1. Learning Objectives
And now we’re into the sales cloud. So the Sales Cloud is one of the two main platform features within Salesforce. We have the sales cloud and the service cloud. Now the Sales Cloud basically manages all those sales processes that are going on, from capturing leads, bringing them into Salesforce.org, scoring them, and assigning them to specific salespeople. Then, once those leads are qualified, they’re converted into accounts, contacts, and opportunities. Then the whole sales process kind of kicks off, and you go through different stages of the opportunity until you’ve potentially won or lost that opportunity.
And then there’s the campaign management aspect, as well as tracking ROI for an email campaign, a trade show, or something similar, and how that fits into that kind of sales cloud. So there’s a lot to learn from this. But the key learning objectives from this are understanding the capabilities and implications of this sales process and how that works within opportunities.
Then, understanding and identifying the appropriate salesforce productivity features that aid and assist in that sales process. describing the capabilities of products and price books and how they relate to opportunities Then we look at how to automate lead management, scoring, and assignment of those leads. Then we’re looking at describing the capabilities of campaign management, which revolve around this ROI, as I mentioned, of how effective your campaign has been based on the opportunities you’ve won or lost. And then finally, we have activity management. So we’re managing the events and tasks that are related to these objects and also other objects. So, for example, in service clouds. So there’s a lot to get through, and let’s kick off in the next video.
2. Sales Overview
Okay, so before we kind of get going into the sales cloud in depth, I just wanted to give an overview of the whole sales process within Salesforce because it gives a bit of context on where all these elements kind of fit in with the process. So it all kicks off right at the very start by getting leads into Salesforce. Now, leads are potential customers that you’re going to make a sales pitch to and maybe convert eventually into an order and then a sale mail.
So these can come from all over the place. So, for example, emails could arrive. We could also get website inquiries, people filling out forms at events, social media, or a variety of other things. There’s also a product in Salesforce called Pardot, which is an email marketing landing page kind of tool, and again, leads could come from there. Also, we’ve got the marketing salesforce and the marketing cloud, so there’s a whole host of different places that leads could come from. And, in essence, all of these leads are entered into Salesforce as lead records. And when the lead record gets created in salesforce, then they rescore the assignment of those leads to different people within the sales team, so they can see which leads they should work on now or a bit later on. After they’ve qualified the lead and determined that it’s a legitimate sales inquiry, they’ll go ahead and convert the lead. And this conversion process basically allows an account, contact, and opportunity to be created within Salesforce.
But the key thing about this is that when the conversion process starts, there may be an account or contact already existing within Salesforce. So you can link it to the existing accounts or contacts, but then you’ve got the option to create an opportunity as well. Now, once the opportunity is created, this is where the sales process really starts to kick off. And we’re constantly elaborating on the opportunity, tracking it through our stages of our sales process to see where the salesperson is in that journey to the sale, as well as all the other opportunities they have in their sales pipeline. So then, also across this whole process, there is this thing called campaigns. And campaigns help all the way through this process. And campaigns are really cool because they allow you to track which leads came in from which campaigns and then track all of the opportunities as they progress through the process. And at the end of the day, the opportunities are either closed, as in “we’ve won that business,” or closed, as in “we’ve lost that business.” And so, because that opportunity or that lead is kind of tagged with the campaign, you can track its ROI on it.
So you can see if that particular campaign you ran has resulted in revenue for the company, which is really cool. And then you can see that you could really kind of drill into, okay, these are the campaigns that have run really well; we’re going to do these again, but these ones haven’t. So we’re going to abandon those and leave them, or maybe market them in a slightly different way because the first approach didn’t work. So that’s the campaign side of Salesforce. But that’s the general model. And salesforce has a number of tools, particularly for lead capture right at the start of the process of getting leads into salesforce. And one of those is web-to-lead, which allows you to create a form on your website to capture information and bring those records into your salesforce as a lead. So that’s about it.
At the high level of the sales process, you have leads coming into the salesforce and being captured. Then there are the assignment rules: assigning them to the appropriate people and scoring those leads to determine which are the best leads to work on and which are not so great. And then, once the leads have been qualified, you’re going to convert those leads into an account contact and an opportunity or link them to existing accounts and contacts. And then you’ll begin working on this opportunity, updating it and moving it through these kinds of opportunity stages, which is similar to the sales process. Then there are these underlying campaigns, which track how successful our marketing campaigns have been based on the opportunities we’ve taken or missed, as well as the revenue generated by the specific campaign. So let’s dive into the details now.
