Salesforce is a popular cloud-based CRM owned by the US company of the same name. It is used by large international companies such as Sony, Financial Times, AWS, Canon, Philips, American Express, and Toyota.
What is Salesforce?
Salesforce is a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system that is designed to manage a wide variety of business processes, customer relationships, analytics, marketing, sales, and so on. Salesforce CRM works similarly to the SaaS model (a form of computing in the cloud). Its users are provided with ready-made software, access to which is gained via a browser or mobile application. The CRM system is designed to meet the needs of small, medium-sized, and large enterprises. It offers instruments for searching, retaining a customer base, closing deals, and more.
What services does Salesforce offer?
It has prepared quite a number of solutions to the problems faced by different industries; often they stand out as independent products. Check out what the major Salesforce solutions include.
Sales Cloud
Sales Cloud is the core of the entire CRM. It has built-in objects (Lead, Contact, Account, Opportunity, Order, Quote, etc.) for managing the client relationship and ready-made business logic (Lead Conversion, Lead Assignment, Forecasting, etc.). It allows users to build a pipeline and apply to a wide range of tools for analytics and reporting.
Service Cloud
Service Cloud helps businesses process customer complaints. The service has built-in objects (Case, Knowledge Article, etc.) and built-in business logic (Case Assignment, Case Escalating, Web-to-Case, Email-to-Case). The user interface of the console app allows support professionals to conveniently work with multiple records without switching between tabs.
Experience Cloud
Experience Cloud simplifies the creation and development of attractive and intuitive websites that enhance interaction with customers, partners, and employees. Tightly integrated with Salesforce, Experience Cloud allows users to configure automatic uploading of content from the CMS.
Marketing Cloud
Marketing Cloud is a business-to-consumer (b2c) marketing solution with the typical functionality of a marketing tool: bulk emails, email tracking, creation of landing pages, advertising campaigns, etc. The service helps businesses create a customized and targeted customer journey, understand their consumer base better, and improve their marketing efforts.
Pardot
Pardot offers a variety of instruments for business-to-business (b2b) sales. It allows managers to create forms and landing pages, track visits, check and evaluate potential customers, measure the effectiveness of marketing campaigns, and capture real-time statistics.
Tools for specific areas
Along with that, Salesforce offers tools for specific areas of activity:
Salesforce Lightning — for low-code development of applications for the automation of operational activities of enterprises. It features a rich library of easily configurable components that can be dragged and dropped, deleted, cloned, etc. Configuration Price Quotes (CPQ) — for flexible price setting and sales, advanced management of the decision-making process, configuring products, and applying quantity discounts. Healthcare Cloud — for bringing together patients and healthcare providers. Non-Profit Cloud — for charitable organizations. Government Cloud — for government organizations. Vaccine Cloud — for easy search of a clinic for vaccination. Force.com Sites — for the development and deployment of cloud applications and websites. Omni-Channel — for the integration of different channels of communication with customers. Einstein AI — artificial intelligence for data analysis.
Einstein AI helps businesses discover use cases to improve their most critical KPIs
A complete list of Salesforce solutions can be found on the official website of the developer. Each product of this system has its own tariff plan.
Sales Cloud tariff plans
Benefits of Salesforce
Time management
A well-designed CRM allows a business to find the best potential clients, save time in the search process, and automate sales as much as possible. Salesforce does not require any software to be installed. You can start working with this CRM in just a couple of days. All data is sent to the business and is available in real time. This helps the company enter the market more efficiently and begin to increase its share on the word.
Increased revenue
Salesforce helps to correctly define business goals based on actual metrics, maintain constant feedback from customers, and stimulate the sales team’s motivation for better marketing. This results in a significant increase in sales volume and growth of profits.
Ultimate accessibility
The CRM has a cloud-based structure, therefore employees can access it from virtually anywhere, which helps to increase the overall productivity of their teams. It is easy to get started with Salesforce due to its ability to seamlessly import data from Google Calendar, Gmail, Excel spreadsheets, and many other sources.
