Salesforce is the leading CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software provided in the cloud. It has more than 800 apps to support various features like creating new leads, gaining new leads, increasing sales and closing deals. It is designed for organizational management. It also provides features to customize its existing data structure and GUI to fit the specific needs of a business. Recently, it has started to provide IoT connectivity (internet of thing) for CRM platform.
Anyone who manages sales and customer relationships will find this software very useful as an end user. This tutorial will also benefit software developers and cloud enthusiasts who want to learn custom software for specific business needs.
Knowledge of cloud computing is essential to understanding its environment and architecture. Knowledge of databases is essential to understanding how data is stored, retrieved and manipulated.
Salesforce started as a cloud-based solution for CRM. CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management. It involves managing all aspects of the relationship between an organization and its customers. For example, customer contact details, transactions in progress or completed, support requests from new customers or potential customers from new customers. Asking for customer-related information, it also involves storing and managing the details of people and related departments from the seller organization managing their accounts and customer needs. This makes it easier to manage and strengthen relationships with customers and thereby grow the organization better.
Here are the different features of the Salesforce platform:
Contact manager
To view customer contact details, activity history, contact customers and discuss internal accounts, etc. In short, it manages all data related to customer contact.
Opportunity management
Provide details of a deal’s stage, products related to the deal, quotes for the deal, etc. In a nutshell, it manages all the data that helps identify, expedite and end a delivery. Translate.
Join the sales force
This feature focuses on personal contact with customers for different campaigns designed by the marketing team. It also provides real-time sales alerts based on customer interaction.
Sales cooperation
This feature helps to quickly find experts who can help close the deal based on customer queries and feedback. In a nutshell, it helps bring together a collaborative effort to involve the entire team in the agreement and implement it.
Manage sales performance
It provides a goal setting based on metrics, and feedback and rewards and ongoing recognition for the sales team. This helps improve the performance of the sales team.
Managing potential customers
This feature starts and tracks potential customers in progress. It also helps to constantly optimize campaigns across all channels.
Partner management
This also helps connect directly with channel partners to share goals, goals and activities.
Mobile sales application
This is a mobile platform to perform all above operations on a mobile platform.
Workflow and approval
It helps create a flexible approval process with deal discount and expense management, etc.The interface provides simple drag and drop options to implement this design. This is an intuitive design to automate business processes.
Email integration
Salesforce can integrate into an existing email platform. This helps to provide flexibility to existing groups without further study.
Synchronize and share files
This feature gives the sales team the power to easily share different files, discuss them and update them as needed. Also get a notification when something in the file changes.
Reports and dashboard
Dashboard provides a real-time picture of the business at a glance. With this, anyone can create detailed reports that can be accessed from anywhere.
Sales forecast
It provides multi-currency support and inline editing mode to manage sales forecasting well. This feature helps to get a real-time view of the forecast of a sales team.
Territory management
This feature is used to create multiple territorial models, preview them before deploying, and continually optimize and balance territories throughout the year.
Salesforce architecture
Salesforce brings a highly customized experience to customers, employees, and partners of an organization. The platform is used to customize standard functionality and create custom pages, components, applications, etc.In addition, it is made faster, mainly due to its excellent architecture when built. erect. Here is a brief introduction to Salesforce Architecture.
To better understand the architecture of Salesforce, we need to put it into classes. The purpose and operation of each class is explained as follows:
Trusted Multitenant Cloud (reliable versatile cloud)
Here, multiple versions of one or more applications operate independently in a shared environment. Versions are called tenants and they are logically separated from each other while still on the same hardware. It is called reliable because of its robust nature and high security.
Scalable Metadata Platform (Scalable Metadata Platform)
The metadata control platform makes it easy to customize and replicate as the amount of data or concurrent user cases increases.
Enterprise Ecosystem (Enterprise Ecosystem)
The enterprise sales ecosystem is huge when a large number of partners contribute by creating and maintaining applications in the platform.
CRM and Related Functionality (CRM and related features)
Salesforce covers all aspects of CRM in its feature list and also expands it by providing features for app creation and analytics integration, etc.
APIs
Salesforce provides a powerful API suite. This helps develop and customize the Salesforce1 Mobile App.
