What is Salesforce?
Salesforce is a customer relationship management tool (CRM), which is used to keep track of a company’s relationship with its existing and potential clients.
Salesforce is a cloud-based software company that provides its customers with a platform to develop their own applications without following the difficult steps that they used to follow in the legacy system. It allows users to upload the created software and application to the Cloud allowing the end-users to view them.
Salesforce is currently providing many software solutions and platforms for developers to create and distribute custom software/applications. Many big technical platforms are using Salesforce either in the form of SaaS or PaaS – like Google, Twitter, Amazon, and Facebook.
WHAT DOES SALESFORCE DO?
Salesforce brings companies and customers together.
Salesforce provides powerful, connected products for improving your marketing, sales, commerce, service, IT, and more.
How does it work?
When you use Salesforce, you will use it’s five main data objects Accounts, Contact, Opportunities, Leads, and Campaigns to keep track of your sales process and lead generation efforts.
Accounts – Accounts are the companies you deal with.
Contacts – Contacts are the people at those companies.
Opportunities – Opportunities are the deals you make with those companies to sell them your product or service. Salesforce is an account-centric CRM, that’s why the contacts and opportunities are always linked to any of the accounts.
Leads – Leads are the people who have shown some interest in your company, They are separate from those three objects but they are not enough to take the next step in the sales process. Leads are generated by the company’s marketing efforts, like speaking engagements, webinars, etc.
Campaigns – Campaigns are Salesforce’s way of keeping track of marketing efforts. Campaigns are the best way to track where your leads are coming from and how your marketing efforts are going.
Marketing efforts (which are linked to campaigns) generate leads; once a lead shows the requisite level of interest it depends on the company and sales process when it’s ready to become a contact. The new contact is linked to a new or existing account and an opportunity may be created.
Salesforce Platform Programming Technologies
Apex – Being a proprietary programming language, Apex is similar to C# and Java. The Apex code is mainly used to manipulate data and express business logic rather than supporting user interfaces and interaction. It is a strongly-typed, case-insensitive, object-oriented programming language that has dot-notation and curly-brackets syntax. As the packaging model of Apex code is similar to that of Java, reusable code packages can be invoked from each other. The Responsibility is completely on the
Salesforce only, not on the use for compatibility, scalability, and maintenance issues.
Visualforce – Visualforce is a component-based UI framework that incorporates a tag-based markup language like HTML. Visualforce utilizes the MVC framework with the choice to utilize auto-created controllers for database objects, giving simple integration with the database. Along with supporting traditional MVC, Visualforce also provides features that promote AJAX interactions, mobile rendering, PDF generation, and much more.
Why use Salesforce?
- Every customer can be familiar with sales, marketing, and customer service teams when Salesforce CRM is used.
- Because CRM is shifting to cloud computing.
- You can get a higher Return on investment through the cloud platform and infrastructure of Salesforce.
- Salesforce gives total freedom to the Clients to customize the CRM for their business as Salesforce.
Who uses Salesforce?
- Pizza Hut has been able to provide a smart mobile experience to their customers through the marketing cloud of Salesforce.
- United breweries are using improved reporting provided by Salesforce to quickly identify issues in about 2 days which previously took about 2 weeks.
- To promote data integrity, HCL technologies at the time of data entry are using Salesforce to put out various levels of entry.
- Mobile technologies of Salesforce are massively used by leadership groups to associates in Schneider electric.
- L’Oreal added a social network through which their stylists and reps plan events and share everything related to hair fashion.
- Nikon Instruments initially used customer relationship management (CRM) of Salesforce but later they also started using their social network which is powered by Chatter.
- Other companies like InMobi, Genesys, Babajob, Urban Ladder, Western union, Activision, American Express, etc all use Salesforce to enhance their businesses.
How Salesforce pervades itself in various areas?
Sales Cloud
The entire customer information and interactions happen in one place that is the sales cloud of Salesforce meaning it enables better use of sales data by the sales personnel. Deals are progressed faster as best practices are used along with in-line intelligence. Decisions can be made very quickly based on the latest information as all the data is located in one place. This information is so compatible that it can be viewed from a phone, laptop, etc. Leads can be provided to the right representatives at the correct time. Converting the leads becomes that much easier. You might now get a good idea of what is salesforce used for in the sales arena.
