The Core Sales Process

Designing and building an appropriate, successful solution is dependent on a thorough understanding of the business process you are modeling. In this case, this involves the sales process and any business pains that need to be addressed. It also involves avoiding common pitfalls, such as trying to do everything at once and letting technology dictate the business process.

This chapter gives you the tools you need and the confidence to explore, understand, and document the sales process and associated requirements. First, you will learn about sales frameworks to confirm your foundational knowledge of the sales business process. You will then learn about the full Sales Cloud data model and look at the key Objects for the sales process, including the main considerations and how they are used in practice. You will learn about the Objects that are related to lead generation in the next chapter.

We will also review the data security tools available in the Customer...

Supporting tools and information

For this chapter, you will require a tool to capture system requirements. A spreadsheet application such as Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets is a good way to quickly capture, share, collaborate, and refine requirements.

For your Sales Cloud implementation, you should consider using the tools your organization standardizes as they will be widely understood and accepted. Requirements can be managed in spreadsheets for simple and very small team projects, but specific requirement management or project management tools offer tailored functionality and will help improve collaboration and organization on larger projects with more people involved. These tools often offer traceability through the life cycle, so you can map the requirement to the configuration changes. Some examples are JIRA by Atlassian or the Agile Accelerator, an application built on Salesforce that can be installed from AppExchange.

For this chapter, you will require a tool to document...

Understanding your sales (business) process

To explore the sales process, we’ll start by delving into the common sales frameworks. Understanding the characteristics of these will help you get an initial understanding of your organization’s sales needs and narrow down the Sales Cloud functionality you might be using. For example, if your sales are business-to-business, then you will need to capture information about organizations. Being familiar with the terminology and what it means will also help when you talk to business stakeholders about what they need.

Building on this foundation, we will explore methods of gathering information on the steps your organization takes during a sale, the sales process, and who you should involve. This may already be well documented in your organization, in which case is it simply about familiarizing yourself with the documentation and artifacts. Although there may be some documentation, in practice, the details and variations in the...

Sales Cloud data model and security

In this section, we will explore the functionality of the Sales Cloud data model and security. Sales Cloud is built on the Salesforce Customer 360 platform, which means it benefits from the secure and scalable infrastructure, as well as other capabilities.

It is assumed that you understand the core concepts of the Salesforce Customer 360 platform data model, where data is stored in Objects with individual records. Generally speaking, access to Objects is controlled by profiles and permissions, and the visibility of records is determined by the sharing model.

We will take a look at the Objects that are available in Sales Cloud and explore what they are best used for and how they relate to each other. We will then take a look at the tools available to secure them and the data they hold.

Before we get into those in detail, we will review the breadth of Sales Cloud’s capabilities.

Sales Cloud’s capabilities

Sales Cloud has...

Reports and forecasting/reporting metrics

Forecasts are an important part of business planning. They are used to inform when parts and resources are needed so that products can be manufactured and delivered on time. They also predict when revenue will be available to hire employees, run marketing programs, and invest in product and system improvements.

It is important to identify the metrics that an organization wants to measure and track early in requirement gathering so that the system can be designed in a way that allows these to be reported on. The data required to generate these metrics needs to be included in the data model and additional calculation fields might be required to allow the metric to be reported on in the desired way.

Every organization has a combination of metrics that they track and also have a way of preparing their forecast that is unique to them.

Sales Cloud capabilities

We will now explore the capabilities in Sales Cloud, first with Dashboards...

Accounts and Contacts

In this section, we will look at the capabilities of Sales Cloud for capturing and managing organizations and people, then explore some of the key considerations and what happens in practice.

Sales Cloud capabilities

In the Customer 360 platform, organizations are represented in the Account Object and people are modeled in the Contact Object. The relational model provides the flexibility to capture organizational structures. It is also possible to turn on the capability to relate a person to multiple Accounts as a person can be an employee of one company and a board member of another. In both cases, they may influence the purchasing process.

In the beginning, Salesforce focused on supplying software to B2B companies, where the focus was on the organization. They expanded into B2C, where the person is the main entity, not an organization. In this context, the Account record had no purpose. To reflect this operating model, Salesforce created the Person...

