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Salesforce CRM

by Faulkner Staff

Copyright 2021, Faulkner Information Services. All
Rights Reserved.

Docid: 00018991

Publication Date: 2111

Report Type: PRODUCT

Preview

Although it faces tough competition from the likes of Oracle, SAP, and
Microsoft, Salesforce has distinguished itself in the customer relationship
management (CRM) marketplace by offering its application software as an
on-demand or monthly subscription rather than selling it outright. The vendor
markets its hosted CRM suite in several editions, enabling customers to choose
the version that best satisfies their requirements. Options for
Sales Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Commerce Cloud, and Service Cloud offer a range of
platforms for industries as diverse as financial services, healthcare and life sciences,
communications, consumer goods, public sector, and manufacturing.

Report Contents:

• Description
• Related Faulkner Reports
• Vendor
• Platforms
• Environment
• Support
• Pricing
• Competitors
• Web Links

Description

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Salesforce offers a complete, fully-customizable customer
relationship management (CRM) solution offered on a hosted or
software-as-a-service (SaaS) basis.

Customer relationship management (CRM) is an umbrella term applied to
business processes designed to attract and retain customers – processes
such as sales lead management (the management of prospective customers),
account management, or the management of current customers.

Among the first CRM solutions to be offered solely over the Web,
Salesforce’s CRM package has grown by leaps and bounds over the years.
The offering is now considered the top CRM suite available,
outselling software-installed products from vendors such as SAP and Oracle.

One of the main reasons for the success of the Salesforce CRM package is
that the product can be implemented quickly and simply by users. The
intuitive CRM offering is easily customizable and quickly integrated into
the computing architecture a company currently has installed. The suite
can also work with any of the market-leading Web browsers. Since there is
nothing to be installed, customers can deploy the CRM suite with few risks
and upfront costs, making it extremely attractive to organizations.

The Salesforce CRM subscription service enables organizations to gain a
CRM solution without the high up-front costs typically associated with the
installation of a large-scale offering. This has allowed Salesforce to tap
into smaller-scale organizations who could reduce their own costs with the
addition of CRM but were prevented from doing so because of the high cost of
the software. With the Salesforce package, organizations are able to add
tools to assist in the tracking, management, analysis, and sharing of
sales; customer support and service; and marketing. By not forcing the installation
of a massive software product – as well as the requisite customization
– clients can quickly have the product up an running, gaining the
advantages of CRM without needing to make changes in other parts of their operations.

There are four primary platforms within the Salesforce CRM:

• Sales Cloud – A central repository allowing reps to manage all sales-related activity.
• Marketing Cloud – Digital marketing solutions to improve strategy and engagement.
• Commerce Cloud – Enhancing customer service operations
  (call center, customer self-service, omni-channel shopping and fulfillment, transparency into orders, etc.).
• Service Cloud – Productivity tools to deliver personalized customer service.

Each platform includes a range of add-ons that allow clients to customize the
offering for their specific needs and utilize the data analysis tools necessary for their
business.

Platforms

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Sales Cloud

The company’s Sales Cloud is a sales force automation product that
features a host of application services. The software helps clients access
and organize data about current and future customers, as well as develop a
system for recording, tracking, and sharing information regarding sales
opportunities, leads, forecasts, and processes. Clients
can also manage unstructured data including sales collateral,
presentations, price lists, and video assets.

Salesforce Sales Cloud is offered in the following editions to suit the
needs of specific customers.

• Essentials. Limited to ten subscribers,
  provides a basic sales automation tool for smaller organizations. The
  tool enables workers to share customer data and manage relations with
  their clients, building on the capabilities of a contact manager by adding
  access to opportunities, accounts, contacts, tasks, and basic
  reports. 
• Professional. Professional Edition adds forecasts, lead management, contract
  management, solutions, and online case capture. Also standard with the
  Professional Edition is customization, security and sharing,
  integration, and administrative tools.
• Enterprise. Enterprise Edition expands on
  the Professional Edition with additional features such as territory
  management, sharing and permissions capabilities, workflow and business
  process controls, and enterprise customization and automation tools.
• Unlimited. Unlimited Edition provides the
  features of the Enterprise Edition, plus features such as multiple
  sandboxes, unlimited customizations, additional data storage, and
  unlimited custom apps.

