When I started my Salesforce career back in 2012, there were only two products available: Sales Cloud and Service Cloud. Life was simple back then. Fast forward to today, and the number of Salesforce products has increased tenfold – each is targeted at improving your business and helping you connect with your customers.
This post has been designed to serve as your guide to all Salesforce products – with a video and an infographic too! We will break down each product’s purpose and benefits, as well as any add-on features available. Enjoy!
Salesforce Products
Even if you’ve been the ecosystem for a little while, Salesforce’s breadth of products is wide, and it can be difficult to get your head around them all – especially all in one place. This video explains every Salesforce product in under 15 minutes, so you can not only get up to speed on all that Salesforce has to offer, but you can do it record time too!
Jump to the Salesforce Product Infographic for a take away resource, perfect for admins and consultants to see the vast landscape of Salesforce products and how they interact with one another…
Sales Cloud
Sales Cloud is Salesforce’s flagship product – it was released when the company was founded back in 1999, and has the largest share of any CRM available today.
Sales Cloud’s primary focus is to help companies accelerate their sales cycle by providing tools to manage leads, opportunities, businesses, and individuals they are working with. Primarily aimed at B2B businesses, Sales Cloud has features such as quoting, product management, and forecasting for sales managers.
Add-On Products: Sales Cloud Einstein, Inbox, Salesforce Maps, Lightning Dialer, Lightning Scheduler, Salesforce Engage, Einstein Sales Analytics, Revenue Analytics.
CPQ & Billing
Salesforce CPQ (now called Revenue Cloud) was obtained through the Steelbrick acquisition back in 2015, and stands for “Configure, Price, Quote.” It enables customers to go beyond the rudimentary functionality of Opportunities Products & Quotes and allows them to sell complex sets of Salesforce products.
CPQ has features such as product and price rules that help sales users build accurate quotes with complex sets of products and a quote generation engine.
On the other hand, Billing is an add-on to Salesforce CPQ. When the quote has been finalized, Billing takes over the process and handles invoicing, payments, and revenue recognition.
Service Cloud
Salesforce Service Cloud is a CRM that assists a business’s customer support team. It helps customers get in touch with a company via email support, live chat or phone, and then helps the customer agent find and process a resolution to the customer’s issue.
Think of the last time you got in touch with a business using live chat or creating a support ticket – it’s very likely that the company was using a system such as Service Cloud.
Add-On Products: Digital Engagement, Service Cloud Einstein, Service Cloud Voice, Customer Lifecycle Analytics, Salesforce Surveys Response Pack.
Field Service
As an extension of Service Cloud, Salesforce Field Service provides a comprehensive view of workforce management.
Simply put, when a customer orders a new cable service, the cable installer will show up. Where they are now, where they’re going, and how many meters of cable are in their van, is all managed with Field Service Lightning.
Features include: Appointment scheduling, dispatching technology, territory management, as well as mobile app to help field service technicians.
Data Cloud (Salesforce CDP)
Salesforce Data Cloud, previously known as Salesforce CDP / Genie, was launched at Dreamforce 2022, with Salesforce calling it one of their greatest innovations in the history of the company.
Data Cloud allows you to ingest and store real-time data streams on a massive scale, and then automate tasks using this data, ensuring highly personalized experience.
Data can be ingested from various Salesforce data sources including Mulesoft, Marketing Cloud, and more, as well as customers own proprietary apps and data sources. It can then act on this real-time data, by automating actions through Salesforce CRM, Marketing Cloud, Commerce, and much more, including automating actions through Salesforce Flow!
Marketing Cloud
Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a digital platform that automates marketing across email, mobile apps, SMS, websites, and more. Marketing Cloud can seamlessly connect to other Salesforce products, such as Sales or Service Cloud, allowing CRM data to flow freely.
Note that in April 2022, Salesforce updated six Marketing Cloud product names (the functionality remained the same). Reviewing these changes can help avoid confusion before you continue reading.
