What is Salesforce?

This article was originally published at Twistellar.com

The author of these lines is a business owner with almost 25 years of experience in management of retail, wholesale, and production companies. Throughout my career, I used to spend a lot of effort on the automation of my companies with various custom solutions, until I was introduced to Salesforce.

In this article, I will try to uncover the benefits and the definition and purpose of Salesforce for a business by answering some common questions: what Salesforce is, how to use Salesforce, and why Salesforce is so popular.

What is Salesforce?

This question has a lot of answers, depending on who’s asking. While Salesforce is a powerful corporation, a leader in cloud computing automation and one of the greatest innovators, it’s also a domain that attracts talents and provides a thankful ecosystem where every person can find their best individual path to grow as a skilled professional.

According to IDC’s research, dedicated to the “Salesforce economy”, 9 million new jobs related to Salesforce technology will have been created by 2026, resulting in $1.6 trillion of new revenues for customers.

Such a success is explained by the fact that Salesforce is a global CRM (customer relationship management) leader. Salesforce provides cloud-based software to over 150 000 companies, including Adidas, Amazon, Spotify, Toyota, and others, to help them automate their business flows, find more clients, close deals faster, and provide seamless customer service.

So let’s see how Salesforce can be defined from a business perspective.

What is Salesforce for a Business?

Each business can be represented as a number of different functions or sets of actions that are automated or conducted by certain people. At the top level of abstraction, it’s probably a set of sales, marketing, resource management, and people management functions.

Each of these major united functions is decomposed into smaller ones, down to the operational level of a particular employee. The way these functions are organized, combined with the corporate culture, defines the company’s competitiveness and unique outlook.

There are two typical ways to manage these functions for better performance.

Download a PDF guide “What Is Salesforce?” here.

One approach that I’ve seen in some companies is to try to use separate IT systems to automate particular functions. One system for CRM, another one for project management, a third one for inventory, a fourth for accounting, etc. Such a method usually leads to the following results:

• a siloed conglomerate of systems with different interfaces
• different departments are rarely connected
• no single view of the customer
• lots of mistakes happen while transferring information from one system to another

An opposite approach would be to try to create an ultimate ideal all-in-one custom IT system that would be 100% tailored to the needs of a particular company and that would live and develop itself with the company’s growth.

It can be extremely risky and may cause the need to find solutions for such business tasks that have been successfully solved plenty of times-for instance, how to present a sales pipeline. This is far from an ideal way, but some companies achieve considerable success on this path.

I was struggling with similar challenges, but when I got acquainted with Salesforce, I was surprised to see that it’s a solution for both approaches. With Salesforce, you can get a set of specialized tools for each of your business functions, but you can also tailor it 100% to the needs of your particular business due to its scalability and flexibility.

How To Use Salesforce?

In order to understand how to use Salesforce, it’s worth taking a look at its architecture. Salesforce as a platform consists of three layers:

Layer 1 — Technical Backend

Layer one is a scalable database and the technical backend written on Java and working on the cloud premises of Salesforce and its partners. That’s where all your data is actually located and separated, and the code is working.

As a business stakeholder, you shouldn’t worry about it. It’s enough to remember that Salesforce takes care of the security of your data, all devops operations, and the hardware infrastructure. This thing is marvelously scaleable, and with just one license, you have full access to its advantages. You don’t have to worry about upgrading servers, and keeping them in good condition.

Layer 2 — Automation Backend

Layer two is the logical automation backend layer, where Salesforce developers can write executable code and build ANY automation they can think of. This is what differentiates Salesforce from smaller competitors.

On the customer-facing side, systems may look similar, and even the lists of features can be quite comparable. But the power, flexibility, and scalability of the Salesforce backend layer are unbeatable.

Layer 3 — Clouds

Layer three consists of the customer-facing applications, the сlouds. These are out-of-the-box sets of automations for typical business processes and functions to be applicable in any industry. That’s also the reason why they require certain customization before use. Salesforce is constantly upgrading its portfolio of applications and introduces the new ones.

• Salesforce Sales Cloud
• Salesforce Service Cloud
• Salesforce Marketing Cloud
• Salesforce Commerce Cloud
• Salesforce Experience Cloud (Community Cloud)

Together with the powerful backend, this selection of сlouds creates a unique ecosystem that allows a company to automate all its activities on Salesforce. Implement it step by step, block by block, never reaching a blocker and never facing a technical need to change the system to something else.

Why is Salesforce So Popular?

To sum it up, Salesforce is a powerful platform that combines the secure technical backend taken care of and operated by Salesforce with the customer-facing capabilities of unlimited customization using Salesforce Clouds, third party packages, and your own applications.

Here’s a breakdown of additional benefits that make Salesforce the leading CRM on the market.

1. A vast array of licenses with powerful and flexible permission management depending on the company size and goals.

2. The mobile app is available within all the licenses. You can run a company with real-time data from your smartphone or tablet.

3. Learning & Community. Salesforce has created a free gamified learning platform as an easy and quick way to learn the platform features. Access to the professional community lets you receive up-to-date ideas and solutions directly from Salesforce partners, employees, and customers.

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