Salesforce.com Sales Cloud Consultant Certification Exam Preparation

I passed Salesforce.com Sales Cloud Consultant Certification Exam in March 2012. Haven’t got time since to share my thoughts about the exam. Personally I found Sales Cloud Consultant Certification Exam tougher than Service Cloud Consultant Certification Exam although I worked more on Sales Cloud in my Salesforce.com projects.

I am positing here my notes that I have made while preparing for Sales Cloud Consultant Certification of Salesforce.com. The notes are organized topic wise and I have prepared them while studying for these topics for future reference – thought this may help others while preparing for Sales Cloud Consultant Certification Exam.

These are not exhaustive notes – just some indicators. They in no way replace the study material. There are some topics which may be missing also as I have not got time to note for all of them. Do let me know if there are any mistakes by writing in the comments below.

Note – This post is still a work in progress – some part of it are unfinished. Will update when I get time

Industry Knowledge (3)

Industry knowledge mainly covered metrics related to Sales and Marketing. Here are some important metrics according to a SFDC document and one of the popular industry reference:

http://assets.salesforce.com/pdf/crm_metrics_to_measure_final_5.16.05.pdf

http://www.scribd.com/doc/23807994/For-business-success-mind-your-metrics

Sales metrics

• Number of prospects
•  Number of new customers
•  Number of retained customers
•  Number of open opportunities
•  Close rate
•  Renewal rate
•  Number of sales calls
•  Number of sales call per opportunity
•  Amount of new revenue
•  Amount of recurring revenue
•  Time to close by channel
•  Margin
•  Sales stage duration
•  Sales cycle duration
•  Number of sales calls made
•  Number of proposals given
•  Competitive knockouts

Marketing Metrics

•  Number of campaigns
•  New customer retention rates
•  Number of responses by campaign
•  Number of purchases by campaign
•  Revenue generated by campaign
•  Cost per interaction by campaign
•  Number of new customers acquired by campaign
•  Customer retention rate
•  Number of new leads by product
•  Number of customer referrals

Other industry sources

Radian 6

http://www.radian6.com/blog/2010/03/10-key-sales-metrics-to-track/

1. Lead Volume – How many leads did you get through particular channels
2. Cost Per Lead
3. Lead Value – ((Deal Value for Qualified Lead) x Customer Retention Rate) x Average Conversion Rate
4. Conversion Rate – percentage of leads that convert to actual sales
5. Referrals
6. Retantion rate
7. Average Transaction Value Per Account Value
8. Sales Value Per Fan / Follower
9. Time to close
10. Highest value Lead Sources

Top-line Strategies

http://www.toplinestrategies.com/revenuemasters/it-professional-services/salesforce-sales-cloud-the-factors-that-influence-sales-metrics-kpiskey-performance-indicatiors-and-business-challenges/

1. Top X in Sales Revenue. (X can be products, reps, cities etc.)
2. Bottom 10% of Products by Sales
3. Percentage of Sales Growth (Current period sales revenue – Previous period sales revenue) / Previous period sales revenue
4. New vs. Repeated Business
5. Customer Loyalty (Total – Number of customers who cancelled or did not renew during the period / by the total number of customers)
6. Sales Per Sales Rep or % on Quota – Actual Sales / Quota Amount = Percentage on Target
7. Sales by Contact “Method X” For each contact type: # of sales / total # of contacts (email, calls, visits)
8. Quote to Closing Ration # of wins / # of quotes
9. Units or Revenue Per Transaction (UPT) – Total # units sold / Total # of transactions
10. A) Sales Quota Attainment. Sales in period / Quota for period – OR – (Sales in period – Quota in period) / Quota in period
11. B) Sales Forecast Accuracy

Sales territory

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sales_territory
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sales_operations

Implementation Strategies (8)

To be added

Sales Cloud Solution Design (25)

