A guide to Salesforce Cloud tools – benefits & implementation explained

Salesforce is well known for its CRM platform, but it is much more than that. There are many tools in the Salesforce ecosystem that can help companies grow. In this guide, we’ll discuss three of them: Salesforce B2B Commerce Cloud, Salesforce Service Cloud voice and Salesforce Net Zero Cloud.

Let’s find out how they can streamline your processes and help you get better insights, as well as what’s the smoothest way to implement them.

What is Salesforce B2B Commerce Cloud, and how can you use it to grow your business?

Salesforce B2B Commerce Cloud is a solution that helps handle the whole sales cycle and create a 360-degree view of your B2B business.

It was formerly known as Cloud Craze, before it was acquired by Salesforce in 2018. Before the acquisition, Cloud Craze was successfully deployed in multiple companies, including such brands as Coca-Cola, Cummins, Ecolab, Land O’ Lakes, and WABCO. It was distributed as a managed package and introduced many custom objects. However, that wasn’t in line with the Salesforce approach. Salesforce decided to create a brand new B2B commerce based on Lighting Experience.

Salesforce got rid of custom objects and integrated the commerce solution into the Customer 360 experience. The new B2B Commerce uses standard Product2 objects and PriceBooks. The intention is to have a seamlessly integrated solution no matter where the B2B customer interacts with Salesforce. Both direct and indirect channels end with a standard order object.

This is very important for customers who already have Sales Cloud deployed. The new B2B Commerce Cloud is built entirely on Experience, which benefits from Lighting Communities and CMS. It is effortless to change the look and feel. Salesforce B2B Commerce Cloud can be used widely by organisations that want to enable the indirect commerce channel.

Recommended reading: Why should you use Salesforce B2B Commerce Cloud and how to start?

It is worth mentioning that Salesforce constantly unifies the Commerce experience and brings all the systems – B2C (formerly Demandware) and B2B (formerly CloudCraze) into one platform. It has many benefits, such as a joint customer base and the same CMS components. Under the hood, Salesforce B2B Commerce supports features that are a ‘must have’ nowadays: buyer groups, entitlements, promotions, checkout flows, login on behalf, etc. The platform benefits from the Experience Cloud and is very easy to extend with low-code tools like Flows or custom LWC components.

How Salesforce Sales Cloud can enable and improve your sales process

Giants, as well as middle and small-size companies, use Salesforce Sales Cloud to boost sales teams. Below you can read about a couple of must-have, but not obvious functions of Salesforce Sales Cloud.

Automation and productivity

With point-to-click tools, you can easily automate many tasks – sending an email, creating a task, or reassigning a lead to another team member can be easily configured with Flow or Process Builder. Sales Reps don’t need to spend hours doing repeatable activities. Large deals can go through an approval process, another Salesforce automation tool. Since you are still on the same platform, all the tools work together perfectly.

Mobility

With the Salesforce Mobile app (distributed for free) sales team can collaborate on leads and work anywhere. The app is customisable and can be updated to meet your needs. It also supports the offline mode, so the lack of Internet connection is not an issue anymore.

Get smart

Not everyone is aware of the Sales Cloud Einstein capabilities. Features like: lead scoring, next-best action, or insights can help you unlock the tool’s full potential. With Salesforce Einstein, you can benefit from all the data and learning models Salesforce runs for its customers.

Recommended reading: How Salesforce Sales Cloud can enable and improve your sales process

How to plan to grow your business with Salesforce Commerce

You need to consider some steps before you start thinking about commerce. First of all, understand the personas. It is different if you deal with the final customer rather than a dealer.

Secondly, if you already use Salesforce – think about a seamless experience. It is effortless to bring commerce orders into Service Cloud and vice-versa. Map your business processes and define the customer journeys. Configure the system according to your needs rather than using an out-of-the-box configuration. Plan for marketing, customer onboarding, post-sales support, web analytics, etc. It all matters.

Below are some other things that you should consider when planning to grow an ecommerce business.

