Best Salesforce Products: Reviews of the Most Popular Services

Salesforce is largely regarded as the most influential salesforce automation and cloud CRM vendor, having popularized the SaaS model and, in the process, disrupted the business tech industry early into this millennium. The company has since grown beyond salesforce automation and CRM, and now offers a wide range of cloud business solutions designed to suit your specific business type, role, need, or industry.

Having a good grasp of all of them is a bit daunting for new users. Thus, we’ll list and discuss the slew of Salesforce offerings to date. In this article, we’ll bundle the products by category and also by a variety of factors like business size, feature sets, user roles, and specific requirements. So after reading this, you’d get an idea of how leading Salesforce products like Marketing Cloud, Einstein, and Service Cloud, among others, can help your business optimize and grow. Hopefully, our exposition will help you narrow down your search and help you determine which products match your business requirements.

Salesforce has become one of the most formidable companies in the SaaS industry. For example, it has been hailed as the sixth-best company to work for in 2020. It sits at the top with other reputable organizations like Hilton, Workday, Cisco, and Wegmans Food Markets.

In 2021, Salesforce is being praised as one of the most agile companies when it came to reacting to the pandemic. The company has applied its core principles into its own practice. Brent Hyder, the company’s Chief People Officer, wrote that the 9-to-5 workday is dead in their office towers. In Salesforce, employees’ workspace is no longer limited to their desks.

The company itself found its business accelerating during the outbreak. It posted a better fourth-quarter result than estimated. Early revenue projections were at about $5.68 billion. The actual earnings stood at $5.82 billion. Moreover, the actual earnings per share also outdid the earlier projection of 75 cents. The company rallied with earnings per share of $1.04.

How was its yearly performance? Well, it registered a $21.25 billion fiscal revenue. This is a 24% YoY increase and a new record. And, moving forward, the company is strongly advocating a “flex” way of working to cut down on expenditures from travel and other operating costs. This is taking their SaaS culture to heart.

As Marc Benioff, Salesforce’s CEO, stated, “when you’re digitally enabled, you can go anywhere just much, much faster.”

What is Salesforce?

Salesforce.com, Inc. is an innovative cloud computing company that specializes in its CRM product, which is one of the most popular in its industry. In addition to CRM for Sales and Marketing, it offers a complete customer success platform solution for managing all interactions with your prospects and customers to drive customer growth and success.

The Company

Founded in 1999, the company pioneered moving CRM software from the traditional desktop deployment to the revolutionary and modern cloud technology. Since then, Salesforce continued to grow its user base by helping companies get access to easy-to-use yet robust tools and technologies to grow their businesses. This eventually landed them the prestige of being the world’s 4th largest software company.

Salesforce has 59 work sites scattered around the world. Headquartered in San Francisco, it also has offices in the Asia Pacific, United States, Canada, Latin America and the Caribbean, Europe, Middle East, and Africa. With over 17,000 employees, Salesforce continuously ranks high in Fortune’s list of 100 Best Companies to Work For. The company has been on the list for 11 years. In 2019, it was ranked second after dropping from its 1st spot in 2018’s list. In 2020, as mentioned, it sits as a strong six overall.

Salesforce is widely recognized for its corporate culture with a rewarding work environment from rich rewards both monetary and psychic to employee philanthropy of dedicated “mindfulness” rooms, among others.

The company’s sustainability leadership efforts are also worth mentioning. Ranking #11 in Barron’s 2019 list of 100 Most Sustainable Companies, it has proven to be a tech company that harnesses innovation while considering the state of the environment. It does so by achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions globally and delivering a carbon-neutral cloud to its customers.

The Products

Salesforce’s products run entirely in the cloud. Hence, companies don’t have to worry about expensive maintenance and setup costs. Furthermore, cloud technology enables your employees to work from any device—smartphone, tablet, or laptop—anywhere they are and at any time, as long as there’s an internet connection. With these, the company reinvented the way this enterprise software is used and delivered. It also made the solution available to companies of any size, from small businesses to large enterprises.

Salesforce developed a variety of products to offer an end-to-end solution, specifically for what you’re looking for, which you can explore for your industry, business type, role, or need. With that in mind, let’s proceed to have these Salesforce products explained so you can find the right solution that suits your needs best.

All Salesforce Products Explained

Salesforce CRM is the primary offering within the Salesforce platform. It does more than just manage contacts; it also tracks all your sales activity in every lead, customer, and opportunity. It has a pay-as-you-go model, which lowers the cost of implementing the system. Meanwhile, cloud technology doesn’t require you to install expensive in-house hardware and computer servers.