3. Web to Lead
Onto the web to lead. Now, the web to see feature within Salesforce is quite cool, as it allows us to create lead records from our website based on a potential customer filling out a form. So that form can have the different fields that we want that potential customer to fill out. And then, when they hit submit on that form within our website, a lead is created within our sales force. But before we do that, let’s take a look at the Lead tab and see which fields we’ve got to work on.
So here I am in the “Leads” tab. Now I’m going to dive into this lead here, and these are essentially the standard fields on my lead object. We’ve got this rating, so I can basically check to see if this lead is cold, warm, or hot. Because these leads could potentially be generated via a web form or by me manually creating the lead. I could be a first-line receptionist, and a lead has come in over the phone, but there are no salespeople available, so I’ll just make a lead record. But I’m considering a phone call as potentially a hot lead, so the receptionist can, if they want to, set the hot rating immediately when they’re creating lead records. Then we got the number of employees, industry, and revenue, and all these fields can be used in our lead scoring to again determine if this is a hot lead or not.
Then we were promoted to the position of leader. So are we working on this? Is it open but not being contacted? Have we closed it as converted, or is it closed? Not converted. Then we got some more standard fields that you’d see on a contact record. As a result, phone numbers, email addresses, company names, and addresses are also provided. So far, everything looks pretty standard. So we can actually allow our potential customers to fill out all of these fields on our website. So let’s dive into the Web to Lead section. So if I search for “web” here, we’ve got “this web to lead” under the “Leads” section here. So if I click in there, the first thing I want to do is just click the edit button and take a look at these settings. So the first thing is to make sure it’s enabled, which is always very important, and then this one is quite important. So this is basically the default lead creator. So when a user, sorry, a potential customer, is filling out our form on our website, they don’t actually exist as a user within salesforce.org.
But as you know, every record in Salesforce has to be assigned to a user. And this is essentially telling the salesforce. When a customer or potential customer fills out the form and a lead is created, who should be the owner of that record? So at the moment, it’s defaulted to me because I’m the one that set up salesforce.org. So you can change it to whoever you want. So it doesn’t have to be me, but I am always very handy. And then at the bottom here, we’ve got this autoresponse sequence, which we’ll go into a bit later on. So I don’t want to delve too much into that. So that’s all good; it’s all on, and it’s the right user. So I’m going to click save. And now there are a couple of things at the bottom that you may want to read about.
The maximum number of leads you can capture in a 24-hour period Not really that relevant for the exam, but if you do want to check them out, you can. Then I’m going to create my actual Web to Lead form. So I’m going to click on my button here, and this gives me all the fields that are available to create my web-to-lead form. So, once I’ve decided on a first name, last name, email, company, city, and province, So far, so good, but I’m going to include the country field as well. And these are the fields that are going to show up on my website. Then I’ve got my return URL. So this is the page that you want the potential customer to go to when they submit the form. So you can say thank you for submitting the form; we’ll get back to you within 24 hours or something like that. Now I don’t have this, so I’m just going to type in my website address like that.
And then at the bottom, we’ve got this recapture. I strongly advise you to do so because there is a risk that many bots on the internet will fill out your web-to-lead form, resulting in a flood of spam records in Salesforce. So if you are creating a web-based lead form, definitely do this. This isn’t really even recommended; it’s like a requirement to do it. Now, I’m not actually going to do it here, but it is actually quite easy to do. All you need to do is click on the box here, and then you get an option to create a new key pair from Google. So I’m going to click “new” on there, and then you have to enter an API, just the name of it, and then a site key and a secret. Now you get these from the Google website. So if I just close that dialogue for now, just dive through to the recapture Google website.
And then all you have to do is just click the Get recapture button, and then it will go through how to set it up, and you’ll get this secret key that you can put into Salesforce, and then you can use that, and then it means you’ll get this recapture box appearing on the form on your website, and this will stop the bots from creating loads of leads in Salesforce. This is extremely important. But I’m not going to do that. I’m going to leave it off for now because it does take a little bit of setting up and it’s not really relevant for the exam. So I’m going to click “generate” on that.
