This week, Salesforce announced their plans to offer both a Sales Suite and a Service Suite, which bundle together more features from their product suite than ever before.
The objective is twofold. Firstly, it’s to “help any company unlock cost savings and create exceptional customer experiences”. Secondly, “Salesforce Suites simplify tech stacks and reduce total cost of ownership” – as opposed to using a range of different vendors and tools (Salesforce News). So, let’s take a look at what’s included in these fully-loaded Salesforce editions.
Salesforce Sales Suite
“Empowers companies to sell faster, smarter, and more efficiently on a single platform.”
- Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (formerly Pardot): This marketing automation solution enables marketers to identify prospective customers most likely to convert. Marketers discover this by communicating with prospects in the right way, at the right time. Being tightly integrated into Salesforce’s core objects, Pardot is ideal for marketing to prospects as they progress through the opportunity pipeline (considered purchases, which is why Pardot is known as a tool for B2B marketing).
- Sales Cloud for Slack: Improve team productivity with cohesive collaboration across teams and systems – all in an intuitive and engaging UI for messaging and ‘huddles’ (ad-hoc voice meetings). The Slack app for Sales Cloud includes Digital Deal Rooms, Daily Briefs, and Slack Canvas.
- Sales Enablement: Outcome-based enablement and coaching – all in the flow of work. Sales reps work through onboarding programs. The tasks they complete in Salesforce automatically update the program because the outcomes (e.g. close more deals) are tracked with real Salesforce data.
- Revenue intelligence (i.e. CRM Analytics): Out-of-the-box dashboards that enable organizations to visualize sales data in more ways, and further ‘slice and dice’ as they wish.
- Revenue Cloud (CPQ + Billing): Configure, price, quote (CPQ) helps your sales reps create accurate quotes for customers, going beyond basic opportunities products, and quotes to sell complex sets of products and bundles. It also adds sophisticated quote approval. Billing automates and unifies invoicing, payment, and collections across your business.
- Territory Planning: An account sharing system that provides access to accounts based on their characteristics. This usually involves a geographic area or customer group over which either a sales team or an individual has responsibility. With Salesforce Maps, a location intelligence solution, you can embed and use maps within Salesforce to understand how your Salesforce data is mapped geographically – especially beneficial for field sales teams. Maps comes with location data visualization, live location tracking, and route optimization.
- Premier Success Plan: Specialized guidance and expert coaching, such as Salesforce maturity assessments, health checks, and recommendations.
- 24/7 Global Support: Contact Salesforce anytime, across more channels, with faster response times.
Salesforce Service Suite
“To help companies scale service faster and reduce support costs.”
- Self-Service: Several features to help deflect cases and provide self-service options to your customers. For example, with Lightning Knowledge you can build a knowledge base within Salesforce to provide easy answers and critical information. You can make a public knowledge base or one for registered customers only.
- Bots: Chatbots act as triage and can handle more rote issues such as FAQs, checking on order statuses, or asking basic company questions. If the bot can’t find the answer, it can route to an agent or create a case for the customer, providing a seamless service experience.
- Messaging, chat, voice, service automation.
- Service Cloud Einstein: AI-enabled features such as Einstein Case Classification, Einstein Case Wrap-Up, Einstein Case Routing, Einstein Article Recommendations, Einstein Reply Recommendations, and Einstein Conversation Mining.
- Service Cloud for Slack: Improve team productivity with cohesive collaboration across teams and systems – all in an intuitive and engaging UI for messaging and huddles (ad-hoc voice meetings). The Slack app for Service Cloud includes swarming, Expert Finder, and Slack Canvas.
- Service Analytics (i.e. CRM Analytics): Out-of-the-box dashboards that enable organizations to visualize sales data in more ways, and further ‘slice and dice’ as they wish.
- Premier Success Plan: Specialized guidance and expert coaching, such as Salesforce maturity assessments, health checks, and recommendations.
- 24/7 Global Support: Contact Salesforce anytime, across more channels, with faster response times.
Summary
Salesforce have announced their plan to offer Sales and Service Suites – bundles of features from its suite of products. The objective is to help companies create exceptional customer experiences, while simplifying tech stacks and reducing the total cost of ownership.
It will be interesting to see how these new suites are received by Salesforce customers, and whether there’s scope for organizations to invest even further into the Salesforce platform.