Salesforce Knowledge Article

The Salesforce® platform allows companies to transfer most (if not all) of their customer relationship management needs to the cloud, allowing them to reduce on-site resource usage considerably. These services are easily accessed over the Internet through standard Web browsers, and Salesforce has continually expanded their suite of tools over the years to encompass everything from suggestion management to social performance management.

So, Really Break It Down For Me… What Exactly Does Salesforce Do

Fundamentally, Salesforce provides online services that businesses subscribe to. It’s a “software as a service” (SaaS) business model, similar to the way Microsoft now handles their Office products.

Salesforce is a CRM – customer relationship management tool. The software allows you manage, track, and report on your lead and customer journeys from beginning to end.

Salesforce breaks down their pricing structure for most services to a monthly fee, but actually bills on an annual basis. The base price for Salesforce consulting services is relatively low, which is part of what makes them one of the most popular CRM solutions. But it is important to keep in mind that unless you have staff on hand who are well-versed in Salesforce software, it will cost extra to have experts actually implement the services on your company’s end.

If you’re interested in Salesforce’s offerings but aren’t sure if they’re the right fit for your business, there is a limited free version of their CRM software that you can play with. It’s called the “developer edition,” and it restricts you to only 10 MB of data and two users, making it unsuitable for all but the tiniest of businesses. But it does allow you to play around with creating things like billing systems, email campaigns, product lists and knowledge bases. You can experiment as much as you like and get a direct sense as to how well the Salesforce services will work for you.

So what are some concrete examples of tasks that companies commonly accomplish with Salesforce software?

It’s popular for creating a sales tracking solution that reports on the lead-to-opportunity sales cycle, implementing a customer service system, an external customer community, logging activity and implementing all sorts of different pre-made mobile apps. Salesforce training can require varying commitments of time depending on how many different features are in use, but it is generally regarded as an intuitive system.

An Overview of Salesforce Services

The overall CRM software is divided between several different .com addresses that each serve a specific function. The central hub is salesforce.com, from which companies perform both sales and customer service management. Customers can manage their own cases and tickets that they open through this interface as well as leave comments about the company via the major social media websites.

This main application splits off into several different subordinate sites. Salesforce integration features allow you to use these added sites seamlessly from your central interface. Due to the high level of use, Salesforce consulting services have developed to help businesses determine exactly what features they need and to get them all working together seamlessly.

Salesforce Extensions

On top of these applications, there are almost countless pre-made extensions that can be appended to your Salesforce platform. These are just a few of the most popular and useful to give you a sense of what is available:

Chatter® integrates with Force.com applications to add group collaboration features like feed tracking, public and private team creation and record keeping. Each user can also create their own social media-like profile.

Analytics Cloud not only analyzes Salesforce client data, but any type of third-party data can be added into the mix. It’s a very powerful tool that basically allows you to dump in any data you want to, then filter and view it in any way that you want to.

Pardot™ is a business-to-business (B2B) marketing automation tool. Lead nurturing programs are automated down to email, social media and reporting.