A Guide to Best Salesforce Products for Your Business Growth

The last few years have been a period of upheaval for the world. In business, cataclysmic changes have shown up the weaknesses of the unprepared and played to the strengths of others. For example, those caught off-guard by the Covid-induced move online were forced to readjust their modes of operation or risk going under. Those who were better prepared and had the technology and tools to facilitate such change embraced the new normal and took advantage of the holes left by the casualties of these unforgiving times. These tough times have left them stronger. 

 

As 2023 rumbles on, bringing with it its own challenges, we thought we’d put together a list of the top Salesforce products that have helped businesses enhance their competitive advantage and build up the resilience needed to weather different storms.

Top Benefits of Using Salesforce

Salesforce offers comprehensive support to ensure that the company stays on top of communication with individual clients from start to finish. The platform has features to help you keep up with communications in sales, marketing, HR, and many other business functions. Your business benefits from intelligent automation tools, rich and informative analytics, and the ability to tie different data sources together into one cohesive structure that your decision makers can act upon.

Here are some of the top Salesforce products that illustrate these benefits in practice.

11 Best Salesforce Products

Sales Cloud

Converting leads and getting more sales is more than just effective marketing. Communication with the client has to be meaningful, the information presented to them has to be tailored. Sales Cloud helps businesses of various sizes manage this communication better. With features to store information on and provide deeper insights into contacts, opportunities, and leads. To support strategy and decision-making, there are dashboards and reportings, tools that forecast sales, manage territories for sales teams, and much more. 

Price

Unlimited edition: $300 USD/user/month (billed annually)

Pros

• Highly configurable
• User friendly
• Powerful and comprehensive

Cons

• Relatively expensive
• Can present a bit of a learning curve if you are completely new to it
• Migration of old data can be challenging

 

Some prominent products included in Sales Cloud are:

Salesforce Essentials

This product is intended for small businesses that will find Sales Cloud too expensive. It is still a very robust, albeit simplistic CRM solution that supports up to 5 users and costs $25/user/month. The features that come with Salesforce Essentials are task management, sales process customization, account management, opportunity management and Einstein Activity Capture.

Salesforce CPQ

Salesforce CPQ provides you with the functionality of selling your products and billing your customers in one platform. It leverages approval and pricing automation to increase revenue. Some of its other prominent features include a product configurator, price and quote, proposals and contracts, orders and renewals, subscription billing, and billing automation, among others.

Salesforce IQ

SalesforceIQ is a CRM solution that focuses on customer relationship building. You can set it up by integrating it with your Gmail or Exchange and it will immediately start evaluating data and providing insights for more efficient deal closing. It unifies your customer’s story, detects critical actions, and enables productive outcomes. It also has a Chrome extension and a mobile app that enables you to access your CRM data from your inbox. 

Service Cloud

For businesses that are more customer-facing – typically those in the service industry, Salesforce’s Service Cloud helps them improve the quality of their service and give their clients a better experience. It helps customer service agents do their jobs better. Agents get a single workspace from which they can see insights about customers, related cases, and recorded resolutions to problems in a knowledge base. There are options for automating processes using AI, as well as analytics and reports to help companies analyze performance and continuously improve.

Price

Unlimited edition: $300 USD/user/month (billed annually)

Pros

• Complete control over data accessibility for GDPR compliance
• Ease of use
• Feature rich

Cons

• Bundled editions mean you may have to pay for features you don’t necessarily prioritize
• Some clients have requested better flexibility on reporting
• Initial set-up tailored to your strategy can be challenging

 

Some prominent products included in Service Cloud are:

Field Service

Salesforce Field Service serves as a connection between your employees and the onsite service in order to enhance onsite job management. Your workers can get access to inventory, schedules, and how-to articles even without being connected to the Internet. On top of that, Field Service is universal and supports virtually every field service role. 

Salesforce Live Agent

Salesforce Live Agent is essentially a live chat solution. With its help, you can interact with customers in real-time online or in-app via Snap-ins. Customer support with Live Agent tends to be more efficient and personalized as you can see the customer’s profile with all their data and history.

Salesforce Live Message

Salesforce Live Message is a mobile messaging module designed to remain in touch with your customers no matter the circumstance. It eliminates the need for the messaging system to be connected to a web browser. You can communicate with customers via the app of the choice, Facebook Messenger, for instance. This way, you improve customer experience. 

Marketing Cloud

Marketing Cloud helps companies effectively implement a multi-platform, unified and cohesive marketing strategy. It has features to help you pull data from different sources and tailor your messaging to your audiences. Marketing cloud has what are called Studios for email, mobile devices, social media, webpage creation, and advertising. All of these can be enhanced with AI capabilities.

Price

Corporate Edition: $ 3,750 org/USD/month (billed annually)

Pros

• Excellent for cross-team communications
• Ease of use
• Feature rich with great ROI

Cons

• Bundled editions mean you may have to pay for features you don’t necessarily want
• Some clients have complained that the Journey Builder feature is too rigid
• Set-up may require the help of consultants

 

Some prominent products included in Marketing Cloud are:

Journey Builder

Journey Builder is intended for providing personalized, meaningful experiences with each  customer interaction, and at each stage of the customer lifecycle. The module also assists you in building customer journeys and making your marketing efforts more aligned across all channels.

Loyalty Management

Loyalty Management allows your business to better incentivize your customers. This loyalty program management platform can build programs with numerous customized benefits such as special offers or vouchers. It can also help build partnership relationships with other companies and manage eligibility, rewards, and redemptions of your affiliates.

Email Studio

Email Studio serves a tool for email marketing, enabling you to set up both simple and complex email marketing campaigns. To help you build the most efficient campaign, it aggregates vital data from your CRM and provides you with valuable insights. For example, you can use customer profile data for better audience segmentation.

Mobile Studio

Mobile Studio allows you to connect with your customer base with the help of SMS messages and push notifications. It makes the process of setting up a SMS/MMS message campaign very simple and intuitive. It also takes into account your customers’ behavior patterns and preferences to provide higher engagement.

Customer Data Platform

Customer Data Platform is a data management solution that allows specialists to get a complete view of each customer with unified profiles. Its AI-powered analytics provide vital insights and connect data from many sources (Salesforce and beyond) into one comprehensive database.

Advertising

This tool enables you to connect your marketing and CRM data with your digital advertising activities. With the help of the CRM data, you’ll be able to adjust your Google or Meta ad campaigns for more optimal performance. On top of that, integrating different parts of your sales and marketing toolkit into one system streamlines your sales processes and makes them more consistent. 

Personalization

Marketing Cloud Personalization is devised as a real-time interaction management solution. Its AI aims to monitor customers’ online behavior and match them with their email and offline actions to better understand each person’s intent and thinking patterns. It also uses powerful real-time segmentation to provide prospects with contextually relevant experiences that drive them to action.

Intelligence

Marketing Cloud Intelligence is presented as an all-in-one marketing dashboard. Its main purpose is to gather all data from as many channels as possible and present them in a visual and intuitive way. It also offers powerful analytics and reporting capabilities, allowing marketing specialists to get numerous market insights.