As Salesforce transforms its products to become an overall customer success platform, it created a variety of CRM categories and systems to fit your needs best. Salesforce products are also deeply integrated and often share the same tools and modules. Here are the major Salesforce products you should explore.

1. Salesforce Sales Cloud

Salesforce Sales Cloud is the CRM tool (it is commonly called Salesforce CRM). You can use it to drive growth to your accounts, find customers, and close deals. Some of its top features include contact management, opportunity management, lead management, reports and dashboards, sales forecasting, workflows and approvals, sales collaboration, territory management, and partner management.

Salesforce Sales Cloud pricing comes in fully customizable CRM editions: Lightning Professional for a complete CRM tool for teams of any size ($75/user/month), Lightning Enterprise for highly-customizable CRM ($150/user/month), and Lightning Unlimited for unlimited CRM functionality and support ($300/user/month).

It is easy to get started with the CRM features at no cost.

Salesforce CRM

Try out Salesforce CRM with their free trial

Salesforce Essentials

If these prices are too steep for you, you may check out Salesforce Essentials. It is an out-of-the-box CRM platform for small businesses with up to 5 users. This package costs $25/user/month for features such as account and contact management, opportunity management, customizable sales processes, task management, activity feed, Einstein Activity Capture, and the ability to sell using any device.

Salesforce IQ

Additionally, Sales Cloud also has the product SalesforceIQ, which connects Sales Cloud and email to empower salespeople to sell smartly and provide outstanding customer service for all customers, thanks to its built-in intelligence. Powered by relationship intelligence technology, this helps small and medium-sized businesses to gain deeper insights into their customers and sell more.

Salesforce CPQ

Salesforce CPQ, another essential product under Sales Cloud, gives you the ability to sell and bill in a single platform. This allows you to deliver complete support to your customer lifecycle from lead to retention. Its tools can be used by your sales teams and channel partners to configure, price, and quote quickly, even on complex deals. It also automates pricing, approvals, and discounts so you can maximize your revenue and margins.

This solution enables you to offer one-time, subscription, or usage-based pricing models with ease when you launch products. This streamlines complex billing requirements and electronic payments for invoices and cash collection. Its array of solutions includes a product configurator, price and quote, proposals and contracts, orders and renewals, subscription billing, and billing automation, among others.

Salesforce Data Management

Salesforce Data.com is Salesforce’s first native and complete data solution inside its technology. This data management solution gives your team access to insights and contacts right in Salesforce. It offers three Data.com specific plans based on your needs: Data.com Clean, Data.com Prospector, and Data.com Connect.

Data.com Clean is for automatically cleaning and enriching your account, contact, and lead data. Data.com Prospector is designed to gain deeper insights and understanding of your accounts by adding relevant account and contact data to your database. Meanwhile, Data.com Connect is an online community where people can easily access and share business contacts.

Salesforce also introduced another data solution, Lightning Data, this year on the Salesforce App Exchange. It is a collection of third-party data applications that seamlessly integrate with Salesforce. The solutions are built to enrich your CRM data for a better strategy in sales, marketing, and business. Hence, this requires the usage of Salesforce Sales Cloud or Service Cloud.

2. Salesforce Service Cloud

Salesforce Service Cloud specializes as a customer service application. It helps you deliver more personalized support through various channels such as email, live chat, and phone. Its console shows your agents all relevant details to a case from any department to boost agency productivity. A self-service portal with a custom-branded community enables customers to look for answers independently to reduce case volume.

Salesforce Live Agent

This solution also has additional digital service channels. For instance, Salesforce Live Agent features include a personalized live chat so you can engage customers in real-time both online and in-app via Snap-ins (here’s a Salesforce Snap-ins overview you can read). Each live chat is connected to the customer’s profile to deliver support in-context while contributing to the overall customer experience.

Salesforce LiveMessage

Meanwhile, Salesforce LiveMessage is a mobile messaging solution to stay connected with your customers on the go. This offers a more convenient method of providing a solution without getting tied to the web browser. Personalized conversations happen in the messaging app preferred by the customer—SMS or Facebook Messenger.

Salesforce Field Service Management

Salesforce Field Service Lightning is another product offered in the Service Cloud. It is designed to connect your workforce with onsite service to improve first-visit resolution and onsite job management. Users can access van inventory, job schedules, and knowledge articles with or without an internet connection. This solution supports any field service role. It has packages for employees (mobile employees and dispatchers) and contractors to match your needs.

