Cloud helps with customer support and fixing issues before they become problems.

What makes Sales Cloud really shine is the unique functionality that exists within it.  At the forefront of these features is the Lead Conversion Pipeline which allows you to streamline your process for managing new cash points for income, accounts, etc. This then immediately pairs with Sales Cloud's highly performant Opportunity Pipeline that provides your Sales team the insights it needs to operate efficiently. From here you can even connect to your Marketing Cloud instance so that your sellers can leverage Sales Cloud's powerful Insights and Reporting tools while providing a more holistic campaign approach.

How do I know my data is secure in Sales Cloud?

When approaching security, Salesforce starts you off by requiring your users to log in using some form of MFA (Multi-Factor Authentication). Some Organizations handle this using a SSO protocol to keep the feel of a single action sign-on.  Additionally, Salesforce offers Basic and Shield Encryption to limit certain users from seeing sensitive information. It should be noted however that Shield Encryption is at an added cost.

Salesforce has 4 levels of security:

1. Organizational level security: Who and where users can access your org via IP restrictions.
2. Object level security: What objects individual users can access via Profiles and Permission Sets.
3. Field Level Security: What fields on objects users can access via Profiles and Permission Sets.
4. Record Level Security: What records individual users can access via Org-Wide defaults, Role Hierarchies, Sharing Rules, and manual sharing.

What is Lightning Experience? Can I still use Salesforce Classic if I want to?

Lightning Experience is the future of Salesforce, so while you can still use Salesforce Classic, we recommend clients use the Salesforce Lightning Experience. The Lightning Experience puts the power of controlling your UI directly into the hands of your Admins where in Classic you’re forced to leverage custom developer-driven solutions to match these UI features. With tools like Lightning Web Components, Lightning Record Pages, Dynamic Forms, and the continual optimization of Flows, the Lightning Experience will provide a more maintainable, efficient, and easier experience for your users while meeting or accelerating your development timelines consistently.

How long does a Sales Cloud implementation take?

When building out a timeline for your implementation there are several key factors that drive time to completion. Some of the questions we ask to understand how long an implementation will take are about whether you’re migrating from an existing CRM, if your data is defined in detail, if your processes are documented, what your user access looks like, and how many third party applications will need to maintain connections.

For every question that you’re able to answer, we’ll be able to better judge the timeline of replicating these features in Salesforce for your business. That said, not having an answer to any of the questions is okay too. Implementations are a great opportunity to overcome existing pain points and change old processes that weren’t working the best.

At Digital Mass, we approach implementations with clients with the crawl, walk, run approach because it really allows users and sales pipelines to get up running faster and more efficiently in the long run.

What techniques can we use to improve the quality of pipeline data?

The three biggest pieces of advice we give to teams wanting to improve the quality of their pipeline data and Sales Cloud in general are:

1. Define your source of truth. If Sales Cloud is going to be your source of truth, then make sure those expectations are set across teams that will be using it.
2. If you’re working to clean up Sales Cloud:
   • Start with Auditing Security to ensure users only have access to what they need.
   • Review processes in problem areas. Work on consolidating logic to keep things efficient, and simple, and reduce recursion.
   • Determine whether you need a process for Archiving records.
3. Leverage Flows and triggers where you can. For example, if there are fields that should be updated every time a different piece of data is changed and specific criteria is met, create a Flow or trigger to handle it automatically for your Users.

What are Flows and how can we leverage them to automate our processes in Sales Cloud?

Flows are an incredibly powerful tool that can be leveraged to meet your automation needs and even make callouts to open AI declaratively. Not to mention Flows are replacing workflow rules and process builders going forward simply due to how much more efficient they are. The true beauty of working with flows is the variety of ways you can utilize them to meet your given needs.  For example, you can utilize flow types like:

• Screen flows - which can be used to standardize information gathering in an intake, for example, in a sales process.
• Record-Triggered Flows - which can be used as a declarative version of Apex Triggers that are more straightforward in use. 
• Sub Flows - which can be used to capture commonly reused automation that you would reference in other automations that flows are being used in.

We also have to call out how much we love Flows Orchestrator! Flows Orchestrator puts Flows head and shoulders above the previous declarative automation that was in place, which allows Salesforce Administrators to control the order of Flows handling record automation in your system.

If you have more questions for the Digital Mass Salesforce Consultants, please reach out here.