As the Salesforce Marketing Cloud is split into quite a few products, let’s take a look at each one individually:
Journey Builder
If you’re working in the B2C Marketing space, Journey Builder is what you need to be looking at. This tool allows you to build powerful marketing journeys and provide customers with a personalized experience.
The product sends customers on a journey – where you can interact with them via a multitude of platforms such as email, mobile, advertising, and your website.
Journey Builder is a core part of Marketing Cloud, which is primarily B2C.
Email Studio
If Journey Builder sets out the path you want to put your customers on, Email Studio gives you the capabilities to create the email content you wish to send them.
Email Studio has powerful features that help you craft the perfect email with customizable elements, scripting languages, or tailored real-time content.
Mobile Studio
As you might have guessed by the name, Mobile Studio is similar to Email Studio, but focused on the content creation for mobile. Using the Salesforce product, you can craft messages that may be delivered via SMS, MMS, and Push messages.
Marketing Cloud Advertising (formerly Advertising Studio)
To help you reach customers beyond email and mobile messages, Advertising Studio provides a bridge to digital advertising platforms such as Google, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, and YouTube.
The Salesforce product lets you use Journey Builder to include these platforms into your marketing campaigns.
Marketing Cloud Personalization (formerly Interaction Studio)
Marketing Cloud Personalization provides a whole new level of personalization for you and your clients. By registering your customers’ behavior within your website, the program can modify messaging on your web pages and tailor the experience with the kind of products and services the customer is interested in.
Marketing Cloud Intelligence (formerly Datorama)
All of your marketing platforms are constantly generating a huge amount of data. Marketing Cloud Intelligence unifies all of your marketing tools so you have one source of truth. This provides holistic reporting, measurement, and optimization.
You can connect platforms such as Google, YouTube, Instagram, etc. with clicks, not code, using out-of-the-box connections. Once connected, Datorama can show you trends, progress against goals, and the ROI of your marketing efforts.
Loyalty Management
In January 2021, Salesforce announced the launch of Loyalty Management with the intent to help businesses engage and reward their customers. Using clicks not code, the platform allows businesses to build loyalty programs at scale. You can create a variety of programs – including tiered memberships or points-per-purchase.
Loyalty Management can be configured to work with Experience Cloud for customer sign up and Marketing Cloud for sending content.
Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (formerly Pardot)
One of the more commonly used Salesforce products, Marketing Cloud Account Engagement is Salesforce’s B2B marketing solution. The platform focuses on email marketing, with additional features for landing page creation, form generation, as well as lead scoring and reporting.
Add-On Products: Sales Emails and Alerts (formerly Salesforce Engage), B2B Marketing Analytics Plus, Engagement History Dashboards.
Slack
Slack was acquired by Salesforce for $27.7B in December 2020 and is the largest purchase they’ve ever made.
Slack is a messaging app for businesses; it allows you to message your colleagues directly or communicate with them via dedicated channels set up for a specific purpose. For example, you could use a channel for a project, or for your regional office.
Salesforce purchased Slack to revolutionize how businesses communicate in this new remote world we find ourselves in. Check out some of the initial integrations that Salesforce have released to bring the two platforms close together.
Experience Cloud
Experience Cloud is the product you need to help you create various platforms for your customers, partners (or even employees!), to interact with your business.
You can create portals, forums, websites, and help centers, built directly on the Salesforce platform, and it seamlessly integrates with all your CRM data. The tool is on a low-code platform, which means you can create beautiful platforms using mostly drag and drop functionality.
Analytics Cloud
With the amount of information all businesses collect, data must be at the heart of any business’s strategy. Salesforce offers a couple of solutions that go beyond standard lightning reports and dashboards to provide deeper insights into your data.
CRM Analytics (formerly Tableau CRM)
CRM Analytics is native to the Salesforce platform. It allows you to use Salesforce data, as well as any data from external sources, to embed analytics within Salesforce. Users have to have Salesforce licenses in order to access this data.
