In recent years there has been a significant increase in cloud computing based technologies. Among many of these technologies that have become available recently, Salesforce has made an immense impact on the information technology world. Salesforce (SF) is one of the largest technology companies in the world today. Chances are, as a beginner, you’ve never heard of it. But think about the big tech giants you’ve heard about ie Apple, Facebook, Uber, right? Salesforce is the one that drives them.
Before Salesforce, CRM or customer relationship management solutions were simply hosted on their own servers. Businesses have had huge expenses and a huge need for high-end technical know-how to run CRM solutions. Salesforce has created a one stop shop solution to all of these problems by offering an affordable CRM as a service delivered online. As a Software as a Service (SaaS) provider, Salesforce is now the fifth largest software services company in the world.
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A bit of company history
Salesforce was founded in 1999 as a cloud computing services company. Marc Benioff, the founder of Salesforce, started with the vision of creating CRM software that was easy to use the way the Amazon platform works. Now, 21 years later, Salesforce leads the CRM software market by dominating about 20% of it. Since 1999, Salesforce has developed a wide range of products that enable companies to connect more effectively with their customers.
Why should you choose Salesforce?
The most important thing that makes Salesforce the preferred choice of many is the fact that it gives you the fastest way to turn your ideas into an application. Salesforce tools help you build apps without maintaining your own infrastructure or tools. For individual developers and enterprise development teams of various sizes, this saves years of their time and millions of dollars in infrastructure costs. Salesforce is:
- More quickly: Traditional CRM applications can take many months or years to deploy, Salesforce can do it in weeks.
- Easier: With no-code or low-code development platforms like Salesforce DX or SF DevOps, You can use them directly instead of spending more time figuring it out.
- Cloud Computing: Because it’s so easy to use and adapt to the needs of different businesses, customers also find Salesforce-based apps more effective and user-friendly.
Most importantly, Salesforce is a cloud-based application, so your team members can access it like a web service anytime, anywhere over the internet. Salesforce is also highly scalable based on your growing needs and easily integrates with other third-party applications.
Salesforce Products
Salesforce covers all the basics of information technology application development and services with its unique range of products. This is referred to as a 360° customer view, which means a company can manage every aspect of their customer relationship through the Salesforce system, which seamlessly integrates various SF products. Now let’s take a look at the main Salesforce products.
Sales Cloud
Sales Cloud is a customer relationship management platform that supports the sales team. It was originally designed for B2B companies to help them process potential leads and guide a customer through the sales funnel. However, many B2C sales teams are now using this for advanced opportunity management, lead management, forecasting, and quoting capabilities as well.
service cloud
Service Cloud aims to support the customer support team. It helps the customers to communicate with the support teams via email, chat or phone. For B2C vendors, the Salesforce Service Cloud helps handle large numbers of support requests by helping customer support agents process solutions to customer issues immediately. Key features of Service Cloud are queue management, ticket assignment, live chat, product/service knowledge base.
marketing cloud
It is a digital marketing cloud platform that allows marketers to reach out to potential customers. A number of modern marketing avenues are available as calling, SMS, email, social and digital advertising platforms. Marketing Cloud integrates with Service and Sales Cloud to handle operations seamlessly.
community cloud
For companies that need a platform to enable instant communication with internal employees, stakeholders and customers, the SF Community Cloud helps to share information and data in real time.
Commerce Cloud
Commerce Cloud offers businesses the ability to deliver a seamless customer experience both online and in-store. It offers real-time customer data integration to provide a more personalized user experience.
Analytics Cloud
Provide companies with innovative business intelligence for working with big data by creating interpretable charts and graphs and other graphical representations of data for decision-making. Analytics Cloud is also optimized for mobile access and can be integrated with other clouds as well.
app cloud
Helps enterprise application developers build custom applications to run in the Salesforce ecosystem. App Cloud comes with a set of development tools to build enterprise-grade mobile applications. Some of the main App Cloud tools are Force.com for developing websites and applications, AppExchange as an online marketplace for third-party applications, Heroku Enterprise for developers to build applications in their preferred languages, Salesforce Thunder as an engine for the big data -Processing and Salesforce Sandbox for developers to develop and test their ideas in an isolated and secure environment.
IoT cloud
For organizations dealing with the Internet of Things (IoT) and related data, the Salesforce IoT Cloud is a platform that can process massive amounts of data from various input devices, sensors, social media, websites, applications and from customers. The IoT cloud can receive this data and process it immediately to provide real-time answers.
health cloud
For healthcare IT services, Health Cloud CRM will help to better integrate the provider-patient relationship and medical records management.
AppExchange
Another great thing about Salesforce that beginners should know and access is the AppExchange. Similar to the Apple App Store or Google Play Store, you can find countless third-party applications on the AppExchange that help extend Salesforce functionality. Developers can use these third-party apps to create any imaginable apps for CRM, ensuring seamless integration with other services.
I hope the information above helped to give beginners a first glimpse of what Salesforce is and its basic components. Once you’re into it, you’ll find numerous related articles and Salesforce trailheads to dig deeper into many Salesforce features and capabilities.