So here’s the HTML. I’m just going to copy all this HTML out. And now this is the HTML that you can put on your website. So I’m just going to paste it in here for now. This is a text editor on my computer. You could use Notepad if you want, if you’re using Windows. But I’m on Mac, so I’m using this sublime text editor, and I’m just going to click file, save as, and I’m going to save it as index HTML and save that. So now that it’s saved on my computer, I’m going to load it up in my browser. I’m going to select the file, click Open, and voila. Here’s my form. Obviously, I haven’t centered the look and feel of my website around it because all I need are the pure fields. So I’m going to type in my name, Francis Pander. I’m going to type in my email address, a random email address (s.com), just so we know that it’s come from here. I’m going to type in my consultancy company name, city, province, and country. If you’re using the recapture, you’ll also see the recapture box here to stop the spam.
And then, when I’m happy with that, I’m just going to hit submit. Now this is going to submit the record into Salesforce and redirect back to my website, which it already has, which is brilliant. So now I’m going to go back to salesforce.org, look into leads, open all leads, and if I’m quick enough, oh, it’s already created it. There we go. So if I click here, here we go. That’s the lead that was created, and it’s filled out all those boxes. So it’s defaulted to “open” and not “contacted.” It put in my location, my state, and my country, which is great. And yeah, that’s looking really cool. And put my name in as well. And is that the time? Yes, that is the time. So, yeah, that’s the record that was created. That’s it. So it’s now created a record within Salesforce. And now you can do more advanced processing around this lead to score it and potentially assign it to salespeople within Salesforce. So that is the web-to-lead form, which is kind of cool.
4. Lead Scoring
Okay, so now we have a lead in scoring. Now, lead scoring is basically when a lead is created in Salesforce, you want to score those leads so that the salespeople can kind of go on to those that you think are going to convert more quickly or get a sale out of them based on the other leads that have come in. And that’s basically what lead scoring is. Now you can do this in a number of different ways. Now, the traditional way is based on putting a formula field or a workflow on the record, which looks at all the fields on that record. And based on the information you know about what makes a good lead, you can then score it as a hot lead, a kind of warm lead, or a cold lead based on that. There are products within the Salesforce ecosystem that can do this for you and can bring in massive amounts of data to score that lead.
So for example, Par Dot has a scoring mechanism that allows you to say, “Well, based on the pages it’s been to or the clicks and opens of emails and all this kind of stuff, we’re going to score the lead by this amount.” But for the exam, it’s just centred around Salesforce and how you can score leads there. So let’s take a look at how I would do it. So we’re back on my lead record. And you can see here that we’ve got some information filled out. Now, this could have come from the web, or it could have been somebody who created the lead. So one of my sales reps created the lead, and then I want to qualify this information and score it appropriately. So I’m going to open up and create a new field, and I’m going to use a formula field, and I’m going to call this my lead score, give it a number, and then all I’m going to do is include a number of fields that I want to include in my score. So I have a number of employees. So I’m going to use the “number of employees” field. So I’m just going to dive in and go by the number of employees. I’m also going to use another field; what other field shall I use? Let’s use the industry as well. Dive that in and go, industry.
Okay, cool. So now I’m going to tell you to use the formula if. So if I dive in here, you can see how it works. It says if the logical expression is true, do this; otherwise, do this, which is false. So I’m going to say if the number of employees is greater than 500, then return ten; otherwise, return zero. Then I’m going to add that to my existing industries to create another if my industry.Now this is a picklist. Because it’s a picklist, I need to put the text formula in here. So if the industry is equal, And I’m going to say, “Oh, what did I put on my banking?” I said banking, didn’t I? Yes, banking. because I know that is a hot industry. I’m going to give it a score of 5, otherwise zero. Now I’m going to check my syntax. Yep, that all works. Okay. And then I’m going to click next. Click “next” again and click “save.” So now I’ve created this formula field. If we dive back into it, that essentially says that if the number of employees is greater than 500, then give it a score of 10. And then, if the industry is banking, give it a score of five and add those two numbers together.
