Customer relationship management software has gone a long way in the days of AI and automation.
One of the biggest advancements in CRM technology has been the leap to the cloud that CRMs like HubSpot and Salesforce have taken.
This leap has made integrations between different CRMs, like the HubSpot Salesforce integration, possible for enterprise companies and SaaS providers.
Salesforce, in particular, has been a pioneer in the evolution of cloud-based CRMs, boasting 16+ different types of cloud-computing applications as of 2024.
While cloud-based configurations may only seem important to developers, there are several ways that marketers and sales staff can benefit from Salesforce’s cloud-based CRM.
In this article, we’ll walk through five of the most essential types of Salesforce Clouds for businesses and what features they offer.
Introduction to Salesforce and Cloud-Computing
Historically, CRMs were primarily built as desktop or mobile applications that had to be housed on servers, which made them notoriously slow, expensive, and buggy.
With the advent of cloud-based CRMs, such as Salesforce, users gained access to lightning-fast iterations and updates and automated tools and integrations that CRM vendors like Salesforce could quickly deploy.
As a result, Salesforce was able to offer several key new features, including:
- Multi-channel integrations: Salesforce offers integrations with email, marketing, sales, and CTI platforms, as well as third-party APIs.
- Dynamic and user-friendly dashboards: Salesforce’s cloud-based dashboards are fully customizable and easy to use.
- Big data analytics: Salesforce's robust third-party integrations and CRM network over its clouds allow it to harvest, track, and report on data across your sales pipeline and attribution channels.
- Robust marketing materials: Salesforce offers everything a business needs to begin marketing to consumers, including automated pipelines, advanced lead nurturing tools, live chatbots, landing page templates, email marketing services, etc.
With these features in mind, let’s explore some benefits cloud-based computing offers CRMs like Salesforce.
Benefits of Salesforce Clouds
Salesforce Clouds are designed to augment every business area, from sales to marketing to customer management. Here are some benefits of leveraging Salesforce Clouds for your business.
- Automated updates
- Integrations with over 2,500 third-party programs
- Access to several individual cloud services, including marketing, sales, and service clouds
- Internal quality control
- Lightening fast user speeds and interactions
- Increased collaboration among multiple parts of your business (i.e., sales, finance, marketing, etc.)
- Cost-savings–you choose which cloud you want to use
- Use across multiple devices
- Secure data
- Robust analytics–tracks data across multiple clouds and channels
- Competitive advantage
Want to learn more about how Salesforce Clouds can benefit your business? Let’s explore the five major Salesforce Clouds and their key features for businesses.
Five Primary Types of Salesforce Clouds
1. Salesforce Sales Cloud
Salesforce Sales Cloud is its most popular CRM designed to help automate and accelerate sales efforts. Sales Cloud combines its robust analytics platform, automation, and real-time/predictive analytics so sales staff can make smarter decisions that drive better results.
Key Features
- Sales Automation: Automate internal and external tasks to keep leads proceeding smoothly across sales pipelines.
- Opportunity Management: Manage Salesforce opportunities and Salesforce lead stages so that you can identify, track, and score Salesforce leads as they travel through your Salesforce pipeline.
- Einstein: AI service that analyzes past interactions and user data to offer actionable insights across your sales path or customer journey.
- Territory Management: Location-based software that enables users to plan and streamline field operations using Salesforce Maps to track inventory, labor, and other inputs across geo-specific territories.
- Revenue Management: Track active subscriptions, payments, CPQ, and more to generate an accurate revenue statement.
- Sales Forecasting: Forecast your sales using the data above to predict quarterly revenue and make pivots where necessary.
2. Salesforce Marketing Cloud
Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud is designed to assist marketers by providing them with the right tools and insights to map out customer journeys, personalize marketing messaging, and automate those messages to scale their efforts.
Key Features
- Customer Journey Mapping: Connects data across all marketing and attribution channels and allows marketers to easily personalize different stages of their customer journey based on the insights provided.
- Automated Personalization: Scale marketing efforts using automated surveys, split testing, and dynamic content served over email, web pages, or ads that best appeal to a particular customer segment.
- Marketing Cloud Intelligence: Visualize marketing spending and create automated reports so you can allocate money to campaigns that deliver the highest ROI.
- Genie: A brand-new, all-in-one automated customer journey mapping tool designed to nurture leads with personalized messaging, custom-built AI, or custom apps that best achieve marketers’ goals.
- Automated Engagement: Serve personalized content and deliver sales alerts when customers achieve certain actions across your sales pipeline.
- Loyalty Marketing: Create marketing promotions and offers using out-of-the-box tools and templates that integrate easily with your third-party APIs.
3. Salesforce Commerce Cloud
Build digital storefronts, process payments, and create curated marketing messaging using Salesforce’s Commerce Cloud.