Marketing cloud
There are many ways how optimal marketing strategy should be. But from those companies which failed badly in marketing one thing is clear. Deluging mistargeted ads to the customers is clearly not the way to go. If you’re an avid online user you might definitely have encountered such ads in your mailbox. If you are in the marketing business then you can make your marketing team smarter and more predictive about each customer. You’ll get an intelligent platform integrating marketing, sales, service, and commerce which makes for a collaborative CRM equipped with the tools and data to make recommendations based on past purchases.
This is also helpful in solving issues your customers may have had with a certain product. You can increase engagement through custom communities as specified in the subsequent section below and connect to your customers through any device on any channel from social media to your connected products. Gathering key insights to strengthen your relationship with each customer at every stage will be made very easy with Salesforce technology of marketing cloud. Easily adjustable campaigns to help drive leads in the pipeline all while you get a complete view of the customer data to optimize your marketing strategy is very much possible with Salesforce’s marketing facility.
Community cloud
Users may wonder what Salesforce does in the community cloud. It has good applications in marketing, sales, service but what could it have in the community. This cloud lets you directly connect with customers, increase partner success, and drive employee productivity like there’s no tomorrow. Multiple communities can be easily created and accessed for specific needs and customized to represent any brand. You can personalize each customer’s experience with their specific interests so customers can search the community to find information quickly and ask the community to get the answer they need while service representatives spend time tackling the toughest cases. Channel partners can close the deal faster by easily accessing experts and managing leads right within the community. Marketing teams can collaborate with agencies to streamline their campaign creation and gather feedback from potential customers.
Manufacturers are able to manage distributions by monitoring in-store promotions and placements. They are better equipped in responding to risks within the supply chain with help from the supplier community. Doctors can share their expertise in helping patients to get the optimal medical care they need. Patients from anywhere are able to access the community and your employees can increase productivity by sharing insights and files instantly. The social intelligence of the community cloud automatically creates topics that help the users instantly access the files, discussions, and experts for the topics they relate to. Community owners possess the ability to create custom badges to encourage members. To measure community success there are built-in dashboards.
App cloud
Imagine how it would be if you had the power to create apps. Salesforce app cloud is a new kind of platform-as-a-service. You may imagine this to be in-line with the play store of google but for CRM purposes. It is a kind of ecosystem for building, discovering, and running all of your apps. Developers using frameworks in modern languages and business admins using drag and drop lightning tools like app builder and process builder can all leverage the app cloud. Apps can be created that connect you to customers with highly personalized experiences. Through this platform, legacy data can be modernized into mobile apps for all your employees if you host an organization. These apps will also change the way you make partnerships with anyone across your business domain.
You can design apps to listen to event data from mobile devices, sensors, websites, and then make prudent actions based on it. Thousands of pre-built apps in AppExchange can be discovered. You can run your apps on a secure infrastructure trusted by the world’s leading brands easily scaling across every device from a bunch of users to lakhs instantly. This truly gives out the salesforce features in the development of apps.
Commerce Cloud
This cloud connects you with your customers in a whole new way by letting you create a unified, online, and offline intelligence driven commerce experience with a mobile-first approach. Engage shoppers with attention driving merchandise and promotions and build one-to-one in-store journeys that blur the lines between digital and physical experiences. This way your prospects can make purchases whether they’re online or at the store. It’s about personalizing all aspects of the shopping experience from product assortment to price to recommendations making commerce smarter. Customers can buy anywhere, receive anywhere, and get service anywhere. The service managers can stay up to date on store performance right from their mobile phones and all that in real-time.
Service cloud
Using Salesforce, support agents can address customer problems by equipping them with the right tools. Building self-service communities give your customers the ability to solve their issues on their own terms. As a service owner, customer opinions ought to be your top concern. Every share, like, hearts, recommendations make a big difference from customers, and if they’re happy you’re happy.
The service business owner knows all about the issues from the customer and they provide one-to-one conversational service. The business owner knows all about the customer history as what all issues he had previously from what product through this cloud. This makes the service agents smarter, better able to discuss the details of each sale, case history. They are also able to put forth marketing messages that tweak the interest of the customers. They are better able to connect to the technicians on the field hence making them more productive.