A clever way to manage your salesforce licenses WITH SALESFORCE Experience CLOUD

It's clear that companies want to spread the value of their CRM among their employees, customers and partners. Their is a way not only to engage with them in a new digital manner, but also grow sales, decrease the service costs and improve loyalty. Meet Experience Cloud.

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As we know, the bread and butter of Salesforce — Sales and Service Cloud licenses have the basic price of $105/month for Professional Edition and $190/month for Enterprise Edition, paid per seat on an annual basis.

Of course, most companies want to engage with their partners and customers with the help of the CRM. Those who are not familiar well with Salesforce products, may start considering thoroughly the people they will need to provide access to the system, or even look at the proposals of other CRM vendors.

We often notice this kind of doubt in the Salesforce projects we deal with, so here's a reminder and advice on how you can use your resources effectively, cut down on Salesforce license costs and engage with more partners in your CRM. Meet Salesforce Communities.

Salesforce Experience Cloud is an effective technology that allows you to build interactive web-portals to interact with your partners, customers, and employees.

What's the aim of building communities? With Salesforce Experience Cloud, you can:

Partner Communities, in particular, provide your business partners with access to your database via the web interface tailored to your needs and permissions. Thus, it becomes possible to place orders, trace their fulfilment and stock updates, get reports on collaboration metrics — and all that without spending efforts on manual information processing.

The special part about Experience Cloud is the price of Salesforce Experience licenses — from $5 to $35 per seat per month. It puts them in the row of the most affordable CRM systems in the market, but with powerful capabilities of the leading cloud platform.

To use Experience Cloud, you have to purchase and allocate Community Licenses to your customers and partners, so that they have their credentials (login and password) to control access, permissions, and personalize UX.

This way, Salesforce Experience Cloud enables people to use their browsers to log in under their credentials to your interactive web-portal, input information directly into your database where it's processed, and get feedback and reports on their activities.

What exactly can you achieve with Salesforce Communities within your organization? Let's take a look at the most popular examples.

If you have a distributed network of sales commission agents, or brick and mortar shops with your representatives who need to work with the system and you can clearly define the basic sales flows to be automated for your sales reps — Experience Cloud is a great choice.

You can build a portal that will have all necessary tools to plan and report:

You can embed Community into your overall sales management system. Your office sales reps and managers will use full Salesforce licenses, and remote agents will use Community licenses — and they all will be working with one database.

An organization that considers implementing Salesforce usually possesses an already existing landscape of IT solutions used by different departments and services.

For instance, an IT service desk can use Jira or a similar tool to track technical tickets. How to help them get connected to the Line 1 customer service that creates Cases upon customer requests?

Create a Community for them that will provide your technical support service with access to filtered Cases, allowing to modify, escalate, or resolve them.

And all that will be immediately reflected in the interface of your customer service.

What are the most typical needs for managing the daily requests of people in your organization?

All that gets really effective with necessary materials stored and timely updated in Salesforce.

There's another type of Salesforce Community licenses — when you pay per login session, and not per month. The basic price for such licenses is $2 per 24-hour session. And obviously, that becomes really effective in case you need to process relatively seldom applications of your employees.

One of the challenges that any organization faces is how to prevent information from its distribution in disconnected silos. Using per-session licenses helps to collect information in one place, and make it accessible and reportable for the needs of management.

Another example of internal collaboration in a company is the budgeting process. It usually requires people to exchange budget applications and approvals on a regular basis, and use the tools of actual plan/fact tracking for all expenses for employees and management.

So, Community licenses are also a great tool for that, as it enables all Salesforce collaboration means: files exchange, Chatter, approval process, spreadsheets, and forms necessary to automate any process, including Budgeting.

So, with all these benefits of collaboration within an organization using Salesforce Experience Cloud, let's discuss what's required to achieve that from a technical and financial standpoint.

To enable Experience Cloud, you need to have at least one full Enterprise Edition license (Sales or Service Cloud) on your Salesforce org. That means that if you're using Professional licenses, unfortunately, you don't have access to this useful tool, so maybe that's a great reason to consider an upgrade.

On the second hand, initial configuration of the internal interactive portals (that includes building forms and controlling elements, markup and styling, permissions management) will require certain investments.