Beginner’s Guide to Salesforce

So you’ve come here to get an answer to the question ‘What is Salesforce?’. Look no further as you’ve come to the right place.

We’ve all been there, you first heard of Salesforce from a colleague, friend, read about it in on a tech blog or maybe your new manager is planning a Salesforce rollout for your team. And after hearing about it, you decided to google it.

Here is what the obvious and most common answer is:

Salesforce is a cloud computing service as a software (SaaS) company that specializes in customer relationship management (CRM).

What you got from this is that Salesforce is some kind of software that helps your customers and is based on the cloud. And you’ll see this answer plastered on every website, providing zero value to you, or anyone for that matter, as it explains nothing on what Salesforce can achieve.

Fortunately, it’s way more than that, and as the company is ever-expanding, new features are brought in by the month with constant updates and roll-outs.

Let’s go over some of the finest features that Salesforce can provide:

1. Salesforce can immensely boost your business.
   Have you ever thought about automating your business? Sales Cloud & Service Cloud (Salesforce Products) are perfect to jump boost your business.
   
   Sales Cloud offers the perfect way for you to manage your sales, employees, clients, and products. How does it achieve that? By tracking your sales agents’ productivity and progress through the week, month or year. Keeping detailed events around the sales process is a basis for any business, this includes customer info, interactions, tasks, events, and logs.
   Service Cloud, on the other hand, helps you achieve the perfect customer support and help. All that data that was stored about your customer during the sales process will now be used to aid your customer support team in delivering a fast and flawless support experience.
   And let’s not forget about workflow automation. Email alerts, approval processes, data field updates and a lot more that make your life easier by removing unnecessary steps to your productivity.
2. Salesforce can automate Marketing & Promotion
   It’s almost 2020, and let’s be real, Marketing is a key point in running a successful business whether you like it or not. Salesforce basically offers seamless email marketing in which you can build your own email journey. Did the customer open the email instantly? Send another one in a couple of days. Maybe he never opened it? Send him an email next month. There are endless possible combinations regarding email marketing including personalized emails. Did we also mention there is SMS marketing, Facebook, Instagram & Google Analytics integration and in-depth analysis of your promotions?
3. Everything is on the cloud
   If your desktop looks like a 4-year-olds kindergarten drawing that just discovered different colored pencils, you have a problem. Your desktop is nothing but Word documents, dated Excel spreadsheets and PDF files that are collecting dust by the day, but there is a solution to all of this.
   Salesforce offers you a complete overview of all your documents & files with the ease of access to all your past and present information. A colleague of mine likes to describe it as ‘Excel in the cloud’. This way, your desktop stays clean, you save on storage and you can access your documents anytime, anywhere!
4. Salesforce is the industry standard
   In the picture below you can see the percentage of market share that Salesforce has in comparison to other CRM Software. It’s definitely the most used and the industry standard, with that being said it can help you gain significant experience in working on or with CRM software.
5. Incredible Community & Easy to Learn
   Salesforce offers everyone a free learning experience. Check out trailhead and start learning yourself! By using trailhead you can try some of the features that salesforce offers and see how they work by yourself while also completing challenges and earning badges thus having fun while learning.
   If you need any additional help that you can’t seem to find on google, Salesforce Trailblazer Community is always here to help. Ask questions, give ideas, recommendations and connect with millions of other salesforce users around the globe.

The above features were just a fraction of the possibilities available in Salesforce. You can check out more features on the official salesforce website, or follow us and in the upcoming weeks, we will go in-depth and show you the world of Salesforce.