What Nobody Told You About Salesforce: A 5-Minute Crash Course

You may find out a lot of posts, articles, and videos explaining What is Salesforce, How Businesses are growing with Salesforce? What is CRM? Sales cloud etc. But no one talks about Why and from where these words come from. Everything starts from Digital Transformation, So Before we understand Salesforce, we have to understand what is Digital Transformation.

What Is Digital Transformation?

By definition Digital transformation is the process of using digital technologies to create new — or modify existing — business processes, culture, and customer experiences to meet changing business and market requirements. This reimagining of business in the digital age is digital transformation.

Let's discuss this with an example, Before Netflix, people chose movies to rent by going to stores and combing through shelves of tapes and discs in search of something that looked good. Now, libraries of digital content are served upon personal devices, complete with recommendations and reviews based on user preferences. That is the power of Digital Transformation.

Digital transformations have reshaped how companies approach customer service. The old model was to wait for customers to come to find you. Now businesses nailed through social media as a chance to extend their service offerings to customers, no matter what platform the customer is using. They always keep an eye on every activity.

What is Salesforce?

Salesforce is a company that makes cloud-based software designed to help businesses find more prospects, close more deals, and wow customers with amazing service. Customer 360, A complete suite of products, unites your sales, service, marketing, commerce, and IT teams with a single, shared view of customer information, helping you grow relationships with customers and employees alike.

Salesforce helps teams work better together by improving team communications and productivity, businesses drive greater success. Salesforce is a customer success platform, designed to help sell, service, market, analyze, and connect with customers.

Salesforce has everything you need to run your business from anywhere. Using standard products and features, you can manage relationships with prospects and customers, collaborate and engage with employees and partners, and store your data securely in the cloud.

But standard products and features are only the beginning. Salesforce platform allows you to customize and personalize the experience for customers, partners, and employees and easily extend beyond out-of-the-box functionality.

What does Salesforce do?

As the business grows, it gets frustrated or overwhelmed by its customer data because it’s not sharable, readable, and does not tell the story of who their customer is or what they want. For example, sales don’t share knowledge or data well with marketing; marketing has no knowledge of when a customer has contacted customer service.

To solve this Salesforce creates customer relationship management (CRM) software that helps businesses to view their customer everywhere they interact with the business brand. When Salesforce technology is implemented, employees in marketing, sales, commerce, service, and information technology (IT) can share a single customer view from any device, anywhere in the world. 

Finally, we can say Salesforce helps businesses in Digital Transformation.

Quick Overview Of Salesforce Products

Salesforce Products or Say Cloud:

Salesforce cloud is the base product that you are selecting. Salesforce has a bunch of products including Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Community Cloud, App Cloud, Commerce Cloud, & specific industry products, there are only two main products to start, that is Sales Cloud and Service Cloud.

Sales Cloud:

As the name described, it is an all-in-one solution for Sales. It comes with a basic CRM that comes in most of the other tools. If you want to use Salesforce for sales operations, the sales cloud is a good start.

Service Cloud:

Service Cloud by Salesforce is one of the highly rated and most popular customer service software solutions. You can choose this if your business is service-based.

Marketing Cloud:

Marketing Cloud gives you the tools to create trusted relationships. With personalized messages, unified data, and performance insights, your job got a lot easier.

It is more about understanding data generated by your business.

Commerce Cloud:

Commerce Cloud delivers the unified experience that shoppers, retailers, and B2B companies want and expect today.

Salesforce Editions:

Here we are talking only about Sales Cloud and Service Cloud. Both of these come with Four editions:

1. Essentials
2. Professional
3. Enterprise
4. Unlimited

You can check more about their pricing and features here:
Sales Cloud
Service Cloud

For successful and future safe Salesforce implementation, we recommand to start with Salesforce Enterprise edition. Below the enterprise edition, salesforce does not support Customization that you are looking for.
Most of the automation is not supported by Essentials and Professional edition. You can select Sales cloud or Service cloud according to your business requirment.

Salesforce add-ons Products

Salesforce offers a lot of related products that will be charged separately. Some popular products are as follows:

Field Service:

Field Service is an extension of Service Cloud. It can help you manage the workforce. i.e. when a customer orders a new internet connection, the fiber installer will show up, where they are now, where they’re going, and how many meters of fiber is in their hand. It is all managed with Field Service.

Digital Engagement

Salesforce Digital Engagement can help you to connect salesforce with different communication channels. i.e. WhatsApp, SMS, Facebook Messenger, and Webchat.

Quip

Quip is real-time collaborative documents, spreadsheets, and chat embedded inside Salesforce to transform any business process.

Salesforce CPQ

CPQ Salesforce, or Configure, Price, Quote Software by Salesforce is a sales tool for companies to provide accurate pricing with any given product configuration scenario.

Pardot

Pardot is a software as a service (SaaS) marketing automation platform by SalesForce offering email automation, targeted email campaigns, and lead management for B2B sales and marketing organizations.