Launchpad Lesson 1 - Sales Cloud Intro

So, by now I'm sure you're familiar with the term Salesforce.com, or just Salesforce. That's the name of the entire CRM, or customer relationship management, product suite. But you may have also heard of the term Sales Cloud. What is that exactly?

Well, a cloud refers to a grouping of similar features in Salesforce that help you accomplish certain types of activities. The Sales Cloud refers to the sales module in Salesforce, which helps you sell your products or services to new prospects and customers.

This would infer, of course, that there are other clouds as well. There's Service Cloud, Commerce Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Community Cloud, Financial Services Cloud, and even more.

But in this course, we'll be looking exclusively at the Sales Cloud.

In this lesson, we're going to cover the very basics of the Sales Cloud and look at the four primary sales objects to support your business-to-business sales.

Don't worry if the term “objects” doesn't mean much to you yet. We'll be looking at that and many other concepts in an upcoming lesson. Let's get into it now.

So, here are four standard sales objects that will be critical for you and your users to understand: Leads, Accounts, Contacts, and Opportunities.

Leads represent people and not companies. These are people that we think we may want to do business with, but we don't know much about them yet.

Leads can come from our marketing activities, like trade shows, from our website, or even just our salespeople's research on who we should be reaching out to.

Think of leads as business cards. We have some information, but we don't know the whole story yet.

Accounts are simply companies. I find that a big misconception among new Salesforce users is that an account must mean customer, but it doesn't.

An account can be a customer, a prospect, a partner, a vendor, or even a competitor. It just represents any company.

Further, a company with multiple locations would actually be made up of multiple account records. We have one account record for each location.

We can even create a head office as the parent, with the branch offices as the children.

A contact is a person. But unlike a lead, which is also a person, a contact is a record that is related directly to an account, whereas a lead is not related to that account. More on that later.

And finally, an opportunity is a chance for future revenue from a sale. It is the salesperson's way to track and report on potential deals in their pipeline.

Opportunities are probably the most important records that salespeople will use to let the organization know what they're working on.

Now, the final thing I'm going to share is one of the most important concepts in all of Salesforce, as far as your sales users are concerned.

Leads live alone. They're separate and not related to Accounts, Contacts, or Opportunities.

Think of Salesforce leads as a bunch of business cards just sitting in a bucket.

We invite our sales team to come over to the bucket and grab a handful of business cards so they can start reaching out.

Sometimes the sales rep is going to get ahold of that lead and have a meaningful conversation. In other cases, they won't get anywhere.

Welcome to the world of selling, right?

And when a sales rep determines that the lead is truly interested in moving forward in our sales process, they will then convert that lead. There's actually a button in Salesforce called Convert, and it's designed just for this activity.

This will transform that lead into three new records: an Account, a Contact, and an Opportunity.

The lead record is then hidden in Salesforce and can no longer be accessed by the salesperson. And once a salesperson converts a lead, there's no going back.

It's like taking that business card and ripping it in half because we've now got new records to work with.

The person from the lead becomes the Contact. The company from the lead becomes the Account, and the salesperson decides to name the Opportunity based on what they think they might be able to sell.

We'll look at how all of this works and how to set it up for your company in the upcoming lessons.

But know that this is one of the most fundamental concepts in all of Salesforce Sales Cloud.

Now, let's get into how we set this up for your company.