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Enhance Data-Driven Strategies with Sales Cloud and Data Cloud

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

  • Identify the benefits of integrating Sales Cloud with Data Cloud to enhance business operations.
  • Describe the basic functionalities and purpose of Data Cloud.
  • Identify use cases for Sales Cloud and Data Cloud integration.

Sales Cloud is a dynamic CRM platform that enhances your sales process, boosting productivity and revenue. It excels in managing accounts, leads, and opportunities, simplifying the tracking and nurturing of leads throughout the sales cycle. The platform offers robust features for seamless prospect tracking and engagement. Its Sales Engagement tool helps create structured communication cadences, ensuring consistent interactions with prospects.

Sales Cloud also improves visibility into the sales pipeline for better bottleneck and opportunity identification. Advanced features like Sales Forecasting and Revenue Intelligence use analytics and AI to predict sales outcomes and provide deeper insights into sales trends and customer interactions.

Clearly, Sales Cloud is powerful. But what really fuels its engine? It’s data. By tapping into vast amounts of information, Sales Cloud turns every nugget of data into actionable insights, making it an incredible resource for any business looking to thrive in today’s competitive landscape.

When we talk about data, we’re specifically referring to Salesforce data. However, Salesforce data alone might not always provide the full picture. For instance, what if you could use past purchase data from AWS (Amazon Web Services) to help qualify leads? This valuable data resides outside Salesforce. With Data Cloud, you can seamlessly integrate this external data into Sales Cloud, enabling you to identify prospects who have previously shown interest in similar products. By combining this external data with Salesforce insights, your sales team can prioritize outreach to leads who are more likely to convert, ultimately increasing sales efficiency and success rates.

Say Hello to Data Cloud

Think of Data Cloud as an additional engine that works alongside Sales Cloud, further powering it with relevant data from external data warehouses and systems. Your external data can live almost anywhere, and you can bring it into Salesforce. Explore some of the available options.

The Data Cloud integration web page shows the many options available to bring data from external sources.

For example, you can improve the accuracy of your sales projections by including subscription, renewal, and cancellation data in your forecast. You can achieve this by bringing in customer subscription data through a Salesforce and Snowflake connection. This allows you to:

  • Analyze past subscription renewals and cancellations, and identify patterns that inform future sales projections.
  • Understand usage patterns, allowing you to segment your customers based on their engagement and predict which segments are more likely to renew or upgrade.
  • Recognize which products or services are commonly upsold and adjust your forecasts to account for potential increases in revenue from these areas.

Overall, connecting data from your external sources empowers you to proactively engage with your customers at the optimal time, enhancing retention rates and maximizing revenue potential.

Note

Review Resources to learn more about Data Cloud and its capabilities.

Maximize Sales Cloud Potential with Data Cloud

Now you know a little about how powering your Sales Cloud with data could maximize your outcome. However, the true value of connecting your data can only be assessed by testing its capabilities against real challenges faced by most sales teams. Let’s choose and solve an age-old problem: How can you get the most out of your budget for attracting and retaining customers, while also making your services as effective as possible?

Salesforce is great for managing your sales activities, tracking your customer service interactions, running your market campaigns, and so on. The data from these activities can give you great insights into how well your sales, customer service, and marketing are doing.

But while Salesforce gives you detailed profiles and interaction histories, it may miss out on the bigger picture like broader buying behaviors or trends outside your direct interactions with customers. It tracks interactions and service requests. But it often doesn’t capture how customers use your products or services, which is crucial for spotting those sweet upsell and cross-sell opportunities.

To optimize, you need a complete picture of your customers, including their buying habits and how they use your products. You can get this info by pulling in data from external sources like orders, billings, CRM account data, customer segmentation, usage, sales forecasting, and marketing/engagement data from external sources.

Data Cloud makes it easy to connect all your data, helping you gather the insights you need to answer your optimization questions and take your strategy to the next level.

Let’s explore the valuable insights you can uncover from these data sources.

Data

Insights

Recommended Actions

Orders and billing

Identify buying trends and customer habits.

Use these insights to create product bundles and targeted promotions.

CRM account

Get to know your customers better with their profiles, demographics, and past interactions.

Develop personalized communication strategies. Adjust your messages and offers based on past interactions and demographics to boost engagement.

Customer segmentation

Group your customers by their buying behavior or how engaged they are.

Pinpoint your high-potential customers, and run targeted campaigns that cater to their specific needs and preferences.

Usage patterns

Monitor how your customers use your products to gauge satisfaction and find improvement areas.

Suggest products or services that complement their usage. For example, if they love a particular feature, recommend related items that can enhance their experience.

Sales forecasting

Predict your future sales trends and demand.

Use these insights to tweak your sales strategies. Adjust your inventory, staffing, and marketing to match the expected trends.

Marketing engagement

Find out which channels and messages work best for engaging customers.

Fine-tune your campaigns by doubling down on what works and improving or dropping what doesn’t.

Before, you had to consult multiple sources for information and often made decisions based on your gut feeling while calculating possibilities on your own. Now, you can gather key insights and craft strategies and next steps, all backed by solid data.

As you roll out these strategies, keep an eye on key metrics like average order value (AOV), customer lifetime value (CLV), annual contract value (ACV), and customer attrition. Use these insights to spend wisely, focusing on what brings in new customers and retains the ones you have.

This is just one example—how you use the insights and actions depends on your unique business and sales setup. But with all the data and tools you have, you’re set to drive innovation and tackle the challenges that come your way.

Let’s look at a few more scenarios.

General Problem

Use Data Cloud

Recommended Actions

Lack of visibility into your sales forecast and pipeline

Connect and unify billing, shipment, and other data to create accurate forecasts and deal assessment insights.

Adjust forecasts, target the right customers, update strategies, and grow the pipeline to hit your goals.

Difficulty tracking the complete customer journey across various channels

Connect and unify Salesforce data with engagement metrics, past purchases, and buying patterns to better understand account health and calculate a customer’s buying likelihood.

Focus on key accounts and customize strategies, enhancing cross-selling and up-selling based on detailed behavior analysis.

Lack of complete customer profiles with up-to-date information

Connect and unify Salesforce data with data from ERP, past purchases, news, social media, and web engagements to update static and outdated contacts with up-to-date information.

Create complete customer profiles with up-to-date information. Use this to enhance your account planning and effectively engage with your leads.

Lack of detailed information on your team’s sales activities

Connect and unify Salesforce data with activity metrics, third-party meeting tools, social platform data, and billing information to improve sales activity insights.

Set clear, measurable goals for each seller to increase productivity and align daily efforts with sales targets. Implement onboarding programs to quickly integrate new sellers and familiarize them with your sales processes.

Integrating Data Cloud with Sales Cloud is like giving your sales team a superpower—minus the flashy cape! Imagine having all your data at your fingertips, transforming your sales forecast from educated guesses to precision-engineered predictions. With this dynamic duo, you’re not just tracking sales; you’re predicting the future of your revenue streams with the confidence of a fortune teller, but with actual data to back it up.

Whether it’s maximizing customer lifetime value, transforming contact records into opportunity, or enhancing sales activity insights for pinpoint coaching, the combination of Data Cloud and Sales Cloud turns your business operations into a well-oiled revenue-generating machine.

Resources

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