Environment
Because Salesforce is a cloud-based system, you don’t need to install any software. You must do is sign up for a free trial and get started. Free trial accounts provide almost all the features you need to learn to understand the basics of the Salesforce platform. Now let’s discuss the steps to get started with the Salesforce environment.
Step 1
Open the Salesforce link and click on Free Trial.
It takes you to a window where you have to fill in some details about you and register.
Step 2
You will receive an activation email for your account, which will include your account details and trial period. Click the link in the email to verify your email ID and activate your account.
Step 3
Once again visit the Salesforce link and click login. Provide the login information you just created. You will be redirected to the following screen.
You are ready to find out when your environment is set up now. You can click Take Tour of Salesforce to familiarize yourself with the user interface.
Sales cloud
Sales Cloud is part of the Salesforce.com platform, focusing on improving the effectiveness of an organization’s sales team and thereby increasing sales. It is unique when compared to other sales methods because it provides both customer account information as well as helping information gathered from social platforms about products and customers. This helps to assess the potential of a salesperson and helps to end the sale faster.
The following are the main Business Goals achieved using the Sales Cloud.
Get more contracts
The availability of all account information as well as product information for customer needs makes it easier to attract more potential customers to close a deal.
Fasten contracts
Mobile applications and an intuitive design of workflows to approve business processes make closing transactions faster.
Get many incentives
Continuous optimization of campaigns depending on market response and closed interaction with channel partners will receive more deals.
Decide faster
The availability of reports and dashboards gives a very detailed picture of the business scenario and also increases the accuracy of sales forecasts. Therefore, business decisions are made quickly.
Main features of Sales Cloud
In this section, we will discuss the main features of Sales Cloud. Features are described below
Contact manager
Provide complete information about customers including contact information, discussions, main contact and email.
Opportunity management
It helps create and change quotes to respond to interactive scenarios and sales transactions.
Join the sales force
Give alerts about active leads and create personalized campaigns.
Managing potential customers
Help assign potential customers to the right people and keep track of campaigns.
Reports and dashboard
Help create dashboard that can be drilled down for more information. This leads to faster decisions.
Sales forecast
Provides an accurate view of sales forecasts that can be adjusted based on real-time data.
Workflow and approval
Help streamline approval process and automate all business processes with intuitive drag and drop interface.
Territory management
Help create different territorial models and apply rules to them.
Synchronize and share files
Find, share and find files faster. This leads to greater cooperation.
Manage sales performance
Help create links between sales data and sales goals. It also helps generate performance summaries.
Partner management
Easily connect with partners and give them a view of sales performance. It also makes it easy to get on board, train and support sales partners.
Service Cloud
This part of the Salesforce platform focuses on providing customer support and assistance. This helps retain customers, increase their satisfaction and loyalty. Its uniqueness lies in providing services faster than traditional methods, paying attention to each customer’s needs and doing. That ultimately enhances the customer experience thus loyalty. thereby creating a good impact on sales.
The following are the main Business Goals achieved using Service Cloud.
Personalized service
Provide each customer with a good service experience based on their unique purchase history and issues and complaints.
Service is always available
Provide 24/7 service
Support multichannel
Meet customers on their favorite channels like mobile phones, phones, chat, etc.
Support faster
Managing different service needs from a single dashboard helps deliver support services faster.
Main features of Service Cloud
In this section, we will discuss the key features of Service Cloud. These features help accomplish the business goals mentioned above. Features described below –
Control panel for the service
This is a unified platform to manage all of the cases assigned to an agent so that they can help prioritize tasks at hand. This also helps to provide a personalized experience for customers on a case by case basis.
Basic knowledge
Customer interactions and resolutions are captured and organized into a knowledge base. This helps solve the problem faster.
Social customer service
As more and more customers connect to the organization through social media, this feature helps provide services on the social media platform itself without requiring customers to visit their own websites to Interactive.
Direct agent
This feature provides real-time online help with a unique chat service.
Mobile platform
The Salesforce1 platform is a mobile platform for managing customer service from any device and anywhere.
Community cloud services
It allows customers to help themselves by helping each other. Many tools are available for self-service according to different shooting requirements.