3. Salesforce Marketing Cloud

Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a cloud marketing automation platform that empowers you to deliver relevant and personalized journeys across different channels and devices. It was developed so that marketers can send the right messages to the right recipient at the right time, throughout all the phases of the customer relationship. Covering each customer interaction and engagement, marketers can guide customers’ one-to-one journey with ease and efficiency.

Salesforce Engage

Salesforce Pardot has a marketing automation solution for sales called Salesforce Engage. It is designed to empower the collaboration of sales and marketing teams to close deals faster, enhance buyer experience, and create tailored campaigns with marketing-curated content. It automatically logs interactions between Salesforce and Pardot to circulate one-to-one emails from your chosen email interface such as Gmail and Outlook. Its main features cover campaigns, reports, alerts, and mobile interfaces with a focal point on engagement.

Marketing Cloud Products

As an overview, these are the integrated customer journey solutions of Marketing Cloud:

1. Salesforce Journey Builder. This is for delivering personalized and connected cross-channel experiences for every customer interaction at every phase of the customer lifecycle. This B2C journey management tool helps you define customer experiences and relationships, align your marketing message in each channel, and quickly adapt to your customers’ needs.
2. Salesforce Email Studio. This is an email marketing platform that helps you create basic and sophisticated marketing campaigns with 1-to-1 messages. It unifies data from each of your departments to build a smart and effective email marketing campaign. For instance, profile data can be used for refining your subscriber list and segmentation.
3. Salesforce DMP. This data management platform strengthens your customer relationships by capturing and centralizing customer data. It maximizes the use of data from any source so you can create and improve customer relationships across each channel. Additionally, it captures complete data profiles and uncovers new, deep insights.
4. Salesforce Advertising Studio. This product is designed for integrating your marketing and CRM data with digital advertising. Harnessing your CRM data at a scale enables you to drive your display, Google, and Facebook advertising. Connecting your channels also give you consistency and help you gain new prospects based on the behavior of your current high-value customers.
5. Salesforce Mobile Studio. This marketing solution enables you to reach customers through mobile messaging with SMS marketing, group messages, and push notifications. It simplifies the creation and delivery of highly-targeted SMS and MMS messages. Meanwhile, customer preferences and behaviors are used to target your audience and send relevant messages to drive engagement.
6. Social Studio. This is a solution for combining your marketing tool with popular social media marketing platforms. It streamlines creating, approving, and publishing content on multiple social networks and accounts with brand consistency. A single interface lets you monitor your social and marketing activity with in-depth explorations.
7. Interaction Studio. This is where you can visualize, monitor, and manage your customer experiences in real-time. It helps you see cross-channel consumer insights at any touchpoint on any channel, optimize customer experience and engagement, and synchronize each interaction. With its native integration with the Salesforce platform’s marketing, sales, and service solutions, it easily triggers events and communication in real-time.

4. Salesforce Community Cloud

Salesforce Community Cloud is a platform where you can build a community for everyone relevant to your business ecosystem. This means you don’t just collaborate and connect with customers, employees, and partners, you also get in touch with job applicants, agencies, vendors, suppliers, and retail locations, among others. As an online social platform, it boosts collaboration, communication, and sharing of files, data, and records anywhere using any device.

Salesforce Partner Relationship Management

Community Cloud offers the business solution: Salesforce Partner Relationship Management. It helps you in onboarding partners, providing support, and driving demand to your channel. The Partner Central template simplifies your partner management processes. This empowers you to improve partner satisfaction and drive revenue. Partners also get their hands on the same tools used by your internal teams so that they can spend more time selling products instead of looking for information.

Community Cloud is priced according to the type of community you are creating. Each community type—Employee, Partner, and Customer—starts at a base price. Since it is built on the Salesforce platform, data is directly transferred to the community and can be connected with any third-party application.

5. Salesforce Platform

Salesforce Platform is a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) that gives you all the essential tools and services you need to build apps. Built on Salesforce’s cloud infrastructure, CIOs can easily and quickly build apps in any language for any device. It has a single, unified, and enterprise cloud environment where businesses and IT teams can conduct app development with no-code builders, built-in enterprise services, and pro-code tools. This enables you to extend the functionality of your sales and service solutions by creating apps for any of your departments. Every role and department, such as marketing, finance, legal, and HR, get access to apps that automate their business processes with more efficacy.

