The Salesforce ecosystem evolves every single year, with new features, products, and strategies that define what Salesforce professionals need to understand about the platform. Therefore, it’s vital to get to grips with all the different Salesforce products, as well as how they relate to one another.
This article will equip you with all the information you need to navigate Salesforce’s vast array of products, alongside a video and infographic to help distill the complexities of the Salesforce ecosystem.
Salesforce Products
Even if you’ve been in 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 in 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: Einstein for Sales, Inbox, CPQ, Billing, Revenue Intelligence, and Einstein Conversation Insights.
Sales Performance Management (SPM)
Salesforce’s Sales Performance Management offering brings together four different products into a cohesive plan for paycheck setup. While you may already be familiar with Sales Programs – tailored for enablement – and Salesforce Maps, which helps you view data geographically and plan routes, the newer additions are Sales Planning, which can bring your sales strategy to life while facilitating all operational tasks (including territory planning), and of course, Salesforce Spiff for everything related to compensation management!
Revenue Cloud
Salesforce Revenue Cloud is the new Salesforce offering that encompasses everything organizations need for an enterprise-grade quote-to-cash process. Salesforce CPQ (the managed package resulting from the Steelbrick acquisition) was recently announced as entering its end-of-sale phase. While existing customers can still renew and receive support as usual, Salesforce now provides an alternative fully built on the core platform: Revenue Cloud Advanced and Revenue Cloud Billing.
Formerly known as Revenue Lifecycle Management (RLM), Revenue Cloud Advanced includes a wide variety of new features to streamline everything from product management, pricing strategy implementation, order fulfillment and even basic invoicing capabilities to get you started. Revenue Cloud Billing, on the other hand, complements Revenue Cloud Advanced with more advanced invoicing features, payment and collections management, and built-in general ledger functionality.
For both products, APIs have been prioritized from the very start of the development process, so everything you may need for automations and robust integrations is at your fingertips!
Service Cloud
Salesforce Service Cloud is a CRM that assists businesses’ customer support teams. It helps customers get in touch with companies on a variety of channels such as email, live chat, phone, WhatsApp, and more.
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, Salesforce Scheduler, Salesforce Surveys, and Service Intelligence.
Agentforce
Salesforce’s Agentforce is their flagship AI product, which promises to revolutionize the way companies implement the latest GenAI functionality into their businesses. You might have already seen or used Agentforce or Salesforce.com – and may have also come across it in the Help Docs to help you navigate!
Agentforce essentially encompasses many of Salesforce’s previous GenAI offerings from the past couple of years in a new form, including Agent Builder, Prompt Builder, and out-of-the-box agents that you can configure. However, Agentforce brings a huge upgrade: the ability to create completely autonomous agents for sales and service use cases, as well as any custom ideas you can dream up by creating topics and actions – and even by using GenAI itself to help create the agent!
Agents are powered by Salesforce’s Atlas reasoning engine, and all data remains yours thanks to the Einstein Trust layer – no personal identification information will reach the LLM, assured by the data masking capabilities.
Data Cloud
Data Cloud is another one of Salesforce’s flagship products. It was previously known by many different names, such as Salesforce CDP and Genie, and was released to capitalize on the growing amount of data within companies, with the aim to organize and make use of it.
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 Cloud is a core part of Salesforce’s Agentforce and AI focus, primarily because AI needs relevant, accurate data – and Data Cloud helps to organize all of this.
Salesforce Foundations
The too-good-to-be-true $0 SKU was initially announced last year, and following the launch of Agentforce, the offering is now complete. Salesforce Foundations is available for Salesforce customers on Enterprise Edition and above, and can be provisioned through the self-service Your Account app at no additional cost. This bundle of core Salesforce functionality is designed to help customers get started and try out various features within their own orgs.
- Agentforce: 1K conversations, Agent and Prompt Builders, Sales and Service Agents
- Sales: Sales Console, deal management, quoting, meetings
- Service: Service Console, Case management, Knowledge, Macros
- Marketing: 2K monthly email sends, drag-and-drop email builder, built-in analytics
- Commerce: 1 D2C Digital Storefront (for US only), managed checkout, merchandising tools, Pay Now secure payment link, Commerce Cloud analytics
- Data Cloud: Unified profiles, data services and storage credits, 10K annual segmentation credits
- Salesforce Platform: Salesforce Platform login license, 600 annual logins with 30K credits, Agentforce extended to occasional users
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. Their location, destination, and the amount of cable in their van are all managed with Field Service Lightning.
Features include: Appointment scheduling, dispatching technology, territory management, and a mobile app to help Field Service technicians.
Marketing Cloud
Marketing Cloud Engagement (ex-Salesforce Marketing Cloud) is a digital platform that automates marketing across email, mobile apps, SMS, websites, and more. Marketing Cloud Engagement (MCE) can seamlessly connect to other Salesforce products, such as Sales or Service Cloud, allowing CRM data to flow freely.
