Salesforce Sales Cloud Consultant Part 3: Application of Product Knowledge

This topic has the highest weighting and includes the following objectives:

• Given a set of requirements, design an end-to-end sales process from Lead to Opportunity to Quote to Close to Order.

• Given a scenario, differentiate when it is appropriate to include custom application development vs. third-party applications.

• Describe the appropriate use cases for Account and Opportunity Teams and the effect on sales roles, visibility, access, and reporting. 

• Discuss the capabilities, use cases, and design considerations for additional features such as territory management and forecasting. 

• Articulate the capabilities, use cases, and design considerations when implementing Opportunity Products, Products, Price Books, and Orders.

• Describe the implementation considerations of multi-currency and advanced currency management.

A sales process consists of steps such as lead generation, qualification and conversion, opportunity management, quote creation, and order placement. Sales reps typically make use of these steps in order to close sales deals and track related information in Salesforce. However, each company customizes its sales process depending upon its business requirements.

Requirements are typically derived by identifying gaps in business processes, prioritized, categorized, and defined in terms of scope. In addition, it is important to consider whether a declarative or programmatic solution would be appropriate to fulfill a particular requirement.

When creating a lead conversion process in Salesforce, various approaches can be used. Leads are typically converted to account, contact, and opportunity records once they have been qualified based on sales criteria defined by a company. Leads can be converted to both person and business accounts in Salesforce. Furthermore, lead data from standard and custom lead fields can be mapped to account, contact, and opportunity records.

There are considerations related to the use of automation tools and Salesforce features, such as validation rules, record types, page layouts and triggers, while designing a sales process. Record types and page layouts allow the creation of multiple sales processes while automation tools, such as workflow rules and Process Builder, can be used to perform automated actions based on predefined criteria. Other features, such as validation rules and triggers, can be utilized for data verification and execution of custom logic, respectively.

To meet business requirements, Salesforce provides various capabilities to develop custom applications declaratively or with the help of code. However, it is not always necessary to create a custom application if standard features do not suffice. Third-party applications provided by Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) may be installed by Salesforce customers from the AppExchange marketplace.

Account and opportunity teams support collaboration in the sales process. Account teams allow multiple users to work together on an account in Salesforce, while opportunity teams allow multiple people to work on an opportunity record. Default teams can be set up in both cases, and team members are able to get read/write or read-only access to the record. Team members can view other members’ access levels. Other customizations can be done on the page layout and reporting.

Enterprise Territory Management can be used by organizations that are looking to organize their sales structures into different territories. Different territory models can be created to test different territory structures, and the one that suits the organization can be activated. Collaborative Forecasting can be used to allow users to forecast opportunity revenue by territory.

Opportunities have relationships with Salesforce objects and features, including line items, product schedules, price books, quotes, contracts, and campaign influence. Opportunities are closely related to the products sold by a company as well as other aspects, such as the prices of products set in price books and the asset records that represent the products which have been purchased. Opportunities are related to both quotes and contracts; quotes are used to track proposed prices of products and services while contracts are agreements used to define the terms of doing business. The campaign influence feature is used to indicate influential campaigns associated with opportunities.

Salesforce provides features for order implementation and management, such as order products and reduction orders. Sales reps can create orders and associate them with accounts and contracts depending on the requirement. Lead and Opportunity Scoring allows sales reps to prioritize leads and opportunities. Account and opportunity insights make it easier for reps to maintain relationships with customers and close sales deals. Tableau CRM provides deeper insights into sales data.

Multiple currencies are generally used in international organizations which have several global offices that need to use a country’s local currency for doing business. Salesforce supports utilizing a corporate currency to specify the currency of the company’s headquarters. Moreover, there are different considerations related to the use of multiple currencies and Advanced Currency Management in reporting. The multi-currency feature allows international organizations to make use of multiple active currencies for various offices throughout the world, which makes it easier for users to create records in their local currency. Advanced Currency Management allows using dated exchange rates for active currencies. In reporting, dated exchange rates are used only if the objects and fields support this feature. Enabling multiple currencies has several implications related to Salesforce records and other features, which are described in this section.