Salesforce CRM Tutorial – What is Salesforce CRM?
Customer’s expectation, to have an application that is tailored specially to fit the requirement, has been growing a lot lately. To stand out and reach customers and businesses, Salesforce CRM has been working on its products/services to make them user friendly.
Salesforce CRM is cloud-based customer relationship management software that has products and services which can be accessed from anywhere with internet connectivity.
Salesforce CRM: An In-depth Review
Salesforce CRM keeps track of customers and potential leads data safely in the cloud, enabling customers/partners with the facility to collaborate. With CRM one can organize simple and complex tasks like follow up tasks, action items, sales process, and automated email alerts.
Main Components Of CRM
Salesforce CRM has the following components:
- Operations: Operational activities in Salesforce are handled by sales, service, and marketing cloud with each one of them focusing on improving the sales process, customer support experience, and analytics to make smart decisions with organizational data.
- Collaboration: The customer collaborated with the 360-degree cloud to help its sales, marketing, and services team to get the 360 views of its customers/businesses to get the data they need easily. This helps them to be on the same page and know how to reach the potential customer, target the pain areas, improve on customer feedback, know the customer needs, and also be ready with the history of the customer to respond appropriately when they reach.
- Analytics: The effective prediction model in Salesforce is used to analyze the customer data and improve business processes.
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Salesforce Architecture
Salesforce has a multitenant architecture where multiple applications and businesses share the same IT resource at low cost and high security, it is powered by structural metadata and uses API for applications and platform development.
All applications are built using the platform services, API is used to connect the software and pass information, Salesforce has API name to all its apps, objects and fields which is used to call the records from metadata structure. The architecture is flexible and secure.
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Buy Or Customize CRM
CRM solutions in the organizations make life easy with information stored in one place and easily accessible through the cloud, low infrastructure cost, and easy payment option. Salesforce has standard and custom functionalities to take care of the organization’s need for a CRM solution.
- Salesforce standard functionalities include saving the accounts and contacts data in one place, keeping track of all the communications between the employees and customers from different channels, workflow rules, email integration, and prioritizing important leads and opportunities.
- Custom functionalities include creating custom apps, integration of platforms with other systems, collaborating with partners, and downloading readymade apps from app exchange.
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Every business has unique requirements for CRM solutions depending on the size of the company and industry.
Salesforce CRM offers standard functionality like sales process automation, email automation, storing data in one place, and many more, which are pre-build on the platform and are available in sales cloud, service cloud, analytics, and marketing cloud.
But if the business requires custom functionality solutions then those can be built on Salesforce using the lightning platform, development tools, prebuilt apps, and integration with other platforms.
Customization includes creating apps, pages, and integrating with other systems.
Functionalities Offered By Salesforce CRM
Salesforce has standard and custom functionalities. Enlisted below are few of them:
- Centralized data stored in the cloud grants easy access to sales, marketing, commerce, and service teams to access information.
- Sales process automation and opportunity management make agents focus on the sales, follow up with potential leads, and close the opportunity faster.
- Call center automation and service automation helps the agents to connect with customers from all the channels and resolve the open issue fast.
- Email management is used to send auto-responses, notify about the change in opportunity stages, SLA misses on cases, and follow up tasks or events.
- Using the trust on the Salesforce site one can check the performance of the system.
- Analytics helps to see future trends and take immediate actions that need attention.
- Partner portal share product pricing, quotes, orders, and training information on the product.
- Salesforce can integrate with email systems like Outlook, Gmail to access emails, contacts, and calendar invites.
- CPQ Software by Salesforce is a sales tool for companies to provide accurate pricing with any given product configuration scenario.
- Reports give forecasts of the sales trend, service SLA, revenue report, helps the operation team to make decisions based on the report.
- One can be mobile with Salesforce mobile app Saleforce1.
- App exchange is a platform where one can use the prebuilt apps like apps on play store and plug into their existing Salesforce organization.
Salesforce Product And Services
Salesforce products are accessible over the cloud based on the subscription you have opted for. There is no extra infrastructure cost and is accessible on the go. The products are available for all business sizes, industries, storage, and by role.
#1) Sales Cloud: It has features like leads and opportunity management, reports, dashboard, and workflow. This helps the agent focus on the important leads and opportunities and on making more sales.
#2) Service Cloud: It is used for customer support activities and has features like live agents, case routing, reports, and dashboards to show the performance of agents & business SLA’s and email alerts to manage organization responsibilities.
Recommended Reading=> Salesforce Service Cloud Tutorial
#3) Marketing Cloud: It has features like journey builder to take care of customer journey on the platform, mail studio to send customized marketing emails to the customers, data management to build a strong relationship with the customer by sending them advertisement based on their past search, advertising studio which is used to advertise on social channels, the mobile studio which is used to send text messages to customers on marketing adds, the social studio which is used for publishing the content on popular platforms.
Recommended Reading=> Salesforce Marketing Cloud Tutorial
#4) Community Cloud: It allows all the businesses using Salesforce to connect and collaborate. The community discuss the issues, report any problem, and learn how to use the platform. It gives them access to centralized data like partner details, customer details, retail stores information, and suppliers.
