What Are the Features and Benefits of Sales Cloud?
セールスクラウドとは、セールスフォース・ドットコムが提供している営業活動の効率化を図るCRMツールです。
顧客管理はもちろん、顧客の属性に合わせて最適な営業担当者を割り振ったり、案件状況を可視化して適切なフィードバックが可能になります。
これにより、属人的な営業を脱却し、成果にこだわった効率的な営業体制を構築することができます。
Sales Cloud Functions
The core features of the Sales Cloud are as follows.
|
Features
|
Feature Overview
|
| Management |
• Lead Management
• Existing Customer Management
• Opportunity Management
|
|
Forecasting and Analytics
|
• Sales Forecasting
• Opportunity Scoring
|
|
Support
|
• Business Automation
• Process Development
• Cross-Device Functionality
• Workflow and Approval System Construction
|
While there are many other features, the core functionality is divided into three main areas: Management, Forecasting and Analysis, and Support.
Among the many CRM options available, Sales Cloud is a tool that emphasizes Sales Management. By optimizing your sales structure after implementation, you can increase your win rate and drive revenue growth.
Sales Cloud is positioned strictly as a Sales Management tool. While it can be used to analyze existing customers, you must utilize a corporate database to collect information for analyzing prospective customers.
Therefore, for more strategic analysis, we recommend using it in conjunction with tools that can collect corporate data and business information.
Costs Associated with Implementing Sales Cloud
The Sales Cloud pricing structure varies based on the number of users and the specific features utilized. Below is a list of the Sales Cloud pricing plans and their corresponding features.
|
Plan
|
Cost
|
Number of Users
|
Available Features
|
| Essentials |
3,000 JPY/Month
|
Up to 10 Users
|
• Customer Management
• Mobile Support
• Reporting Features
- Cross-sell and Upsell Management
- Process Customization and Automation
- Integration with Other Applications
|
|
Professional
|
9,000 JPY/Month
|
-
|
- Essentials Features
- Sales Forecasting
- Opportunity Scoring
|
|
Enterprise
|
18,000 JPY/Month
|
-
|
- Professional Features
- Opportunity Scoring
|
|
Unlimited
|
36,000 JPY/Month
|
-
|
- All Features
|
For details, please check the Sales Cloud pricing page.
Reference: How to Choose the Optimal Salesforce Edition
Three Things You Can Achieve by Implementing Sales Cloud
1. Visualization and Understanding of Deal Status
By using Sales Cloud, you can visualize and understand the status of deals both inside and outside the company.
This allows you to not only check detailed customer information while on the go, but also to understand past deal history and progress, enabling you to provide optimal proposals tailored to the customer's current situation.
Furthermore, since the deal status for each sales representative can be tracked within the organization, it is possible to prevent omissions in deal management and customer follow-ups.
2. Improvement of Sales Quality
The Sales Cloud allows you to accumulate past sales information and activity history. By building a knowledge base of patterns for lost and won deals, you can reference past successes and failures when approaching new customers, enabling you to refine your sales pitch and create more effective sales materials.
Furthermore, because you can view the sales pitches and prepared materials of top performers, even new sales representatives can maintain a high standard of service, leading to an improvement in the overall sales quality of the department.
Beyond improving the quality of individual sales representatives, analyzing patterns of lost and won deals enables "deal scoring." This allows for more efficient sales operations, such as focusing efforts exclusively on customers with a higher probability of conversion.
3. Strengthening Interdepartmental Collaboration
The Sales Cloud centralizes customer information, deal status, and appointment data, which helps to strengthen collaboration across departments.
Collaboration is particularly effective between the marketing department and the sales team that handles direct customer negotiations. By assigning the most appropriate sales representative—based on their track record with specific industries and business types—to leads generated through marketing efforts, you can build a sales structure with a higher win rate.
Many companies struggle with the alignment between their marketing and sales departments. By implementing the Sales Cloud, you can enhance internal collaboration, ultimately driving revenue growth as a natural extension of your customer acquisition efforts.
Characteristics of Companies That Benefit from Implementing the Sales Cloud
The characteristics of companies that are well-suited for the implementation of the Sales Cloud are as follows.
- Strengthening Inside Sales
- Companies That Rely Entirely on a Single Top Salesperson
- Companies Lacking Collaboration Between Departments and Branches
- Companies With Strict Approval and Internal Authorization Processes
- Medium to Large Enterprises With Dozens of Sales Representatives
- Companies Capable of Assigning Dedicated Personnel for Sales Cloud Utilization
- Companies With an Established Environment for Organizing Customer Information
Sales Cloud is a tool that helps improve sales performance. Generally, companies facing challenges in their sales operations will experience the most significant benefits from its implementation.
Among these, companies where information is siloed across departments or branches, leading to inefficient lead handoffs, or those relying heavily on individual top salespeople, will likely see even greater results from the implementation.
Sales Cloud Implementation Steps
Understanding the basic structure and completing service training are essential before implementing Sales Cloud. The specific implementation steps are as follows.
- View Demo Videos
- Consider Implementation
- Apply for a Free Trial
- Formal Contract
- Conduct Training
Salesforce provides various product demo videos to help you visualize how the products are used. First, please view the Demo Videos before considering implementation.
Once implementation is decided, apply for a 30-day free trial to input your company's specific workflows and sales information for customization.
While immediate results may not be apparent, please consider a formal contract after verifying the user experience.
After signing the formal contract, conduct training for employees to ensure the platform is adopted as an internal tool. Appointing a dedicated administrator is key to smooth operations.
Points to Consider When Implementing Sales Cloud
A key consideration when implementing a Sales Cloud is the necessity of training to encourage proper customer data maintenance and accurate data entry by sales representatives.
Sales Cloud is fundamentally a tool for managing existing customer information; if the quality of data entry is low, it cannot lead to accurate analysis or improved sales efficiency.
Therefore, Data Consolidation and data cleansing are required to resolve data duplication and errors, and it is necessary to create manuals and conduct training to ensure accurate information is entered.
Please note that if the environment is not properly established, accurate analysis will not be possible, making it difficult to achieve the intended benefits of the implementation.
