Salesforce Sales Cloud Tutorial

Components of the Sales Cloud include:

Web-to-Lead

Lead Assignment Rules & Auto-Response Rules

Lead Conversion

Accounts, Contacts, Opportunities

Account & Sales Teams

Account & Opportunity Contact Roles

Forecasting & Quotas

Products, Price Books, Quotes, Opportunity Products

Campaigns: Management, Hierarchy, ROI

Queues can be used in many scenarios where it is not appropriate to assign records to an individual user.

For example, I could route all leads created via website submission to an inside sales queue. Members of the inside sales queue can then take ownership of the leads owned by the queue as their availability dictates.

Web-to-lead generates a contact form that can be integrated with an existing website. Each form submission creates a lead record in Salesforce.

Web-to-lead does have several limitations; so long as those limitations do not hinder its usage, web-to-lead is the easiest way to generate a lead capture form for Salesforce.

Lead assignment rules provide a method to assign lead ownership based on data within the lead record, and can be applied via many different methods

Lead auto-response rules determine which email template is sent in reply to a web-to-lead form submission (assuming the standard email field is captured).

If all web-to-lead submissions are sent the same email response template, this can be configured with web-to-lead default settings, and no auto-response rule is required.

Converting a lead creates a contact, account, and opportunity (unless otherwise specified during conversion).

The lead is then flagged as converted which removes the record from search results, and the lead can no longer be viewed.

Data within converted lead records can still be referenced within reports.

An administrator must map custom lead fields in order for the data to be transferred during conversion. The field must exist on both the lead and the target object (e.g. Lead Company becomes Account Name).

Standard field mappings cannot be changed. Several other considerations and limitations (see Lead Conversion) are important to understand.

Stay in touch is a feature that allows a contact to update their own information within your Salesforce org. A Salesforce CRM user sends a stay-in-touch notification via email to a contact, who can then update their contact information on a website. This updated information is saved back to the contact record. Obviously the email address of the contact needs to be correct for this to work.

A sales process determines which stages can be selected on an opportunity when record types are enabled. The opportunity stage characteristics (type, probability, forecast category) influence a variety of characteristics within Salesforce, including: opportunity expected revenue (standard field), opportunity inclusion in forecasting, and opportunity reporting.

Forecasts can be used to predict future sales within an organization. Data within opportunity records is aggregated into forecast categories and summarized on a monthly, quarterly, and yearly basis. Forecast summaries can be overridden without changing source opportunity data.

Quotas are used to used to set target sales goals for forecast users.

Opportunity splits allow an organization to attribute opportunity revenue to multiple users (e.g. split accreditation for a closed/won opportunity to multiple members of the sales team - not just the opportunity owner)

As of the Winter 14 release, opportunity spits can be included in forecasts.

As of the Summer 14 release, custom opportunity splits are supported.

Products can be used to represent a good or service that your organization sells. Price books can be used to establish tiered pricing (e.g. a "Gold" customer pays a different price than a "Silver" customer for the same product). At least one price book must be active in order to add products to an opportunity or quote. Products can optionally have quantity or revenue schedules.

Users can generate a quote with opportunity data, and keep the quote and opportunity data in sync. A PDF of the quote can be generated and sent to the potential customer.

The quote object in Salesforce is a great solution for capturing and quoting standalone products without complex pricing requirements. If you need to configure product bundles, have product inter-dependencies, complex pricing requirements, or similar requirements, you may want to consider a third party solution such as ApttusConfigure Price Quote.

To create or update campaign records, the user must have the marketing user feature license enabled. Campaign membership can be managed in a variety of ways (see resources).

To perform email marketing within Salesforce.com, a 3rd party vendor is required.

Using campaign hierarchy requires configuring access to the hierarchy fields, and then building a campaign structure using the Parent Campaign field. A campaign hierarchy will allow you to capture statistics about a group of campaigns at a glance. A campaign hierarchy can contain up to 5 levels of campaigns.

Campaign influence allows an opportunity to be associated to more than one campaign. Only an opportunity's primary campaign contributes to campaign rollup summary calculations.

When a contact role is added to an opportunity, automatic campaign association will add that contact's campaigns to the campaign influence related list on the opportunity.

Campaign ROI is the percentage a campaign has returned above its cost. A campaign that cost $20,000 and returned $20,000 would have an ROI of 0%. Campaign ROI calculations only include opportunities where the campaign is listed as its primary campaign.

Account teams provide a clear way to document the roles of multiple users in the management of a single account. Opportunity teams (AKA team selling) does the same for opportunities.

Both account and opportunity teams extend record-level privileges to team member.

Contact roles on opportunities are enabled by default and are used in automatic campaign influence.

Adding contact roles to accounts allows you to establish a relationship between an account and contacts that belong to other accounts (it establishes a many to many relationship between contact and account). This is essentially a cosmetic relationship however, as a contact can only have one primary account.

Opportunity competitors is a lightweight feature that provides an easy way to list competitors on an opportunity record.

Orders are used to capture a commitment between your organization and a customer to fulfill declared goods or services.

Opportunities are often used to represent the lifetime value of a sale. A contract is typically used to represent a legally binding agreement.

For example, within a parts manufacturer, a sales rep creates an opportunity representing the sale of 200,000 units. The customer agrees to purchase 200,000 units at a specified price over the period of one year; this agreement is captured within a contract record. The customer draws down this commitment by placing orders for parts over the period stipulated in the agreement.

In the above scenario, the order indicates which parts were purchased, price, ship date, and other logistical information.

The orders object is intended to be integrated with ERP systems (e.g. SAP, Oracle).