Customize Sales Cloud for Your Business

Learning Objectives

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

• Identify key objects in Sales Cloud.
  
• Identify what changes you can make to standard fields to help customize Sales Cloud for your business.
  

Business relationships are central to any sales team’s success. Building those relationships takes time, and as your sales team works, it’s crucial that you keep track of all of the essential info that helps them close deals. It’s also crucial to report on your sales data and explore what makes a deal successful.

Standard Objects in Sales Cloud

Let’s take a look at four essential objects in Sales Cloud that help sales users keep track of the information they need to maintain business relationships and close deals: Leads, Accounts, Contacts and Opportunities. 

As you set up the fields for your objects, you determine the information that will be collected each time a sales rep logs a new record related to an object. (For instance, when they identify a new lead.)

Leads represent potential sales opportunities or new customers. They can come from a wide range of sources—the web, a list of conference attendees, the business cards your team accumulates, research, and so forth. Leads contain the basic customer contact info your team needs to follow up. Your team determines at what point a lead is qualified and ready to be converted into an active deal.

Accounts represent the companies you do business with. They’re the heart of your business data. They’ll be at the center of your object relationships as you do more business with a customer over time.

Contacts represent the people your team keeps in touch with. They’re the names and faces of your business relationships. Contacts can come from Leads or other sources, and they’re a great way to track individualized info that helps your business relationships flourish.

Opportunities represent the qualified deals your sales team is working on. They help you track key info, like the deal amount and the expected close date. As your deals move along in your sales process, Opportunities help you see exactly what stage your deals are in, allowing you to have real-time insights into your team’s progress.

When your team converts a Lead, Sales Cloud automatically creates related Contact, Account, and Opportunity records. We keep these four objects separate in Sales Cloud, so you have the freedom to define object relationships that reflect the way your business works. It also helps your sales team track changes to your customer accounts over time, for example as you close more deals with your customers.

Custom Fields

In many cases, the standard fields in Sales Cloud get the job done. If they work for your business, you’re all set. But if you find that specific pieces of info your sales team requires don't have a designated standard field within an object, you can create custom fields.

Remember: Fields determine how you report on your business’s success. You'll want to make sure your fields represent crucial, reportable information from the beginning.

As you take stock of what you need to configure, think back to the goals and objectives you had for Sales Cloud. Let’s look at how a sales rep at Cloud Kicks approached it.

Candace, a Cloud Kicks sales rep, needs to track how her deals are progressing, which type of deal has the most revenue potential (Cloud Kicks sells custom sneakers and bulk retail), and which deals to prioritize based on how soon they are projected to close. She brought this request to the implementation team, working with her admin to map her goals and determine what customization are needed in Sales Cloud.

Candace and the other reps can use the standard field, Close Date, to prioritize deals. To track potential revenue for custom sneakers versus bulk retail, the admin can add a custom field called Deal Type to the Opportunity object.

Create Custom Fields

Let’s walk through the process of creating a custom field for Deal Type on the Opportunity object. Fields you create within standard objects will be unique to your business and sales process. You can repeat this process for any other standard objects you need to update.

Before you create a custom field, be sure that you actually need it to meet business goals:

1. Refer back to your goals and success metrics, and describe what data points you need represented in a field to achieve your goals.
   
2. Create a list of all of the contact info your team tracks. Whether they get info through email or write it down on sticky notes, every element should be included.
   
3. Check the standard Contacts object in Sales Cloud and see what fields come out of the box. Check off the standard fields your team needs to do their jobs.
   

This process can seem straightforward, but it’s also important. Getting the details down now helps you work smarter and faster as you and your sales team use Sales Cloud. 

Once you know which fields you really need to create, you can begin your work as an admin. Let’s see what it takes to create a field for Deal Type.

Ready to Get Hands-on with Sales Cloud?

Launch your Trailhead Playground now to follow along and try out the steps in this module. To open your Trailhead Playground, scroll down to the hands-on challenge and click Launch. You also use the playground when it's time to complete the hands-on challenges.

1. Click and click Setup. The Setup page opens in a new tab.
   
2. Click Object Manager.
   
3. Click Opportunity.
   
4. Click Fields & Relationships.
   
5. Click New.
   The Deal Type field is meant to track if the deal is for custom sneakers or bulk retail. This kind of simple choice is best represented with a Picklist, which looks like a drop-down menu of premade options. Just note that there are all sorts of other kinds of data your sales reps might need to gather, like phone numbers or currency values. Choosing the right kind of data type helps keep data organized.
   
6. Choose Picklist.
   
7. Click Next.
   
8. For Field Label, enter Deal Type.
   
9. Click Enter values, with each value separated by a new line.
   
10. In the box that appears, enter Bulk Retail.
    
11. On a new line under Bulk Retail, enter Custom Sneakers.
    
12. Check Use first value as default value.
    Cloud Kicks makes far more bulk retail sales than custom sneakers, so defaulting to the first value will save sales reps a few clicks most of the time.
    
13. Click Next to accept field-level security settings.
    In your actual org you want to only choose profiles who really need access to the data, but for this activity it doesn’t matter.
    
14. Click Next.
    
15. Click Save.
    
16. Close the Setup browser tab.
    

Excellent work, your sales reps can now identify the deal type for each opportunity. And, you can create reports that use Deal Type to distinguish opportunities.

Let’s navigate to a new opportunity to see the new field in action.

1. Click the App Launcher () then enter oppo in the search box.
   
2. Click Opportunities.
   
3. Click New.
   Deal Type appears in the left column, and is already set to Bulk Retail, just like you wanted. Now that you’ve verified Deal Type is there, you don’t actually need to save a new opportunity.
   
4. Click Cancel.
   

Tip: As you’re setting up custom fields, think about your sales process stages. Make sure the Lead Status field on your Leads object and the Stage field on your Opportunity object reflect the way your sales team determines when a prospect moves to the next stage in your sales process. For more in-depth learning on sales processes we recommend this Trailhead module.

Now that you know how to start configuring Sales Cloud to fit your business, you can get out there and start customizing. Then dive into Sales Cloud and start working with real data.

Resources

• Video: Lead Conversion
• Video: Create the User Experience