So, Wait….What’s a Sales Cloud, Exactly?

By Kelly Rigotti

September 21, 2015

Last week at Dreamforce 2015, Salesforce General Manager Mike Rosenbaum delivered a keynote speech entirely devoted to something called the sales cloud. And while that term may not entirely sound familiar, I assure you that what a sales cloud does is familiar territory for the forward-thinking folks among you.

Here’s what you need to know:

The sales cloud is a cloud-based CRM module geared toward improving sales productivity through sales analytics, automation, and multichannel communication. It also uses these advances in sales technology to enable new types of selling that just aren’t possible when you’re tied to your desk.
Sales cloud solutions provide an end-to-end framework for sales associates as they reach out to new clients, build relationships, and close deals. This framework can even assist in progressing the buyer’s journey by recommending contextual next steps for individual clients and by keeping sales associates on target with real-time company and contact data.
Sales clouds drive strong team dynamics by providing multiple cross-platform lines of communication. Whether they prefer to touch base via chat, phone, email, or video conference, your sales team members can reach out from wherever they happen to be.

Together, these seamless connections can do wonders for overall productivity.

For example, when a client asks for specific technical information or wants to speak with another department before closing the deal, your agents can simply conference in the requested expert on the spot, providing value and accelerating the buyer’s journey in a single stroke.

It’s this built-in flexibility that makes sales cloud solutions so powerful. For companies like Adaptive Solutions, a company that provides business intelligence and analytics-as-a-service, cloud-based solutions have entirely supplanted the physical office, making the firm vastly more agile.

Imagine instantly generating interactive reports, creating and combining charts and graphs, and visualizing new insights on the fly by simply asking your data cloud a question. Now imagine doing all that while meeting your client over lunch.

That’s the power of the sales cloud.