Tableau
Tableau was acquired by Salesforce back in 2019 to tap into the larger business intelligence space. Tableau still remains an off-platform solution and is more suited for data analysis across the business. Users do not need Salesforce licenses, and there is an option to have Tableau run on-premise.
Salesforce Platform (formerly Force.com)
The Salesforce platform is the backbone that sits across the Sales and Service Cloud, allowing you to create powerful customizations to standard Salesforce products.
You can build your own tables of data with custom objects, trigger automation with Flow, and build custom user interfaces using the Lightning App Builder.
If you are looking for a totally custom experience, you may purchase Salesforce Platform licenses (which are a lot cheaper than say Sales Cloud) and build completely customized Apps on the Salesforce platform.
Hyperforce
Classically, Salesforce has hosted all instances of its products using their own servers, in a multi-tenanted environment. With the release of Hyperforce, Salesforce allows you to store your data in public clouds such as AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure.
Hyperforce is designed for enterprise companies who might have security, compliance, or scaling issues and are more flexible with public clouds.
Heroku
Heroku is a cloud platform-as-a-service (PaaS) tool. It allows you to deploy, manage, and scale modern Apps. Whilst you can create Apps for your users within Salesforce using the Platform, Heroku is used to create customer-facing Apps.
Heroku’s container-based cloud platform allows you to build Apps that connect seamlessly with Salesforce data using out-of-the-box connectors.
Surveys
Salesforce Surveys & Feedback management does what it says on the tin – it allows creation of surveys that can be directly sent from Salesforce (depending on the trigger). The data is then captured back into Salesforce to be analyzed using reports and dashboards, or even Tableau.
Shield
Salesforce Shield is a product designed for companies that have extra security and compliance concerns. Shield is made up of four products that overlay on top of existing Salesforce products to protect them even further. These include:
- Platform Encryption: Further encrypt your Salesforce data with AES 256-bit encryption, and manage your own encryption keys.
- Event Monitoring: Detailed reports and dashboards to monitor user behavior and see who is accessing sensitive data.
- Field Audit Trail: Take field history tracking one step further by enabling more fields to track ten years of history, and dashboards to monitor.
- Einstein Data Detect: Use AI to find sensitive data in your Salesforce Org, then protect it.
Commerce Cloud
Commerce Cloud lets retailers start selling online as quickly as possible. Powered by Salesforce CMS, Commerce Cloud has hundreds of-out-of-the box features that allow B2C and B2B retailers to create amazing online experiences for their shoppers.
Commerce Cloud has all the features you’d expect from Salesforce. It’s mobile-ready, integrates seamlessly with Service Cloud and other Salesforce products, and has Einstein AI-enabled features. If you’re interested in seeing some real-life examples of Commerce Cloud, check out two of Salesforce’s most prominent customers: Puma and Adidas.
Commerce Cloud comes in two different flavors, depending on your customer focus:
- B2C Commerce: Focused on “Business to Consumer”. It’s a separate technology stack, using JavaScript and web technologies, which has gone through multiple architecture iterations including SiteGenesis, the Storefront Reference Architecture (SFRA), Headless Commerce, and progressive web app development (PWA).
- B2B Commerce: Focused on “Business to Business”, B2B Commerce is native to the Salesforce platform (follows the core multi-tenant architecture of the Salesforce platform).
Order Management
To sit alongside both B2B & B2C Commerce Cloud, Salesforce has developed Order Management. This application is built on the Salesforce core platform, and allows you to fulfill orders using automated workflows.
As Order Management is built on Salesforce CRM, it allows you to use it in tandem with Service Cloud, in order to support customer requests and returns, as well as use the Salesforce Platform to power any custom requirements you may have.
Integration (MuleSoft)
MuleSoft was a key acquisition for Salesforce in 2018 – their platform gives you the chance to easily connect to any system using a myriad of out-of-the-box connectors.
