“Salesforce. That’s a computer program for salespeople, right?”
That’s the question I hear most often from family and friends when I tell them that I work with the platform. It’s not a bad guess — as its name suggests, Salesforce started out as a sales solution. By this point, however, Salesforce has expanded well beyond that specific use case. It now offers a broad array of products designed to service multiple industries and functional teams.
So for those new to the CRM world, it’s challenging to know which products are right for you. What does each of these products do? What use cases do they serve? To help out, we developed this Salesforce product guide to walk you through 19 different solutions the company offers. With so many products across industry and role, the options below allow you to align your entire business on a single platform, streamlining your processes every step of the way.
Salesforce Product Guide - Cross-Functional Solutions
- Salesforce Platform - Users with a platform license can’t use Salesforce for sales, marketing or service functionality — opportunities, leads, cases and campaigns aren’t included. They can, however, take advantage of Salesforce’s basic functionality as a platform, with access to accounts, contacts, activities, documents and any custom applications you download into your org.
- Einstein Analytics - Salesforce’s business analytics tool. Think of it like Tableau but integrated with your entire Salesforce database. It can combine data from multiple sources and help you slice and dice it in various ways, offering reporting abilities and insights well beyond standard Salesforce functionality.
- Salesforce IoT - You may have heard of the “Internet of Things” (IoT) before. But what is it and how does it relate to Salesforce? IoT refers to systems that connect devices in our external world — kitchen appliances, thermostats, cars — with other devices and the internet at large. Think of your Alexa device or “smart fridge” as examples. Well, Salesforce IoT allows you to connect these “smart” devices to Salesforce, enabling you to collect performance and usage data from them and even initiate actions from the platform. Starting the office blender via the push of a button in Salesforce? It’s possible with Salesforce IoT.
- Quip - A collaboration tool that integrates neatly with Salesforce. Quip allows your teams to work together on documents while they’re attached to Salesforce records, bringing the capabilities of cloud teamwork to your files as well as your records.
- Heroku - A cloud platform as a service (PaaS) that supports programming languages such as Ruby, Java and Python. Put simply, it provides a platform where developers can build apps without worrying much about backend requirements like patching, upgrading and security. Together with Salesforce, you can use it to extend the functionality of your platform with custom development and customer-facing apps.
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Salesforce Product Guide - Sales Solutions
- Sales Cloud - As mentioned above, standard Sales Cloud represents what many users think of when you say “Salesforce” because the company started in the sales space. This product is helpful for reps trying to track their leads and opportunities and build forecasts from this data.
- Salesforce CPQ - Standing for “Configure, Price, Quote,” Salesforce CPQ offers an advanced selling platform in which users can build customized quotes for customers. It provides a greater ability to bundle products, factor in discounts and vary pricing structures than you get with standard Sales Cloud.
- Sales Cloud Einstein - Combining the analytic power of Einstein with native Sales Cloud functionality, Sales Cloud Einstein supercharges your ability to build complex reports that offer actionable insights. It also provides predictive analytics, so you can understand which leads and opportunities are most likely to result in wins based on past data. It allows your reps to prioritize these potential deals and drive more revenue from their efforts.
Salesforce Product Guide - Service Solutions
- Service Cloud - Service Cloud focuses on your customer service team, giving it the ability to track and resolve customer issues and questions. The product also includes capabilities to enforce service level agreements through entitlements and case milestones, automate multiple customer service channels and store solutions to common problems. All of this functionality allows your support agents to respond to all inquiries quickly and effectively.
- Field Service Lightning - While standard Service Cloud focuses on your internal support agents, Field Service Lightning offers value to agents handling work orders out in the field. Its interface allows quick logging, assignment and scheduling of work orders attached to cases. From there, field reps can access all of the information they need through a mobile app (which works offline too) to ensure that customer issues are fixed the first time.
- Service Analytics - Unleash the analytic power of Einstein on your customer service efforts. Its enhanced reporting and analysis allow you to understand your customer service KPIs at a deeper level so you can streamline support efforts and deliver high-quality service.
Salesforce Product Guide - Marketing Solutions
- Marketing Cloud - Marketing Cloud is one of Salesforce’s marketing automation products, along with Pardot. Marketing Cloud offers more robust capabilities than Pardot, such as in-depth analytics and the ability to create personalized customer journeys across multiple channels. This personalization makes it useful for B2C use cases, but this isn’t a hard-and-fast rule.
- Pardot - The other Salesforce marketing automation product, Pardot provides a more focused tool designed to convert strangers into leads. It helps marketers push prospects to your website via email campaigns, determine their fit for your business and turn the most promising ones into Salesforce leads.
- Salesforce DMP - DMP (Data Management Platform) captures, combines and unifies data about your audience, allowing you to understand your customer base in a new light. Scale your audience with peer-to-peer data sharing and external data sources. Then leverage the power of AI to better understand the customer journey in your market so your team can time interactions perfectly.
Salesforce Product Guide - Customer-Facing Solutions
- Community Cloud - Think of this as a customer gateway into your Salesforce org, brand or company experience. Many use cases for a community exist, but most center on building engagement with people outside of your company. For example, you could create a Salesforce customer community to help clients engage directly with support and sales reps on a custom-branded site. Or you could use a partner community to align independent contractors or resellers more closely with your mission.
- Commerce Cloud - A bundle of different products, Commerce Cloud offers multiple means of providing your customers a digital storefront. Commerce Cloud Digital lets you create a uniquely branded shopping portal for consumers. Order Management handles inventory management, fulfillment and returns. Endless Aisle adapts these online features to the in-store experience. Selling to businesses, not customers? Then you might want to check out B2B Commerce instead. With all these possibilities at your fingertips, your customer’s buying journey will never be the same.
Salesforce Product Guide - Industry-Specific Solutions
- Financial Services Cloud - Financial Services Cloud represents Salesforce’s wealth management solution. It manages clients individually or by household and can track not only their current financial health but also their future goals and upcoming life events.
- Health Cloud - Salesforce’s one-stop-shop for the healthcare space. For providers, Health Cloud is a patient-centric solution that lets you map a patient’s journey and develop care plans that multiple team members can collaborate on. For payers, it allows them to track complicated member bases in one platform so they can deepen engagement with these members.
- Nonprofit Cloud - An upgrade to Salesforce’s long-standing Nonprofit Success Pack, Nonprofit Cloud allows organizations to track donors and donations by household, individual and company to better understand their revenue streams. What’s more, it offers relationship tracking functionality so orgs can better leverage connections among their donor base to reach high-value prospects.
Having trouble deciding which products might be right for your business?
Send us a message — we can help you weigh different options.