This all-in-one eCommerce platform integrates seamlessly with any of your favorite eCommerce tools. It allows you to add the gift of automation and analytics to improve revenue and reduce shopping cart abandonment.
Key Features
- B2C and B2B Commerce Journeys: Build seamless checkout journeys using pre-built templates for shopping carts, product categories, and checkout pages so that you can record, process, and nurture conversions in real time.
- Seller Marketplace: Integrate and onboard third-party sellers into your digital marketplace with the appropriate products to reduce inventory and digital clutter.
- Order Management: Track, route, and process where customers make payments across multiple channels so you can easily fulfill requests in one centralized portal.
- Integrated Payment Methods: Use third-party payment processors for no additional charge.
4. Salesforce Service Cloud
Customer service is one of the most important aspects of any business. Thankfully, Salesforce’s Service Cloud gives agents access to all the information they need using Salesforce’s robust data platform to serve customers better when the time comes. In addition, the Service Cloud provides predictive insights for everyday customer-facing tasks to assist field agents.
Key Features
- Chatbot: Talk to customers directly over your website using built-in chatbot features.
- Computer Telephony Integration: Integrate your CTI or automated telephone software into your analytics and configure important features.
- Customer 360: Customer 360 combines customer data across Salesforce’s entire cloud-based network to build a complete profile of your customers and their journey thus far.
- Lightning Console: Simple interface that integrates data from across your knowledge bases and analytics to provide to agents so they can better assist customers at a moment’s notice.
- Custom Reporting and Dashboards: Personalize your dashboard and reports to reflect your business goals and efforts.
- Field Services: Services include asset management, mobile app, remote assistant, and scheduling and appointment assistance to streamline field services.
5. Salesforce Experience Cloud (Formerly Community Cloud)
Salesforce’s Experience Cloud is a lesser-known application, but very helpful for HR departments and agents who conduct lots of customer-facing. Experience Cloud integrates with your existing sales and marketing efforts and allows you to collect data submitted by users for various purposes.
Experience Cloud allows you to build a collaborative community to help connect customers with employees and partners.
Key Features
- Community Branding and Management Tools: Create custom branded user interfaces and landing pages over your website or mobile app designed to reflect your brand.
- Flow Automation: Create multi-step automation designed to generate specific user actions, collect data, and update that data in salesforce.
- Full Business Integration: Integrate Community Cloud with any of your existing cloud applications to create support cases or qualify leads inside your Community Cloud. Users can also share and upload files to communities inside your CRM.
- Lightning Bolt: Create customer apps, templates, and automation designed to foster greater community collaboration over your existing platforms.
6. Salesforce Analytics Cloud
Salesforce Analytics Cloud is powered by Einstein and Tableau tools to provide business leaders with actionable insights into their sales and marketing processes.
Analytics Cloud uses AI to sort through big data and provide visualizations and suggestions that improve your business.
Key Features
- Data Exploration and Visualization: Analytics Cloud analyzes trends and patterns from any Salesforce Cloud you choose to integrate with it to provide actionable insights.
- Seamless Integration: Embed charts and graphs from Analytics Cloud into any type of Salesforce Cloud you already use, including Sales Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Commerce Cloud, etc.
- Mobile-First: Analytics Cloud offers seamless mobile responsiveness and can be viewed from your mobile device.
Additional Salesforce Clouds for Businesses
- IoT Cloud: Salesforce IoT Cloud is an Internet of Things (IoT) platform that enables businesses to connect, monitor, and manage IoT devices, sensors, and data to drive real-time insights and actions.
- App Cloud: Salesforce App Cloud is a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offering that provides tools and services for building, deploying, and managing custom business applications on the Salesforce platform.
- Integration Cloud (MuleSoft): Salesforce Integration Cloud, powered by MuleSoft, is an integration platform that enables businesses to connect and integrate data and applications across disparate systems, both on-premises and in the cloud.
- Health Cloud: Salesforce Health Cloud is a CRM platform designed specifically for healthcare organizations to manage patient relationships, streamline care coordination, and drive better health outcomes.
- Financial Services Cloud: Salesforce Financial Services Cloud is a CRM platform tailored for financial services firms to build stronger customer relationships, manage wealth, and deliver personalized financial advice.
- Government Cloud: Salesforce Government Cloud is a dedicated instance of Salesforce's cloud services designed to meet government agencies and organizations' security and compliance requirements.
- Nonprofit Cloud: Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud is a CRM platform tailored for nonprofit organizations to manage donors, volunteers, programs, and fundraising efforts effectively.
- Education Cloud: Salesforce Education Cloud is a CRM platform designed for educational institutions to manage student relationships, enrollment, and academic programs efficiently.
Mastering each Salesforce Cloud Application can help you scale your business and supplement basic processes for greater efficiency.
For help configuring your Salesforce clouds or integration best practices, schedule a consultation with the experts at Coastal Consulting or earn the HubSpot Salesforce Integration Certification.