MuleSoft gives way to the Anypoint platform, which allows you to manage your API connections, run integrations, and monitor and report – all from one cloud based system. One of the biggest selling points of MuleSoft is the hundreds of existing connectors they have, meaning you can integrate to Mainframes, ERP systems, and SaaS applications using tried and tested templated solutions.
Salesforce also recently announced Salesforce MuleSoft Composer: a lightweight Admin-friendly version of MuleSoft that sits within Salesforce.
Industry Cloud
Salesforce has been building industry-specific solutions for a few years now, including Financial Services Cloud, Health Cloud, and their Public Sector Cloud.
These solutions take Salesforce’s core CRM offering and create a specialized product more suited to specific industries. For Health Cloud, think less about Accounts and Contacts and more about Families and Patients. For Financial Service Cloud, think less about Opportunities and Products, and more about Financial Holdings and Assets.
Salesforce bolstered up its Industries offering with the acquisition of Vlocity in 2020, which focused on many more Industry-specific clouds like communications, media, and insurance.
Einstein
Einstein is Salesforce’s AI layer. However, it isn’t really a standalone product, Einstein is baked into almost every Salesforce Cloud. An increasing number of features are becoming free, such as Opportunity Scoring in Salesforce. But for the most part, Einstein features are paid add-ons for core Salesforce products such as Sales, Service, Commerce, and Marketing Cloud.
In March 2023, Salesforce announced Einstein GPT, their Generative AI applications which will extend the Einstein product. This innovative product is built on the widely popular ChatGPT platform by OpenAI, and is expected to be available later this year.
Sales Enablement (myTrailhead)
If you’re involved in the world of Salesforce, you will have no doubt heard of Trailhead, Salesforce’s free learning platform. Here, you can upskill with hands-on technical Salesforce challenges, as well as softer business skills.
Salesforce has taken the concept of Trailhead, and created Sales Enablement (previously myTrailhead), a product that enables you to deploy a version of Trailhead inside your own organization. This means you can build learning modules from scratch, providing your employees with a place to train, learn, and upskill in new areas.
You can even tie milestones to achievements in Salesforce, such as closing a deal of a certain size, or creating a number of Leads.
Quip
Quip was bought out in 2016, which brought in Bret Taylor (previous Salesforce co-CEO) to the company through the acquisition. Quip is like Slack and Google Docs rolled into one. It provides powerful word processing and spreadsheet tools with collaboration in mind.
The platform includes features such as Quip Chat, Quip Slides, and Integration with Salesforce to bring through live data to the doc.
Work.com
Work.com was created off the back of the Coronavirus Pandemic to help companies and communities open back up safely.
Work.com centers itself around a command center so its users can make data-driven decisions – i.e. whether it’s safe to perform certain tasks, such as reopening offices. Work.com also integrates seamlessly with Tableau to visualize far-reaching data sets.
In addition to the command center, Work.com has features such as employee health and wellness monitoring, shift management for capacity planning, and contact tracing.
Net Zero Cloud
One of Salesforce’s most recent products, Net Zero Cloud is a carbon-accounting tool that allows you to take accountability for your company’s carbon footprint.
It helps you upload data from business travel, fuel, electricity, and gas bills, as well as supply chain contributions. With out-of-the-box dashboards, you can easily identify the major areas of contrition, trends, and where you might need to take action.
Web3
Web3, or NFT Cloud as it was previously known, is Salesforce’s official move into Web 3.0 technology. Web3 was announced at Salesforce’s own event, Connections ’22, which provided us with a sneak preview of the new platform.
With NFT Cloud, you can create, sell, and manage your NFTs through the Salesforce platform, creating digital assets to help better engage your customer base.
Salesforce Product Infographic
The infographic below shows the vast landscape of Salesforce products and how they interact with one another, including the core platform products and their various connectors.
Summary
The Salesforce products are designed to transform your business operations and enhance customer relationships. Hopefully now you understand each product’s purpose and benefits, as well as how they interact with one another.
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