Table 1 below outlines the features and pricing of the Sales Cloud
application.

Marketing Cloud

The Marketing Cloud is Salesforce’s platform to support many facets
of marketing including multi-channel campaign execution, dynamic customer interactions, pre-
and post-campaign analytics such as audience building and segmentation, social media engagement
and advertising, and a data management platform.

The platform encompasses a
wide variety of offerings in the areas of data management, integration,
third-party applications, and the Einstein artificial intelligence application
to predict who will interact with various messaging. Pricing is
contingent on the package options and level of service provided.

Products offered within Marketing Cloud include:

• Email Studio – For personalized e-mail campaigns.
• Journey Builder – Builds one-to-one customer relations across all channels and departments.
• Interaction Studio – Delivers real-time, one-to-one customer experiences across multiple touchpoints.
• Salesforce CDP – Unify, segment, activate, and analyze all data with a single customer data platform.
• Datorama – One platform for all marketing data, investments, key performance indicators, and decisions.
• Pardot – B2B marketing automation tool to unite marketing and sales information.
• Advertising Studio – Target one-to-one advertising using CRM data to acquire and re-engage customers.
• Mobile Studio – Personalized mobile interactions including SMS, push notifications, and chat messaging.
• Social Studio – Allows clients to listen, publish, and engage with their customers across social media channels.
• Content Management – Users can author content once and deliver it natively to marketing sites, portals, or mobile apps using headless APIs to share the content across any touchpoint.
• Google Marketing Platform – Delivers data-driven marketing by combining Google Marketing Platform and Salesforce.
• Loyalty Management – Creates personalized loyalty programs to win and maintain customers.
• Datorama Reports – Customizable reports to analyze, visualize, and explore e-mail, mobile, and experiential data.

Commerce Cloud

Commerce Cloud resulted from Salesforce’s 2016 acquisition of Demandware, an cloud-based e-commerce provider for big and small businesses. Combining
Demandware’s technology and Salesforce’s CRM systems was transformational in allowing e-commerce companies to connect with their customers, providing various out-of-the-box features,
tools, and commerce portals for growing an online business. Commerce Cloud allows businesses to streamline the purchasing process by personalizing the buying
experience and creating mobile-friendly shopping.

Salesforce’s Commerce Cloud offers two main options: B2C Commerce and B2B
Commerce.

B2C Commerce allows retailers to create and coordinate online experiences and transactions across digital channels and devices. While generally geared to the Web or mobile,
features include the option to interact with brands through e-mail and social media. B2C Commerce includes the following key features:

• B2C Commerce Storefront. Salesforce’s e-commerce site, which it says is "much more than just a Web site with an online cart," offering the opportunity
  to differentiate brands to manage and customize shoppers’ online experience. Capabilities include the Storefront Reference Architecture (SFRA)
  that helps build and launch sites quickly and easily using mobile-first best
  practices. Fully customizable, sellers can create storefronts that support multiple languages and currencies, including options
  for Apple Pay and other wallet offerings. Prebuilt integrations extend a site’s functionality, and open APIs allow the site to connect to any third-party data or applications such as
  user reviews.
• Merchandising and Marketing. Employing AI, retailers are provided a range of features that empower product, pricing, and catalog management.
  Marketers
  and merchandisers can sync products and pricing across categories, catalogs, currencies, and sites.
  Also, merchandising and promotion management options can quickly launch campaigns and promotions,
  while
  site search and guided navigation allow online shoppers to easily locate products.
  The feature also uses AI-powered personalization and machine learning to deliver personalized offers and
  product recommendations.
• Multi Site Management and Localization. Provides global retail brands with unique, localized sites for individual markets. Geo-specific sites can encompass
  different customs, cultures, currencies, and languages, targeting content, offers, and products by language, country, region, state, or city. Multi Site Management also provides
  regional marketing teams with a global reference storefront that lets them build and launch sites quickly with multi-lingual, multi-currency logic. User interfaces are available
  in English, Chinese, Japanese, French, Italian, Korean, and Portuguese.
• B2C Commerce APIs. Employs digital capabilities across social, mobile, and in-store channels, including APIs to connect with third-party applications; social
  media extensions to extend commerce into social channels and online communities such as Instagram and Facebook;
  and in-store endless aisle and "clienteling" to help in-store
  shoppers find the item they need, even if it’s not available at that specific store location.