Connect direct and indirect sales

When you already sell directly (via Sales Reps), make e-commerce another channel. It is essential to treat your customer the same way regardless of how they reach you. For example, if a customer can receive a discount or a better offer from a Sales Rep, try to use the same promotion scheme in the web channel. If you already use Sales Cloud from Salesforce, Commerce Cloud is just an extension to your current processes and another benefit of the common Salesforce platform and 360 customer view.

Treat B2B customers like B2C customers

According to the research conducted during the last few years, B2B customers have started acting like B2C customers. They use mobile phones and expect more B2C-related promotions and personalised content. The price always comes first in the B2B world, but the focus is more on the experience now.

According to the Salesforce report (Salesforce State of the Connected Customer), 72% of B2B buyers expect personalised engagement. Salesforce has a great tool called Audiences, which can provide customers with a personalised experience without a single line of code.

Do not plan for years ahead

Run the discovery phase using standardised and well-prepared interview schemes. Benefit from quick demos and familiarise business departments with the platform. We can tell from experience that having an open discussion at the very beginning helps avoid future mistakes. Avoid unnecessary customisations and focus on delivering business value even with some mocks and stubs. Time to market comes first.

Recommended reading: What is Salesforce B2B Commerce Cloud and how can you use it to grow your business?

How to start with Salesforce B2B Commerce Cloud?

Salesforce B2B Commerce Cloud is almost immediately ready to go. Many plugins are available on the Partner Community, and Salesforce provides basic LWC components on GitHub. Salesforce constantly introduces new features into their product to cover the gap between Classic (Cloud Craze) and the new B2B Commerce Cloud. Before starting, you should go through Salesforce documentation or contact our experts to make sure current limitations will not impact your business case.

If you already use Salesforce, there is no better choice than Salesforce B2B Commerce Cloud. Integrating different systems is always a pain (whether there are connectors available or not). The benefit of having everything on the same platform is unbeatable.

If you do not have Salesforce – consider where you want your business to be in one, three, and five years. Create a roadmap. Salesforce is a leading CRM platform and offers several tools that various industries can use.

Based on our experience, we have created a framework that can be used to check if Salesforce B2B Commerce Cloud is the right solution for you. Based on the workshops, we will map your requirements into customer journeys and show you how B2B Commerce Cloud fits in the process and where it needs updates.  Contact us using the form below.

How to use Salesforce Service Cloud Voice for customer service

We all know how important the voice channel is for customer service. Customers expect a quick response. Therefore, a service agent needs access to customer details on the spot in order to quickly capture all necessary data during the call.

Before 2019, Salesforce used the Call Center module for integrating with telephony services. Salesforce Service Cloud Voice is a significant upgrade of the Call Center.

Salesforce Service Cloud Voice is well integrated with Service Console. Having these two solutions linked together gives you many benefits. Agents can focus on customer queries rather than opening new windows with different systems. With omnichannel routing, you can reduce the service team’s workload and route incoming calls based on agent knowledge or presence status. There is no way not to mention predefined reports and analytics that can improve service teams even.

What is more, Service Cloud Voice is integrated natively with Amazon Connect, so you do not need to worry about custom CTI packages. If your company does not want to use Amazon, there is still an option to go with another service provider. Having this integration built-in helps install and configure the whole solution quickly and easily.

The calls are transcribed and saved within a case. This feature is critical if an agent can’t close a topic during a single interaction with a customer, and the case needs to be passed to another agent for support. Additionally, the package comes with many predefined flows and (if you select Amazon) Lambda Functions.

Read more about Salesforce Service Cloud.

How Salesforce Net Zero Cloud can help your business reach sustainability goals

To become sustainable is not a ‘nice to have’. It is a must. Climate is changing, and we must protect our planet. Let’s see how Salesforce Net Zero Cloud can help organisations collect, track and analyse environmental data to gain insights on how to decrease their carbon footprint.

Salesforce Net Zero Cloud helps companies integrate, track, and analyse environmental data. Moreover, it gives several predefined reports and dashboards that can be used for audit purposes and executive engagement. It becomes a single source of truth regarding all the environmental data and carbon footprint. Companies can easily track their travel data, supply chain impact, etc., and make a plan to drive towards net-zero goals.