Organization data gets directly transferred to the community cloud as it is built on the same platform. We do not get free trials from Salesforce to community cloud service, the advantage of community cloud service is highly secured and low cost.
#5) Platform Cloud: Platform services include lightning, app development, and platform. This provides a base to develop custom apps. We can build apps quickly with point and click tools and code tools.
- Lighting is a user interface, a component-based framework with build, point, and clicks tool to make apps and app pages with JavaScript.
- App development gives users a sandbox (testing and development environment) which is used to test the custom apps. Heroku gives you the ability to build the custom app using any language and many more.
- Platform services include IoT, Salesforce identity, shield, and analytics.
#6) Einstein Cloud: It helps us to make most of the data in our organization. Einstein is available in service, sales, marketing, and analytics clouds. It helps us visualize data better with reports and dashboards, explore data, and is mobile.
#7) Integration: Integration cloud services are used to integrate other platforms with Salesforce.
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Salesforce Lightning Interactive User Interface
The Salesforce lightning interface is a component-based framework that makes the home page fast, efficient, and interactive. In lightning experience, we can add custom logos to apps, customize pages, and add apps with reusable lightning components.’
Recommended reading =>> Salesforce Lightning Interview Questions
The interface makes the tools easily available on the home page.
- The home screen shows important tasks, news, performance report, recent records, and alerts on the screen.
- App launcher, on the navigation bar, to switch easily between the apps and can make use of the app exchange site.
- Perform global actions like new calls, new tasks, new cases from the home page.
- Reports and Dashboards to show us metrics.
- Advance search, object-specific search available in the lightning interface.
- Detailed view of the account, contacts, and opportunity pages is more engaging.
- Advanced list view with the option to add charts and see the data graphically.
- Opportunity Kanban which shows opportunities of the same record types gives the sales team to act on the opportunity which needs immediate action.
Salesforce Analytics For Future Prediction
Organizations have customer data placed in different systems and it gets difficult to give Systematic computational analysis of data or statistics. Analytics make this work easy with its smart, secured, and scalable cloud services.
Salesforce analytics uses AI, behavioral patterns, predictive analytics to understand the business requirements like sales team can see which lead is having more possibility to be converted to an opportunity, which opportunity has high chances of winning, marketing team can focus on the items which have more demand, the sales manager can focus on improving its team performance by suggesting what can be the next move.
Analytics makes the work easy with large amounts of data. It helps organize data, gain insights, help in decision making, understand behavioral patterns, a special interest of customers, and see predictions using artificial intelligence and data security models.
Products:
- Einstein Predictions $75 USD/user/month
- Einstein Analytics Growth USD 125/user/month
- Einstein Analytics Plus USD 150/user/month
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Training and demo offered by Salesforce
Salesforce offers a free trial of its products and services to get hands-on experience, it also provides you with a free account to explore the functionalities. To learn more about features one can attend the demo sessions or learn on their own from training, webinar, events, and trailhead.
Salesforce CRM has 3 software releases every year which includes updates and new features to its products and services. It has multiple events and resources like online training, trailhead, community success groups to train about the new changes to the users. Salesforce conducts success events to know the requirements of the businesses, learn from it, and implement it in the coming release.
Salesforce License And Pricing
Salesforce CRM is a subscription-based service. It offers a 30 days free trial of too few of its products and services so that customers can get hands-on and no software is required to install it.
Companies can subscribe to the services based on the number of users using the services monthly and other subscriptions are paid annually in advance. Salesforce has editions based on the size of the organization, storage limits requirements, custom features, and mobile access, etc.
Below listed editions are available in Salesforce classic and lightning user interface.
- Essentials
- Professional
- Enterprise
- Unlimited
- Developer Editions
Example of the subscription price for small business, sales, and services clouds.
(i) Small business
| Essentials | Sales Professional | Service Professional | Pardot Growth |
|---|---|---|---|
| All-in-one sales and support app* | Complete sales solution for any size team | Complete customer service solution for any size team | Suite of marketing automation tools for any size team |
| $25 | $75 | $75 | $1,250 |
| USD/user/month | USD/user/month | USD/user/month | USD/month up to 10,000 contacts |
| (billed annually) | (billed annually) | (billed annually) | (billed annually) |
(ii) Sales and Service cloud pricing is the same
| Essentials | Professional | Enterprise | Unlimited |
|---|---|---|---|
| All-in-one sales and support app* | Complete CRM for any size team | Deeply customizable sales CRM for your business | Unlimited CRM power and support |
| $25 | $75 | $150 | $300 |
| USD/user/month | USD/user/month | USD/user/month | USD/user/month |
| (billed annually) | (billed annually) | (billed annually) | (billed annually) |
Referrence=> Salesforce Product Pricing
Conclusion
Salesforce CRM is a cloud-based solution that helps to organize customer data, take care of the daily activities, remind about the important action items, and take care of analytics in the companies. With new technology adoptions, the applications are smart and mobile. Salesforce is a subscription-based CRM.
Salesforce CRM has a smart user interface, analytics to give suggestions to the user to make smart decisions, we can customize the apps with development tools, and Salesforce communities platform to collaborate and empower people.
It offers standard and custom functionalities, has training and demo facilities to understand the features better before buying.
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