While Salesforce B2C Commerce focuses on online retail sites, Salesforce B2B Commerce enables organizations to create e-commerce storefronts that are specifically designed for
businesses making large volume purchases from other businesses online. This allows easy access
for suppliers buying products necessary to run their businesses and, since B2B
transactions are often made over time by long-term customers, capturing commerce data is an important requirement. B2B Commerce provides:

• Authenticated sites including logins for each visitor.
• Shopping carts that can accommodate hundreds or thousands of items per order.
• Rapid reorders to make large, frequent orders fast and easy in just a few clicks.
• Custom storefront themes for a unique look and feel for each account.
• Specific product catalogs by account for a selected subset of products.
• Dynamic and variant products.
• Negotiated/contract pricing by account or by customer segment.
• Complex shipping functionality allowing for multiple delivery dates and locations.
• Multiple payment types including credit cards, purchase orders, and automated clearing house (ACH) transactions.
• Order history for each authenticated visitor.
• Search.
• Storefront and order templates.

Service Cloud

The Service Cloud platform encompasses service and support tools designed to
help clients maintain their customer relations. With the offering, clients
can manage customer interactions through a variety of channels, including
call centers supporting phone, e-mail, and chat interactions; Web portals
for self-service and customer collaboration; and community interactions
such as communication across social networks.

Table 2 below outlines the features and pricing of the Service Cloud
application.

Environment

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With no hardware or software to install, Salesforce CRM may be
invoked in environments running virtually any operating system platform.

Support

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Salesforce offers training, consulting, and support services. The
company’s support services are available in three levels.

Standard Support, which is included as part of all
subscriptions, provides:

• 12/5 online case submission with two-day response.
• Trailblazer Community troubleshooting tips and tricks from more than 3.5
  million Salesforce users.
• Trailhead self-learning tools for admins, developers, and users.
• How-to and issue-resolving videos from Salesforce experts.
• Webinars, office hours, and in-person and virtual events featuring staff
  and experts.
• Guided Journeys offering basic operations instruction, training, and best
  practices using product-specific tools.

Premier Support adds to the Standard Support option with
the addition of: 

• 24/7/365 technical support with one-hour response time for business-stopping
  issues.
• Online, chat, and phone case submission.
• Custom code troubleshooting for developers.
• 25 percent discount on Trailhead Academy public classes and bulk
  certifications.
• Expert coaching for onboarding, implementation, adoption, and
  optimization.
• Salesforce maturity assessment, health checks, and recommendations.

Signature Support builds on the Premier Support
option with the addition of:

• 24/7 proactive monitoring.
• Early alerts and remediation.
• Annual technical health reviews for code, security, and performance.
• Technical account management.
• Key event management.

Pricing

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With a large number of offerings and add-ons, pricing is contingent upon the
user’s requirements and goals. For many users, however, the price range for Sales Cloud
and Service Cloud breaks down as follows:

• Essentials out-of-the-box CRM for up to ten users costs $25 USD per user per month.
• Professional CRM for any size team is $75 USD per user per month.
• Enterprise customizable sales CRM for business is $150 USD per user per month.
• Unlimited CRM power and support costs $300 USD per user per month.

Competitors

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With Salesforce’s success in delivering CRM over the cloud, a number
of the traditional CRM software organizations have also taken on this
model, increasing the firm’s competition in the market. Vendors such as
Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, and NetSuite are delivering CRM tools via the
Internet. In terms of vendors who offer installed CRM packages,
Salesforce competes with offerings from SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft.

Web Links

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• Microsoft: http://www.microsoft.com/
• NetSuite: http://www.netsuite.com/
• Oracle: http://www.oracle.com/
• SAP: http://www.sap.com/

 

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