• Refer Online course: Sales Cloud Success: Implementing Sales and Marketing
  • Sales Cloud Goals
    • More Leads
      • Effective Campaigns
      • Lead Quality
      • Alignment
    • Increase revenue
      • Sales process
      • Data quality
      • Accurate forecast
    • Productivity
      • Automation
      • Collaboration
• Refer Online course: Implementing CRM Essentials
• Refer Online course: Implementing the Sales Cloud
• Refer Online course: Creating a Salesforce to Salesforce Connection
• Refer Implementation Guide:  A Guide to Sharing Architecture
  • Link: https://na1.salesforce.com/help/doc/en/sharing_architecture.pdf
  • Licenses
    • Full Sharing Model Usage Users/Licenses
    • High Volume Customer Portal License – Do not utilize sharing model and have own sharing model. HVPU licenses have their own sharing model that works by foreign key match between the portal user (holding the license) and the data on Account and Contact lookups
    • Chatter Free License: does not follows standard sharing model: Chatter Free is a collaboration-only license with the following features: Chatter Central, Profile, People, Groups, Files, Chatter Desktop, and Chatter Mobile
  • Components
    • Profiles and Permission Sets
    • Record Ownership and Queues
  • Organization-Wide Defaults
  • Role Hierarchy
  • Public Groups: a collection of individual users, roles, territories. When you need to provide access to an arbitrary group of people, you create a public group.
  • Sharing rules
    • Ownership-based Sharing Rules
    • Criteria-based Sharing Rules
    • Manual Sharing
  • Teams: Do teams give access to child records?
  • Territory Hierarchy
    • The territory hierarchy is a single dimensional, additional hierarchy which can be structured by business units or any kind of segmentation in a hierarchical structure.
    • Territories exist only on Account, Opportunity and master/detail children of Accounts and Opportunities
  • Account Territory Sharing Rules
  • Implicit Sharing
  • The Account Hierarchies Impact on Data Access – Account hierarchy – only having a parent/child relationship between two records does not drive access. e role hierarchy and the territory hierarchy do work in this way.
• Refer Implementation Guide:  Deploying Territory Management
  • https://na7.salesforce.com/help/doc/en/salesforce_territories_implementation_guide.pdf
  • Territory Management is available only with Customizable Forecasts and not supported with the Winter ’12 release of Forecasts
  • Territory management only affects accounts and the standard objects that have a master-detail relationship to accounts. For example, opportunities are included in territory management but leads are not
  • Not only can you control access to accounts for users in each territory, you can also control users’ access to the opportunities and cases associated with the accounts in the territory, regardless of who owns the records
  • two sharing groups are created one for the territory, and another for the territory and its children
  • Deactivated users continue to own opportunities and appear in forecasts and territories. When users are deactivated, their opportunity forecast overrides, adjusted total overrides, and manager’s choice overrides on subordinates’ forecasts are frozen. manager of a deactivated user can apply manager’s choice overrides
  • Active in Territory – Users with Active in Territory checked on the territory detail page have open opportunities, closed opportunities, or no opportunities at all in that territory. Users with Active in Territory deselected have been transferred out of or removed from the territory, but retain ownership of opportunities in the old territory
  • Account territory assignment rules
• Refer Implementation Guide:  International Organizations: Using Multiple Currencies
  • https://na7.salesforce.com/help/doc/en/salesforce_using_multiple_currencies.pdf
  • Each division can track, forecast, and report on opportunities in local currencies, while providing company-wide reporting and forecasting in a single common currency
  • All currency amounts display in the record’s currency and are also converted to the personal currency of the record owner
  • Amounts such as Annual Revenue will display in record currency as well as in your personal currency
  • your quota amounts are displayed in your personal currency
  • all amounts in your forecast are shown in your personal currency. If you have opportunities in different currencies, those amounts are converted to your personal currency for display; the actual amounts in the opportunities are not affected.
  • In a manager’s forecast, his or her team’s forecast amounts are converted and rolled up in the manager’s personal currency. manager can drill down into the users’ forecasts and opportunities to see the amounts in their original currencies.
  • Amounts in reports are shown in their original currencies, but can be displayed in any active currency
  • Change currency used for report totals by selecting a currency from Show > Currencies
  • The default value for the drop-down is your is personal currency
  • to capture any currency amount information (for example, Annual Revenue) in your Web-to-Lead or Web-to-Case add the Lead Currency or Case Currency field when generating the HTML form
  • personal imports all amounts in new accounts and contacts are imported in your personal currency
  • importing accounts and contacts or leads for your organization entering a currency code in the “Currency ISO Code” column in your import file

Marketing and Leads (8)

• Refer Implementation Guide:  Campaign Management
  • https://login.salesforce.com/help/doc/en/salesforce_campaign_implementation_guide.pdf
  • Campaigns primary goals
    • Lead generation – direct mail, email blasts, web seminars, conferences, and trade shows. directly generate new prospects. can easily track the effectiveness of each campaign
    • Brand building – print advertisements, billboards, and radio advertisements. may not generate direct responses, so the calculation of campaign ROI may not be as straightforward
  • two main groups to whom you can market
    • Existing customers
    • Prospects
• Refer Online course: Configuring Campaigns to Maximize Your ROI

Account and Contact Management (15)

• Refer Implementation Guide:  Implementing Person Accounts
  • If your organization has been enabled with person accounts,  you have two different kinds of accounts: business accounts and Person Accounts
  • Person accounts  have a combination of fields from both accounts and contacts, and can be used as contacts in most situations that involve
  • If your organization has a partner portal, you can create partner accounts. Partner accounts are business accounts that a channel manager uses to manage partner organizations, partner users, and activities
  • The ability for person accounts to act like contacts is made possible by applying an account record type
  • Considerations
    • Person accounts can only be merged with other person accounts
    • Account Quick Create based on default record type
    • you can use the Partners related list to track relationships between different person accounts
    • Contact sharing is not available if you have enabled person accounts (Need to change organization-wide default for contacts to Controlled by Parent)
    • After enabled list of account fields at Your Name > Setup > Customize > Accounts > Fields will always include contact fields

Opportunity Management (18)

Refer to the following online courses:

• Online course: Introduction to Quotes for Sales Reps
• Online course: Products, Price Books and Assets
• Online course: Forecasting for Sales Reps and Managers
• Online course: Forecasting for Administrators

Sales Productivity (10)

Refer to the following online courses:

• Online course: Salesforce Mobile
• Online course: Getting Started with Data.com
• Online course: Getting a Head Start with Chatter
• Online course: Working with Salesforce for Outlook
• Online course: Salesforce CRM Content for Administrators

Site and Portal Management (3)

To be added

Sales Cloud Analytics (5)

To be added

Integration and Data Management (5)

To be added