Salesforce Lightning

Additionally, there is Salesforce Lightning, which offers a family of technologies for the Salesforce Platform. These are Lightning Experience (Salesforce’s new user interface for SalesForce), Lightning Design System (for building Lightning-styled apps in a CSS framework and component library), and Lightning Framework (for building Lightning Components and single-page apps with a Javascript framework).

App Development Tools

With that, here are the tools you can use to build apps on Lightning Platform:

1. Salesforce Environments. A secure and isolated development environment for developers and admins to test ideas, accelerate app development, and customize the platform. IT organizations can then easily choose which and when to deploy apps. This enables teams to work together safely without impacting the production org.
2. Heroku. It lets you extend Salesforce by building engaging experiences through custom apps. Developers have the freedom to code in their preferred open-source language such as Ruby, Python, Java, and Node.js. It offers three quick-start options to start building apps, which are Hobby, Developer Starter Kit, and Production Starter Kit.
3. mySalesforce. This solution enables you to easily and quickly create, design, and launch custom-branded mobile apps for employees in every department. Its drag-and-drop development tools simplify the app’s customization with your icons, corporate colors, and visual identity elements. Publishing the app to Google Play and App Store is optimized with Salesforce’s Listing Wizard.
4. myEinstein. This is a layer of intelligence that brings AI technologies to admins and developers right where they work. Einstein Platform services are designed for creating AI-powered apps with tools such as Einstein Prediction Builder, Einstein Vision, Einstein Bots, Einstein Language, and Einstein Discovery.
5. Salesforce App Cloud. An enterprise PaaS for developers, this solution is loaded with features for low-code development, a full-fledged component, an app marketplace, and visual app development tools. It supports developing enterprise apps that integrate with open frameworks you prefer.

Platform Services

1. Salesforce Shield. It offers point-and-click tools that protect your enterprise. This focuses on meeting compliance policies with Platform Encryption to safeguard data privacy and confidentiality. Natively encrypting your data at rest across your Salesforce apps is optimized.
2. Salesforce IoT Cloud. It lets you connect your data with your IoT products, sensors, and devices in real-time. With its accessibility to anyone, those who are not programmers can quickly build, test, and iterate business ideas without using code. It also gives you complete visibility over your real customers’ product usage and performance. Additionally, you can develop and create meaningful customer experiences in real-time across your integrated apps.
3. Einstein Analytics. With its mobile-first design, it empowers your team to always access data-driven answers wherever they work using tablets, watches, and phones. It gives you a centralized location to easily import, blend, and explore multiple data sources.
4. Salesforce Identity. This is an identity management solution that streamlines user access in a single identity and logins for employees, partners, and customers. It gives everyone a convenient sign-in experience for all your cloud, on-premise, and mobile apps. It also simplifies the management of apps, users, and data sharing with security and transparency.
5. Salesforce Bolt. If you are looking to extend your CRM with Communities, this tool can help you enrich your digital experiences for employees, partners, and customers with speed. Coding isn’t required in creating custom-branded communities as you can quickly launch a templated community or design a fully-customized experience.

6. Salesforce Einstein

If you need a business analytics solution, Salesforce Einstein is worth checking out. This mobile-first analytics platform works with any data from any source. Its three main features include an attractive data visualization and user-friendly mobile interface, instant data exploration, and fast cloud speed at scale as it is natively integrated into Salesforce.

Salesforce Analytics Cloud

Powered by Einstein Analytics, you can connect data from multiple sources and build interactive data views in the Salesforce Analytics Cloud platform.

Einstein Analytics products include Sales Analytics, Service Analytics, B2B Marketing Analytics, Einstein Analytics Platform, and Einstein Discovery. Its purpose-built analytics apps are developed for uncovering insights, exploring data, and instantly taking action for every member of your business using any device.

7. Salesforce Collaboration

Quip, a subsidiary of Salesforce after its 2016 acquisition, is a content collaboration product that empowers teams to collaborate in a cloud-based technology using desktop and mobile. It deeply integrates the sharing of documents, spreadsheets, and slides with Salesforce and real-time chat. Built for any team—sales, service, marketing, IT, and product, among others, this tool drives productivity and efficiency by working smarter and working anywhere.

This collaboration solution lets you import existing documents directly from Google Drive, Dropbox, Microsoft Word, Evernote, and email accounts in addition to letting you create your Quip spreadsheets and documents. Salesforce offers the tool in two simple pricing plans, which starts at $10/user/month for unlimited storage, integrations, and customer support. It costs $25/user/month for Quip Enterprise, which enables access to Salesforce integrations and enterprise API.

