What is Salesforce CRM and What Does it Do?

Salesforce is a company based out of San Francisco, California. They are the leaders in cloud technology.

Salesforce is also the name of their flagship product, which is a highly customizable CRM with attractive out of the box features like Web to Lead, Weeding out duplicate leads, Opportunity Forecasting, Email and Campaign management, Google Apps Integration etc… All this along with the standard CRM features like Lead, Contact, Account, and Opportunity Management.

What is salesforce CRM, you might ask. It’s a top-notch CRM application built on the Force.com platform. It can manage all the customer interactions of an organization through different media, like phone calls, site email enquiries, communities, as well as social media. Salesforce handles all the customer relationships, by focusing on the sales, marketing and support processes. This is done by working with the standard objects (Shown below), and facilitating the relationships between them.

Force.com platform
Force.com is a platform for creating applications in the cloud with absolutely no software or hardware investment required. The apps thus created are data-centric and collaborative. In fact, the data is never lost here, because there are auto back-ups.

The Standard Objects in Salesforce

1	Account	These could be partners or customers (Be it companies or individuals) who are involved in the organization’s business interactions
2	Contact	Individuals that come within any account
3	Product	Items that the organization sells to the customer
4	Lead	Those interested in the product, be it individuals or companies
5	Opportunity	Any event or activity with potential for revenue generation
6	Case	A description of any issue that a customer has reported
7	Solution	The resolution of a customer problem. Salesforce’s solution knowledge base is the collection of all such solutions
8	Forecast	Estimation of the organization’s quarterly revenue
9	Report	Analysis of the standard or custom objects’ data
10	Dashboard	Representation of reports as a set of graphical data or charts
12	Activity	All the organization’s tasks as well as calendar events within the Activity object
13	Campaign	All marketing projects, for example – mass emailing

What makes Salesforce CRM tick?

Salesforce has grown its platform to support some of the most complex business scenarios and has proved in the market that it just needs one fifth the development effort and cost when compared to a normal application.

A CRM in Salesforce works by managing the standard objects, and maintaining the relationships between them, and the standard in-built functionalities. It is built on the following different types of cloud:

Sales Cloud

Sales Cloud mainly works based on Lead, Account, Contact & Opportunity objects. Leads can be further converted into account, contact and opportunity objects -an important built-in functionality of the Sales Cloud. What’s more, if any custom fields are added to the lead object, it is also possible to set the mapping for them. Opportunities are well managed by giving them different stages and probabilities.

Service Cloud

In Service Cloud, the base objects are cases and solutions. A Service Executive can create a case on a customer enquiry or a complaint, and the corresponding solution can be stored in a solution object. There is some standard functionality, like email to case, which will automatically create a new case in the CRM on every customer email.

Marketing Cloud

Marketing Cloud is an application for marketing purposes. It helps in the creation and execution of marketing campaigns, email promotions, and more.

Custom Cloud

Custom fields can be added to the standard objects, and custom workflows can also be created. For custom views as well as business logic, Visualforce pages and associated apex classes can be used. All of these customization facilities make it possible to fulfill just about any need a CRM user may have.

Analytics

Every CRM application must be able to present reports with the data stored in it. In Salesforce, the ‘Reports and Dashboards’ feature enables effective analytics.

There are a number of standard reports associated with the standard objects. Each report can be used to create dashboard components like graphs. Standard Reports are placed in the folders available in Salesforce, so finding the reports are easy.

Salesforce automation

Salesforce automation features include tracking leads, managing emails, assigning tasks, notifications, approvals etc. This CRM will handle all the automation required for the sales, marketing and service processes.

Who should use the Salesforce CRM?

The answer is simple – ‘Everyone’.
Salesforce has editions for all variety of users. It offers different editions like Group, Professional, Enterprise and Performance (For Sales Cloud). An organization can select the Salesforce CRM edition according to their aims, and the features they require. Do note, the editions have price variations too.

What does Salesforce do?

Salesforce covers all the areas of customer relationships, ranging from marketing to service. Any organization that wants to manage their customer relationships holistically can come in and use Salesforce without losing time, and wasting money for software development or hardware infrastructure.

Applying Salesforce.com in your enterprise may sound overwhelming, especially if you do not have the resources to customize it for your business needs, and maintain/ enhance it for you regularly. That’s where the Salesforce team at Suyati Technologies can help. Contact us for a detailed insight into how Salesforce.com can help your business become more flexible, and in-tune with your customer and market needs.