The Salesforce team at Spyrosoft experiments with NetZero Cloud and creates many different assets. One of them is an application that encourages employees to save their carbon footprint by not using cars when travelling to an office. The app integrates Salesforce with Strava and shows savings in the dedicated Lighting Web Component.

Net Zero Cloud was created on top of Salesforce CRM. It can be easily customised/configured according to the client’s need, as not every company is the same, and not every company has the same journey to become sustainable. At Spyrosoft, we fully understand how it works. This is why we offer you discovery workshops to understand your plan and how Salesforce can help you with that. Do not hesitate to contact us to get more details.

How to implement Salesforce step-by-step

During our years of working with Salesforce, we created a framework that can help you implement Salesforce in your company (regardless of the size). Below, we describe the steps and resources needed to make your Salesforce journey smooth.

Step #0: Pre-discovery (optional for small projects)

This is the first step and needs to be done carefully. All the senior stakeholders will discuss the use case with our industry expert from the helicopter view and decide if Salesforce is their system of choice. Even if we love the platform and have implemented dozens of projects already, we know that Salesforce is not always the best fit. During this step, we discuss the business case and try to set up a roadmap.

Input: Business Case

Output: Salesforce Clouds (licenses), Drafted roadmap

Actors: Business Owners, IT Owners, Spyro industry expert, Spyro Senior Salesforce Architect

Step #1: Discovery

It depends on the use case – it can either be a full-day workshop or a few weeks of work. During this phase, we dig into the business use case and draft the journeys, often demo-ing Salesforce to get feedback as soon as we can. We also discuss the architecture landscape, integrations, etc. It helps us to capture and describe all the dependencies.

Input: Roadmap, Salesforce Clouds to be used

Output: Epics or User stories, System/Integration diagram, project milestones (or project plan), Salesforce environment strategy

Actors: Business Domains Owners, IT Domains Owner, Spyro Business Analyst, Spyro Salesforce Architect

Step #2: Implementation

Mobilisation (Sprint 0)

This step often overlaps with the Discovery. The team needs some time to prepare themselves for the development phase. It depends on the project size. Sometimes, it is done in the development sprints. Please be aware of the importance of this step. Salesforce projects are nothing more nothing less than Software Delivery; therefore, proper tools are needed to ensure the quality of the delivery. You can use many different tools, but throughout our long story with Salesforce, we selected the best ones.

Input: N/A

Output: tools ready

Actors: Scrum Master, Dev Team

Development sprints

We always suggest implementing Salesforce in the agile model. Every project, every industry, and every client is different, but the agile principles work in every case. Salesforce is agile-friendly, and you can demo a working solution even on the first day of the project. It is all there, ready to be shown. We need to benefit from that. What makes Salesforce delivery different compared to a tailored software project? The Salesforce team needs to speak business language and understand when to use declarative tools. Having a proper/skilled team is the key to success.

Input: Epics or User stories, System/Integration diagram, project milestones (or project plan)

Output: Working System

Actors: Agile Team, Business Owners, IT Owners.

Wrap-up sprint/ go-live

Deployment to production can be automated, but it is a good practice to have a dedicated sprint/time to ensure the deployment goes smoothly and the system is ready to be used. Please remember that automation can do a lot, but pre- and post-deployment steps must be executed. It is worth mentioning that it is good to split the go-live into multiple phases and not forget about the rollback plan. Make sure the go-live is planned according to Salesforce releases, and you work on good sandboxes (i.e., release preview).

Input: Working/ tested product

Output: Product installed in the production environment

Actors: Agile Team, Deployment Team

Step 3: Stabilisation

After the successful go-live, plan a sub-group of your agile team to focus fully on the production support. There are always issues or queries from system users. Having this mixed with the backlog is not the best idea. Document all the requests/ issues and update the documentation.

Step 4: Plan for the next steps

This comes back to step zero. We strongly recommend stakeholders sit together, discuss lessons learned and plan for the future. Remember that Salesforce is constantly improving the platform, and you need to benefit from this.

We have never seen a successful Salesforce project without proper support and discussion about new features. There was one case, where turning on the dynamic form saved lots of time for the sales team. Salesforce release notes will be a Bible for your Salesforce team.

If you want to know more about Salesforce, check our offering page and contact our team.