Let’s look into the different components that make MCE one of the most powerful marketing automation tools to date:
Journey Builder
If you’re working in the B2C Marketing space, Journey Builder is the tool you need to be looking at. It 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 multiple platforms, such as email, mobile (SMS, push), advertising, and your website.
Journey Builder is a core part of MCE, 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 and send the email content you wish to deliver to them. Email Studio has powerful features that help you craft the perfect email with customizable elements, scripting languages, or personalized content.
In Email Studio, you can manage your content and also create audience segments that you can later use for sending the campaigns.
Mobile Studio
As you might have guessed from the name, Mobile Studio is similar to Email Studio but focused on the content creation for mobile. Mobile Studio consists of GroupConnect, MobileConnect, and MobilePush. There, you can craft messages that may be delivered via SMS, MMS, push notifications, or messenger apps.
Marketing Cloud Advertising
To help you reach customers beyond email and mobile messages, Advertising Studio provides a bridge to digital advertising platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Google Ads, LinkedIn, X (Twitter), Pinterest, and Snapchat. Using Marketing Cloud Advertising, you can create ad campaigns within your customer journeys using Journey Builder.
Marketing Cloud Personalization
Marketing Cloud Personalization provides a whole new level of personalization for you and your clients. By registering your customers’ behavior on your website, the program can modify messaging on your web pages and tailor the experience based on the products and services the customer is interested in.
Marketing Cloud Intelligence
All of your marketing platforms constantly generate a huge amount of data. Marketing Cloud Intelligence provides holistic reporting, measurement, and optimization.
You can connect platforms such as Google, YouTube, Instagram, Amazon, Snapchat, TikTok, and more – with clicks, not code – using API connections. Once connected, Marketing Cloud Intelligence 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 is built on Salesforce, and it’s possible to create integrations with Marketing Cloud Engagement using content and journeys.
Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (Formerly Pardot)
One of the more commonly used Salesforce products, Marketing Cloud Account Engagement is its B2B marketing solution. The platform focuses on email marketing and also offers features for landing page creation, form generation, cross-channel journeys, lead scoring, and reporting.
Marketing Cloud Growth and Advanced
Whilst Marketing Cloud Engagement has traditionally remained an off-platform product (after ExactTarget was acquired back in 2013), Salesforce recently announced the MC Growth and Advanced editions, both built on the core Salesforce platform.
These marketing automation platforms are built on top of Data Cloud and offer drag-and-drop content creation and journey orchestration, empowered by AI technology. Depending on your marketing stack, you can opt for one of them. For smaller companies, Marketing Cloud Growth is the tool that can help with their marketing automation, such as email and mobile communication, along with AI capabilities to manage marketing pressure. The Advanced edition is more suitable for larger enterprises that require more intricate technology.
Slack
Slack was acquired by Salesforce for $27.7B in December 2020 and is the largest purchase they’ve ever made.
At its core, Slack is a messaging app for businesses – it allows you to message your colleagues directly or communicate via dedicated channels set up for specific purposes. For example, you might use a channel for a project or for your regional office.
Salesforce is making incremental changes to Slack to bring it closer to their other products. This includes Salesforce Channels, where you can see full record details in Slack, Slack lists to enhance collaboration, and the ability to bring agents into channels via Agentforce.
Experience Cloud
Experience Cloud is the product you need to create various platforms for your customers, partners (or even employees!) to interact with your business.
You can create portals, forums, websites, and help centers directly on the Salesforce platform, and it seamlessly integrates with all your CRM data. The tool is on a low-code platform, meaning you can create beautiful platforms using mostly drag-and-drop functionality.
Tableau
Tableau was another huge acquisition Salesforce made in 2019 to tap into the rapidly growing business intelligence space. Tableau remains an off-platform solution and is better suited for data analysis across the business. Users do not need Salesforce licenses, and there is an option to run Tableau on-premise.
However, Salesforce also has two in-house products: CRM Analytics, which is built within the Salesforce platform itself and is better suited for those who want to run advanced reports on Salesforce data.
More recently, Salesforce announced Tableau Next, powered by Hyperforce and Data Cloud, built for the Agentforce era.
Salesforce Platform
The Salesforce platform is the backbone that sits across Sales and Service Cloud, allowing you to create powerful customizations to standard Salesforce products.
You can build your own data tables with custom objects, trigger automation with Flow, and build custom user interfaces using the Lightning App Builder.
If you are looking for a fully custom experience, you can purchase Salesforce Platform licenses (which are significantly cheaper than, say, Sales Cloud) and build completely customized apps on the Salesforce platform.
Within the Salesforce platform, Salesforce offers a wide range of free and paid add-ons to suit many enterprise use cases.