So now if I go back to my lead and just refresh this page, you can see now I get a lead score of 15 because it’s added those two together. And if I narrow this down to, say, agriculture because I know that’s not a good industry for me, that score drops to ten. So you can now use this information to score and rank the leads. So, if I go back to my leads object and select all open leads, I’ll just dive that score onto my list view. What do I call it? What do I call it? Lead score. That was it. As a result, lead score. There we go. And I need to put all the other fields in as well. Name, first name, last name, company, website, lead source That will do. Click save. And now I can rank my leads based on the lead score. So if you’re getting a lot of leads coming into your salesforce.org, you can use this kind of scoring to say, “Hey, if this field equals this, then give it a couple of points.” If it’s this, then give it a bit more points, and so on and so forth. So you can really get a nice score that you can rank all your leads by, and as they come in, your sales team or the person who’s qualifying those leads can say, “Actually, that’s a really high score.” Let’s contact these people, see if it’s a legitimate inquiry, forward it on, convert it to an opportunity account, and start working on this as a sales lead. So that is essentially what lead scoring is. scoring that lead based on the information on it. So you can react to those hot leads—the ones with the highest score.
5. Auto Response Rules
Autoresponse rules. Autoresponder rules are just that. They auto respond to records being created in Salesforce on the lead and case objects. So for example, if a web-to-lead record gets created because somebody fills out information on the website and a lead record gets created, you can create a rule that responds by sending that customer an email saying, “Hey, thanks for your inquiry; we’ll get back to you shortly.” But you can also send these emails based on the data they filled out on their record. So you can basically say, “Well, if they’re interested in certain products and have said that in their record, then let’s send them an email saying, “Hey, thanks for your interest in this product.” Hey, but here’s some information that may be of interest to you specifically on this project while we wait to get back to you. So let’s dive in and create an autoresponder for ourselves. So here I am with my setup. So I’m just going to search for “auto,” and you can see here that there are lead autoresponder rules and case autoresponder rules. So you can only have autoresponse rules on the lead and case objects. If you wanted to do something similar on other objects, then you would need to create, say, a workflow rule that then fires emails off, but it’s a little bit different.
But I’ll show you the differences here. So let’s dive into my autoresponder rules. Now as you see, I haven’t got any at the moment. So I’m just going to click “new.” I’m going to give it a name. So I’m going to call this my product rule. I’m going to mark it as active because no one is using this salesforce or get. So here we go. There’s my rule. So I’m going to now dive into that rule, and you can see it’s in two sections. You got the main detail, which essentially just has two fields: the rule name and if it’s active or not. And then I’ve got my rule entries here. So I’m going to click “New” and create my first rule. Now it’s really important to understand that for each of these rules that we’re creating, you can basically set different orders in which they execute. Now I’ll go into more detail, but first let me state that this is rule number one. Now if I look at my record, you can see here that I’ve got this product interest drop-down list, which is basically listing these different series of products that I sell. And, basically, I want to send a targeted email so that if they generate a lead, I can respond with an email about the product they’re interested in.
So this GC 1000 So I’m going to come back here and search for my product interest, which is where it equals. And then I’m going to pick the GC 1000 series. So this is the from line, so I’m going to reply from me, but this could be your company details if you want. And I’m just going to put in my email address here. Now, as you can see, you can only send it to the user or an organizationalwide default email that you’ve set up. Now, an organisational-wide email address is essentially a generic email address that you’ve kind of authorised to use within salesforce.org. So I’m just going to dive in there to show you very quickly. All I have to do is click “add in” to create an email address. For example, Radnip Sales, give it a name like Sales Radnip.com, and then show which profiles I want to grant access to using this global email address. Now, when I click Save, it will send me an email just to verify that I am the owner of that email. So you’ll need access to the email address you’re creating, but it basically means that people with the specific profiles you assign will have access to it. For example, all Wadnip standard users could use this organizational-wide email to send emails that did not come from them. They can choose this organisational-wide email address instead, which is kind of handy, but I’m going to ignore that for now and I’m just going to use it for me. And then I’m going to set an email template.