Customer satisfaction
The system features scorecards that give a clear picture of how well a company is meeting customer expectations. For each client, you can view a full and detailed description of the service history, current requests, and the quality of service data.
Easy account planning
The drag-and-drop scheduling feature allows users to schedule events related to accounts, contacts, and interests right on the list view page. You can also invite users, clients, and employees to meetings without leaving the system.
Account planning solution offered by Salesforce
Trusted reporting
The report builder allows users to group, filter, and summarize records to create accurate, detailed, and reliable reports. Report charts and tables can be used to visually represent data. You can prepare reports on archived changes or omit part of the data when reporting.
Team collaboration
With Salesforce, you can support efficient interaction between all participants and components of business processes. You can set tasks, distribute them among specialists, and monitor their implementation. Details of negotiations, results of transactions, calls, and orders — everything is stored here.
Omnichannel support
All customers of the service highly appreciate the Salesforce technical support service. The company’s specialists are always ready to give actual step-by-step instructions on any issue, from creating customized reports to enabling customer notifications.
Easy integration with other tools
One of the important advantages of the service is its flexibility. The CRM system, as well as separate Salesforce products, are easily integrated with other services. You can combine Salesforce with just about any other part of your business process.
Use Albato to integrate your CRM with other apps and enjoy a unified experience of superior data quality and management. Read the article “How to connect Salesforce to Albato” in our blog.
Salesforce architecture
The platform is built on a multi-tenant, metadata-driven architecture.
Multi-tenant architecture
Multitenancy is a mode of software operation in which multiple independent instances of one or more applications run in a shared environment. Instances (tenants) are logically isolated, but physically integrated. Multi-tenant architecture is a fundamental way to cut the cost of computing resources and storage for SaaS solutions, due to the minimum amount of resources required and their ultimate load. The most tangible benefit comes from a combination of multi-tenancy and “unlimited scaling”, when there is no need to use additional funds to promote new resources or add servers.
The platform’s software architecture
Metadata
Metadata is information that describes the configuration of every client’s organization. It can be of different types such as programmability, presentation, configurations, code, logic, etc. Salesforce stores metadata in a shared database along with other data, thus keeping data along with its function. It makes the system more scalable, customizable, and secure.
API
Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) allow two software components to interact with each other using a set of rules and protocols. Each time a user opens the system, Salesforce applies the corresponding API name to access the metadata and the data the user is looking for. In this way, all user data and metadata are maintained via the API, which gives Salesforce a lot of flexibility.
Which companies use Salesforce?
Salesforce is deservedly considered the №1 CRM platform in the world. Among its most notable clients are Spotify, Amazon Web Services, U.S. Bank, Toyota, Macy’s, and T-Mobile.
According to Ascendix.com, 150,000 companies across industries use Salesforce tools. The software helps organizations consolidate all business functions and processes into a single source of information. 62% of the service’s clients are located in the US. These are, for instance, Spotify, Amazon Web Services, and U.S. Bank.
According to the data for 2021, the majority of CRM users are professional services. Other large segments are manufacturing, financial services, banking, and retail.
49% of all Salesforce customers are small firms (up to 50 employees), 40% are medium-size, and only 11% are large firms with more than 1,000 employees.
Salesforce prices for small businesses
Conclusion
- Salesforce is a leading cloud-based CRM platform that offers customized solutions for all industries, company sizes, and business purposes. It has a multi-tenant, metadata-driven architecture.
- Salesforce has long ceased to be just a system for managing customer relationships: the system includes a wide range of solutions for many industries and areas, developed internally or by third parties.
- Despite their relatively high prices, Salesforce products remain one of the most demanded by sales, service, and marketing teams. They offer a number of sophisticated tools for small, medium, and large companies, including such world giants as U.S. Bank and Toyota.
