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Salesforce Tutorial

Salesforce is one of the best cloud-based CRM platforms. It is an integrated CRM platform that provides a single shared view of each customer for all the departments within an organization, such as Marketing, Sales, Commerce, and Service. Our salesforce tutorial is designed to help beginners with the Salesforce and professionals’ basic concepts with advanced concepts. In this, we will cover all the essential topics of Salesforce from beginning to Apex development.

What is Salesforce?

• Salesforce is a SaaS or Software as a Service, which means there is no need to install the software or server to work on. Users can simply sign-up in Salesforce.com and can start running the business instantly.
  
• It was founded by Marc Benioff, Parker Harris, Dave Moellenhoff, and Frank Dominguez in 1999.
• Salesforce was started as a CRM software, but today it provides various products and software solutions to users and developers.
• Since Salesforce is cloud-based software, hence it does not require any IT professional to set up anything.
• It provides one of the best ways to connect with customers, business partners, and clients over the single integrated environment. It allows the businesses to identify the customer’s requirements, address the problems easily, and provide the same solution in the minimum timeframe.

Before going in deep with this tutorial, let’s understand two basic concepts of Salesforce, CRM and Cloud Computing.

CRM(Customer Relationship Management)

CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management, a software to manage all the customer and company’s interactions. It contains and manages all the customer-related information such as Customer Name, Address, Phone Number, Email address, and other business-related information. The software keeps all the interactions done with customers, complaints registered by the customer, resolutions provided by the executive, and other customer activities with the particular business or product.

It also allows us to track and manage the sales, marketing, and prospects given to customers.

Cloud-Computing

Cloud computing is a technology to store, manage, process, and access the internet instead of a local server or computer hard drives.

With the help of cloud computing, an organization can save lots of cost to local storage of data, maintenance of data, etc. The information over the Cloud can be accessed much efficiently and from anywhere, with the help of the internet.

Using cloud computing instead of traditional storage helps users with lots of benefits such as speed, cost-effectiveness, security, global access, etc.

Note: In the next topic, we will learn a detailed introduction of Cloud computing.

History of Salesforce

Below are some milestones that occurred in the evolution of the Salesforce over the years from its beginning:

• The salesforce development was started in 1999 by Marc Benioff, Parker Harris, Frank Dominguez, and Dave Moellenhoff, developers with the same vision of Salesforce’s CRM.
• In 2001, the salesforce company announced its worldwide expansion, and it surpassed 3000 customers in the same year and became the fastest-growing CRM company.
• In the year 2003, the first DreamForce event was held in San Francisco. In this event, the first on-demand application service sForce2.0 has launched.
• In the year 2005, Salesforce introduced its AppExchange Service. The service was designed to offer a platform to third-party developers to develop their applications and provide those apps to salesforce customers.
• In the year 2008, Force.com- “a salesforce development platform that allows developers to build applications,” has released.
• In the year 2011, the company launched Chatter-a social collaboration service for the enterprise.
• In the year 2013, it launched the Salesforce1 platform to enable the customers to run their businesses from the phone.
• In the year 2014, the company launched the Trailhead, a platform to empower anyone to learn new skills.
• In the year 2015, Salesforce became one of the Fortune 500 companies.
• In the year 2019, the company acquired Tableau, and hence world ‘s number 1 CRM and number 1 analytics platform came together.

Why choose Salesforce?

In the above section, we have learned about the Salesforce, but why should we choose it? What are the benefits? So below are some points that explain the benefits of choosing Salesforce:

• The first benefit of choosing Salesforce is that we do not need to install any software to build an application or run our business activities. We can focus on building the apps instead of installing, setup, repairing, etc.
• Since it is the cloud-based CRM platform, any user can access it from anywhere using the internet.
• Any new user or business start-up can choose Salesforce for building apps or run business, as it is so affordable with lots of capabilities.
• One can easily integrate the Salesforce with any third-party applications, such as Gmail, which is much easier than other CRM Software.
• It is the world’s number 1 CRM software, as it is easy to use, fast to deploy any app, and provide efficient outputs as per the requirements.
• The development cost is also very less.

Technologies used by the Salesforce

• Apex: Salesforce has its own programming languages, knows as Apex. Hence to become a salesforce developer, or to create a salesforce app, user must have a good knowledge of Salesforce Apex.
• VisualForce: Visualforce is the framework introduced by the Salesforce, which enables the developers to create the custom user interfaces that can work on the lighting platform.
• Compiler: Salesforce contains its own complier to compile the Apex programs and VisualForce Pages.

Companies using Salesforce

Today, there are multiple big brands, and new start-ups who are using the Salesforce platform as CRM software and for other services. Below is the list of some popular companies that are using Salesforce for their businesses:

1. HCL Technologies use Salesforce CRM for data entry to validate customer data.
2. Pizza Hut is providing the smart mobile experience to its customer using the marking salesforce cloud.
3. L’Oreal builds a social network using the Salesforce, by which they can share any Hair fashion-related plans or events to their stylist or customer.
4. American Express is using the Salesforce cloud since 2010, and now they can connect to their employees together across the organization, or from anywhere.
5. Nikon Instrument opted for the Salesforce CRM for their business, but later, they also started using the social network provided by the Chatter.
6. Comcast-Spectator uses the salesforce platform to manage the customer profiles that help them identify the customer interest and market more efficiently.
7. Sony uses the Salesforce Service Cloud to connect with their customers. All customer complaints are managed and taken care of with this to make the customers satisfied.

Other companies, such as Urban Ladder, InMobi, Paytm, Genesys, etc., use Salesforce services for their business growth.

Differences Between Salesforce CRM and Dynamic CRM

In today’s market, various companies are offering CRM Solutions to their customers, such as SAP, Oracle, Microsoft dynamics, including Salesforce. In all these CRM solution companies, there is a big competition between the Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamic. Let’s have a look at the difference between these two CRM solutions:

Capabilities	Salesforce	Microsoft Dynamic
Deployment Options	Salesforce provides deploy on cloud-only option.	Microsoft Dynamic CRM can be deployed on the Cloud, on-premise, or at partner-hosting.
Language Interface	Salesforce offers limited language support as compared to Microsoft Dynamic.	It provides 35 language support to its customers.
Accessibility	It provides accessibility of web and mobile apps from anywhere.	It also provides access to its web and mobile apps from anywhere.
Storage	It provides 1GB/user storage for 1 to 20 users.	It provides 10GB shared storage for 1 to 20 users.
Pricing	It has a pricing rate of $25-$300 per user/ month.	It has a pricing rate of $65-$135 per user/month.

Audience

This salesforce tutorial is designed to help beginners, cloud computing enthusiasts, and developers to learn the Salesforce CRM software for various business requirements.

Prerequisites

Below prerequisites are essential before learning the salesforce tutorial:

• To completely understand the Salesforce and its architecture, one must have a basic understanding about cloud computing.
• The knowledge of database storage is also required to understand how customer data is stored, retrieved, and managed.

Problems

We assure you that you will not find any difficulty while learning our salesforce tutorial. But if there is any mistake in this tutorial, kindly post the problem or error in the contact form to improve it.

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