Flow
Salesforce Flow is one of the most popular tools within the Salesforce platform, allowing you to automate record creation, field updates, email sending, and nearly any other automation use case you can imagine. With the ability to create either background processes or interactive wizards for your users, as well combine them with Apex for more impactful automations and even invoke agents if needed, there’s something for every Salesforce professional to use.
In recent releases, Salesforce Flows have seen a significant expansion of readily available functionality, with new capabilities such as the Transform element to make data manipulation much easier, an out-of-the-box progress indicator to show Screen Flow users their current stage in the process, the latest ability to create Flow Approval Orchestrations to manage all your approval process needs, and much more.
Although it does have a learning curve, Salesforce Flow is more accessible than coding and can be almost as powerful in terms of what it can accomplish, allowing more Salesforce professionals to cater to a wider variety of requests themselves.
Heroku
Heroku is a cloud platform-as-a-service (PaaS) tool that 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 lets you build apps that connect seamlessly with Salesforce data using out-of-the-box connectors.
Surveys
Salesforce Surveys and Feedback Management does exactly what it says – it allows you to create 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, dashboards, or even Tableau.
Shield
Salesforce Shield is designed for companies with extra security and compliance concerns. Shield consists of four products that overlay existing Salesforce products to provide enhanced protection.
These include:
- Platform Encryption: Further encrypt your Salesforce data with AES 256-bit encryption and manage your own encryption keys.
- Event Monitoring: Provides detailed reports and dashboards to monitor user behavior and see who is accessing sensitive data.
- Field Audit Trail: Takes field history tracking one step further by enabling more fields to track 10 years of history, along with dashboards to monitor.
- Einstein Data Detect: Uses AI to find sensitive data in your Salesforce org, then protects it.
Salesforce Backup and Recover
Right before Dreamforce last year, Salesforce announced the acquisition of Own Company (formerly known as OwnBackup), so it should come as no surprise that the new backup solution and recovery is a product you might already know by its previous name: Own Recover.
With daily, on-demand, and even selective backups for specific objects, your data is protected at all times and ready to be restored or searched as needed. Additionally, Smart Alerts allow you to receive real-time notifications whenever changes are made to your records – be them deletions, inserts, or updates – so you’re always in the loop about data operations performed in your org.
Commerce Cloud
Commerce Cloud lets retailers quickly start selling online, powered by Salesforce CMS with hundreds of ready-to-use, mobile-ready features. It integrates seamlessly with Service Cloud and other Salesforce products and includes Einstein AI capabilities. Prominent customers include 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 and follows its core multi-tenant architecture.
Order Management and Fulfillment
To sit alongside both B2B and 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.
Since Order Management is built on Salesforce CRM, it can be used in tandem with Service Cloud to support customer requests and returns, as well as leverage the Salesforce platform to power any custom requirements you may have.
MuleSoft
MuleSoft was a key acquisition for Salesforce in 2018 – their platform gives you the ability 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 it has, meaning you can integrate with mainframes, ERP systems, and SaaS applications using tried-and-tested templated solutions.
Salesforce also has 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 Public Sector Cloud.
These solutions take Salesforce’s core CRM offering and create specialized products better 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 its Industries offering with the acquisition of Vlocity in 2020, which focused on many more industry-specific clouds like communications, media, and insurance. One of Salesforce’s latest vertical ventures has been to build a Life Sciences CRM, following the dramatic end of their relationship with Veeva, one of their biggest partners.
Einstein
Although Agentforce has firmly taken the crown away from Einstein as Salesforce’s flagship AI product, which was released in 2016, there are still many (non-GenAI) AI features that exist in Salesforce’s suite of products separate from agents.
This includes tools such as Einstein Lead and Opportunity scoring, which uses predictive AI to try to understand the success of converting a deal, as well as Conversation Mining and Call Insights – whether in your sales or customer support teams – to try to learn more about the conversations happening across an organization.
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.
Starter and Pro Suite
Salesforce Starter Suite is an accessible entry point, providing core sales, service, and email marketing features for businesses new to Salesforce. Pro Suite expands these capabilities with advanced reporting, deeper integrations, and automation via Salesforce Flow – ideal for businesses ready to scale.
Both suites offer a clear upgrade path to Salesforce’s advanced products.
Quip
Quip was acquired in 2016, bringing Bret Taylor (previous Salesforce co-CEO) to the company through the acquisition. Quip is like Slack and Google Docs rolled into one, providing powerful word processing and spreadsheet tools designed for collaboration.
The platform includes features such as Quip Chat, live apps such as Relationship Map, detailed document history, and integration with Salesforce to bring live data into documents. Quip Documents and Templates can also be embedded directly on Salesforce records for a seamless experience, and Salesforce Flow can be used to automate tasks like folder creation and document organization.
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.
Any thoughts? Leave them in the comments below.
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