So I’m going to click on here and see which templates we’ve got. And as you can see, there isn’t anything really that handy to use. So I’m going to create a new template. So I’m going to search for the templates. Here are my email templates. I’m going to right-click and create a new window, and then I’m going to create a new template. So I’m going to give it a text template and just leave it in that folder. It probably makes sense to create a folder for sales emails or lead emails. I’m going to say it’s available to use as an email template. My lead GC 1000’s name is Name. I can’t remember. Yeah. GC 1000 Series Product Response Email You see, it generated that unique name automatically, and as I tapped to another window, it started and then stopped, which is a little annoying. So rather than writing it all out again, you can delete everything in that field. Go to the field above and you can see it’s automatically populated, which is a kind of handy little trick. Now I’d like to thank you for your $ 1000 product inquiry. Hi.
Now I’m going to put in their name. So you must select the appropriate object to search for. So I’m going to add it to my lead field, and I’m going to say the first name. So this is basically a merge field that I am adding to the template. So I’m saying hi, first name. Thanks for your interest in the GC 1000 product series. We will contact you shortly. But in the meantime, please take a look at our website, which has more information on the GC 1000 product. and then I can put a link to whatever that product is. Of course, that URL doesn’t exist, but that’s fine. And then I’m just going to hit save on that. So there we go. I’ve now created my email. So it’s going to replace that with the first name of the person based on the data within the lead record and send that email. So I’ve now created my template. Let’s dive back here. So I’m going to select that email template. There you have it: the 1,000th response.
And I can click “Save.” Cool. So now I’ve created my first rule in my autoresponder. So you can see now that if the lead product interest equals the 1000 series, then it’s going to send this email out, which is great based on the email address on the lead. However, if I go to my lead, you’ll notice that this is an optional field, so it could be blank or anything else in this list. So you need to make sure that you create enough if it doesn’t match the criteria you’ve put in this lead object. So I could create another rule. Now actually, let’s create another rule about something completely different. Let’s basically say “banking” or “industry banking.” So let’s create another quick rule. So I’m going to say, “What industry?” There it is. Industry equals banking. Put my name and email address in there as well. Of course, I then make another email template that isn’t obviously similar to this one. It’ll be something around banking.
But I’m just going to use this one for now, and I’m going to set my sort order to two. So now this is where the sort order becomes really important because, essentially, it’s the order in which the emails will potentially be sent. So when the rule gets fired, when a lead is created, Salesforce is going to look at the first rule and see if this information matches. If it does, it’s going to send this email and not go any further. Now if it finds that this information hasn’t been filled out and this criteria has essentially failed, it’ll move on to the next rule in the list. So I’ll then see if the industry has been filled out and equals banking. And again, if it does find this, then it will send the banking email off. But if it doesn’t find that, it’s going to go on to the next rule, which there isn’t. Therefore, it won’t send any more emails. So it’ll only ever send one email if it finds a matching rule. But if there are no rules that match, it’s just not going to send an email.
So right at the very end, it’s always best practise to create a rule with no criteria in it at all because you do want to send a generic email off to them to say, “Hey, thanks for sending in a message.” So I’m going to click “new,” and I’m just going to create my generic one. So I’m going to have this as number three. I’m not going to add any criteria again. I’m going to put my name and my email address, and then I would pick a generic marketing email response, for example, this generic email template, and click Save. So now it’s going to look for the record details to see if the GC 1000 series is there. If not, it’s going to move on to the next one. If it finds that the industry has banking in it, then it will send that email. But if it can’t find that either, then it’s going to always send this last email. So, at the very least, an email is sent.
Now I also use this for different languages. So for example, if their user has filled out the country on their web-based lead form as, say, France, then I can use this to say, “Well, if the country equals France, then send out the French email template.” Or it may be that they’ve got some indications to buy. So maybe I search the subject line of their message that they sent us, and if it contains the word “buy” and the product is GC 1000, then maybe I forward them off to our e-commerce site to get them. To buy it online rather than having a salesperson contact us, to do a lead deflection, essentially to deflect and stop all these leads coming in and possibly get them a sale faster than if it went straight through the lead process. But that’s essentially it. That is an autoresponse role. So it’s responding to information that’s come in, either on a lead object or on a case object, and you’ve set criteria so that you can send specific different emails to the people where the lead is being created, allowing you to customise that response.