Opportunities, products, and price books

In this section, we will look at the capabilities of Sales Cloud for capturing deals, explore some key considerations, and look into what happens in practice.

Sales Cloud capabilities

These Objects are used to capture sales deals in Salesforce. I will use the term sales deal or deal rather than Opportunity to avoid confusion with Salesforce terminology. The Opportunity record is the primary record for capturing sales deal information. The other Objects and functionality described here all provide additional capabilities that may be relevant to your use case.

Opportunity

The Opportunity Object captures the overall details of the deal, such as the name, value, and when it is expected to be confirmed, as well as the stage the deal is in during the sales process. It is a child of the Account where all the organization information is captured. OOTB doesn’t include any options in terms of capturing product information – there...

Activities

In this section, we will look at the capabilities of Sales Cloud for capturing and managing sales activities such as calls and meetings. Then, we’ll explore some key considerations and what happens in practice.

Sales Cloud capabilities

In Salesforce, “activities” is a collective term that’s used for Task and Event objects. Unlike other standard Objects, these two Objects have two polymorphic relationship fields – WhoId and WhatId. This allows these records to be related to different types of Objects via the one relationship field – for example, either the Opportunity or Account. This very flexible type of relationship field is not available to create in Setup as a custom field.

To create custom fields for the Task and Event Objects, you need to create them on the Activities Object. By default, Task and Events that are related to Contacts also appear on the Activity Timeline of the Contact’s Account. This automatic...

Account Team, Opportunity Team, and Opportunity Splits

In this section, we will look at the capabilities of Sales Cloud for recording and giving access to those who are working on deals. Then we’ll explore some key considerations and what happens in practice.

Sales Cloud capabilities

Account Team allows Users to collaborate on Accounts. It captures the role they have with the specific Account and the access they should have. It also shows a list of all the users on the Account so that people know who is involved. It is possible to set up a default Account Team, which removes manual work when setting up the Accounts.

Opportunity Team allows Users to collaborate on Opportunities. It captures the role they have with the specific Opportunity and the access they should have. It also shows a list of all the Users on the Opportunity so that people know who is involved.

Finally, Opportunity Splits allow revenue to be shared on Closed Opportunities. These values can be rolled...

Translating sales process requirements into a design

Now that you have reviewed the main Objects in Sales Cloud and the key considerations, and seen examples of how it can work in practice, you are in a good position to translate your requirements into a design.

You want to leverage all the standard functionality first. Try not to get caught up with the names of the Salesforce terminology. Just because you sell products doesn’t mean you need to use the Product and Price Book capabilities. If you sell services, not products, you still might need to use the Product capability.

Start with the data model. Determine what Objects you need. If you aren’t sure, list the fields that you have identified and then determine what Object they belong in.

One of the first decisions to be made is what Account model to use – organization or person-centric? If your organization only sells to businesses, the decision is simple.

Do you have any type of data that doesn&...

Summary

In this chapter, we started by exploring common sales frameworks and what they can tell us about the type of Sales Cloud setup we might need. We went on to look at techniques for gathering more information about the specifics of the sales process used in our organization. Next, we reviewed the Sales Cloud’s capability and then looked at data Objects in detail. We ended by discussing how to approach translating the requirements that have been gathered into a solution design.

In the next chapter, we will explore the Objects and key functionalities available to model the lead or demand generation process.

Further reading

User stories

• Trailhead: User Story Creation:

  https://trailhead.salesforce.com/content/learn/modules/user-story-creation

Sales Cloud capabilities

• Salesforce Data Security Model – Explained Visually:

  https://developer.salesforce.com/blogs/developer-relations/2017/04/salesforce-data-security-model-explained-visually

• Trailhead: Data Security:

  https://trailhead.salesforce.com/content/learn/modules/data_security

Dashboards and Reports

• Trailhead: Reports & Dashboards for Lightning Experience:

  https://trailhead.salesforce.com/content/learn/modules/lex_implementation_reports_dashboards

Salesforce role-based websites

• Architect.salesforce.com
• Admin.salesforce.com
• Developer.salesforce.com