Sales Cloud is a cloud-based application designed to help your salespeople sell smarter and faster by centralizing customer information, logging their interactions with your company, and automating many of the tasks salespeople do every day. This means they’ll spend less time on administration and more time closing deals. For sales managers, Sales Cloud gives real-time visibility into their team’s activities, so forecasting sales with confidence is easy. Best of all, Sales Cloud is easy to use and customizable to the way your salespeople work. 

Close more deals — Sales Cloud helps you keep track of all your customer information and interactions in a single place that’s accessible from anywhere, any time. Always have the most up-to-date contact information, find experts inside your organization to quickly answer customer questions, and see all relevant customer activities to move deals forward.

Get more leads — Not everyone who visits a site or responds to an email is a lead. Sales Cloud helps nurture those potential customers along until they’re a quality lead who’s ready to buy, then it automatically routes them to the right reps at the right time. 

Accelerate productivity — Sales Cloud lets you do more, from anywhere. Log calls, respond to hot leads, work opportunities, and check dashboards no matter where you are. Drive even more productivity by automating complex business processes.

Make insightful decisions — Sales Cloud dashboards give salespeople a real-time picture of the business at a glance. Detailed customer activity reports help you track the effectiveness of marketing campaigns, determine business priorities, and make smart decisions based on the most up-to-date information. 

Sales Cloud is designed to help salespeople sell smarter and faster, allowing them to easily manage the company’s contacts, accounts, leads, opportunities, quotes, and deals all in one place. Service Cloud, on the other hand, helps companies run and improve their customer service using accounts, contacts, cases, and solutions. It’s designed to help support past, current, and future customer service requests to help companies retain their existing customers. The decision of which you need depends on which area of your business you’re trying to improve.

Sales Cloud is built on a robust and flexible security architecture trusted by companies around the world, including those in the most heavily regulated industries — from financial services, to healthcare, to government. Trusted by more than 150,000 companies across all industries and around the world, the platform provides security and control over everything from user and client authentication through administrative permissions to the data access and sharing model.

Org Security — Salesforce protects your organization’s data from all other customer data by using a unique identifier that restricts access to your data at every level from anyone outside of your company — including us. 

User Security — User authentication (both delegated and SAML) combined with network-level security by IP address, session restrictions, and audit trails provides control and visibility into what users are doing in the system and their field history.

Programmatic Security — Configurable authenticated sessions secure access to logic, data, and metadata. Salesforce even offers a source code scanner that produces a report analyzing the security of your code.

Trust and Visibility — Trust starts with transparency, so Salesforce displays real-time information on system performance and security, and offers tips on best security practices for your organization. Learn more at trust.salesforce.com.

Lightning Experience for Sales Cloud is a whole new user experience that helps salespeople sell smarter, faster, and the way they want. Lightning doesn’t have a tab interface like Aloha does; instead, information is surfaced as needed, so you get it when you need it. Lightning also has a new home page with an Account Insights feature that surfaces any news relevant to your accounts and opportunities, as well as an Assistant feature that prompts your next steps to keep things moving forward. Of course, for users who love the original look and feel, Sales Cloud Classic will still be available.

Once your Salesforce account is activated, you can start using Lightning Experience at any time by clicking your name in the upper-right corner of your account and selecting “Switch to Lightning Experience.” Once in Lightning Experience, you can easily return to Salesforce Classic by clicking your profile picture (again in the upper-right corner) and selecting “Switch to Salesforce Classic.” Salesforce Admins are able to configure, enable, or disable access to Lightning Experience for the entire organization or for a subset of users.

Yes. You can continue using Salesforce Classic, and you can easily switch back to Salesforce Classic from Lightning Experience. We will continue to provide support for Salesforce Classic for the foreseeable future.