8. Salesforce Commerce Cloud

Salesforce Commerce Cloud is an ecommerce platform that helps your brand grow faster and convert more leads into customers. It unifies the purchasing experience of customers as it integrates all touchpoints. This gives you a 360-degree view of your inventory, orders, and activities, among others. It also offers mobile commerce with mobile-first capabilities such as one-touch payment and optimized micro-moments.

Available in B2B Commerce and B2C Commerce standalone product lines or as end-to-end, unified ecommerce products, this solution is commonly used by C-level executives and individuals responsible for a brand’s customer and store experiences.

Commerce Cloud Solutions

B2C Commerce is designed to transform shopping experiences powered with AI in all your digital channels—mobile, social media, website, and store. Its solutions focus on creating digital commerce experiences, overseeing marketing and merchandising with campaigns and promotions, and personalization with AI. Here are its products:

1. Salesforce Order Management. It transforms stores into distribution centers by activating and selling in-store products online. It manages order lifecycles, status, and history to ensure a consistent order capture process. This also unifies retail operations tailored to your specific needs.
2. Endless Aisle. This lets you extend your digital commerce into the store by giving in-store customers with unlimited product options and online-only products, ensuring store associates access to inventory in real-time for any product location, and offering multiple fulfillment options.

B2B Commerce is a cloud-based commerce solution to meet the online purchasing needs of the business buyer. The solution doesn’t require a data scientist to personalize purchasing recommendations for each customer. Tailored to B2B customers, its easy-to-use features can help you maximize your online growth, drive revenue, engage customers seamlessly, and scale quickly.

The two options are offered in quote-based plans. Both are equipped with unique solutions catered to your business needs.

9. Salesforce Integration Cloud

Salesforce has an integration platform to connect SaaS and enterprise applications. MuleSoft Anypoint Platform by Salesforce helps users create connected customer experiences and connect any system, whether it’s Salesforce or not. It was added in the Salesforce Integration Cloud after Salesforce’s acquisition of MuleSoft to enable enterprises to surface data anywhere it resides and to deliver connected experiences across channels and touchpoints.

The API-led connectivity future proofs your integrations so you won’t be stuck with inflexible custom code. Teams can also reuse integration assets, which enable building upon previous projects and innovating for new strategies. Its features include prebuilt assets, advanced protection policies and configurations, and runtime engine, among others.

10. Salesforce Industry Products

Salesforce also offers industry-specific products. These are developed to transform each aspect and facet of your business processes and meet your specific challenges using products built in Salesforce. Here are Salesforce’s industry products:

1. Salesforce Financial Services Cloud. Powered by Einstein artificial intelligence and Lightning, it empowers financial institutions to deliver experiences that are smarter and more connected. It supports banking and wealth management for wealth advisors, bankers, business executives, insurance agents, service operations, and IT executives.
2. Salesforce Health Cloud. This gives you individual profiles of patients such as demographics, clinical and nonclinical data, communications, membership and claims systems, EHR information, medical devices, and wearables, among others. This patient engagement software streamlines secure communication, reminders, schedules, and patient registration.
3. Salesforce Government Cloud. Its single, integrated platform speeds up access to information, simplifies workflows, and improves internal and external communication for government agencies to offer better transparency and convenience to customers. It is used by federal, state and local, government contractors and defense agencies.
4. Salesforce Philanthropy Cloud. This global platform connects employees, partners, and customers to charitable causes they care about. For instance, you can easily connect employees to causes and volunteer activities according to preference, philanthropic history, and location.

Find Your All-In-One Comprehensive Business Solution

There you go, all major Salesforce products are all in one place. We hope that this helps you understand what these business solutions are. However, don’t get overwhelmed. In most cases, new Salesforce users start with the popular CRM tool and just branch out to more sophisticated add-ons. If you want to investigate the features closely, you can easily do so when you sign up for Salesforce CRM free trial.

But, this is just the start. As discussed in the article, there are many specialized Salesforce tools that you can use to enhance how you go about business in today’s connected world. Just use this article as a guide.

If you are interested in learning more about this topic and how other companies are using this type of technology, be sure to check out our article on emerging SaaS trends.

By Nestor Gilbert

Nestor Gilbert is a senior B2B and SaaS analyst and a core contributor at FinancesOnline for over 5 years. With his experience in software development and extensive knowledge of SaaS management, he writes mostly about emerging B2B technologies and their impact on the current business landscape. However, he also provides in-depth reviews on a wide range of software solutions to help businesses find suitable options for them. Through his work, he aims to help companies develop a more tech-forward approach to their operations and overcome their SaaS-related challenges.