Salesforce Tutorial – An Ultimate Guide for the Beginners

Introduction

Recently, cloud computing is a great buzz in the IT industry, and one of the most popular cloud platforms having an immense impact on the computing world is the Salesforce. In this blog, we will discuss what is Salesforce, why use Salesforce and different industries where Salesforce can be utilized? This is an ultimate guide for admins and developers looking for a bright career in the world of computing and the Salesforce.

What is Salesforce?

Salesforce is a SaaS CRM, and Salesforce.com helps you to manage customer relationships, it can be quickly integrated with other systems, and even helps in building cloud-based apps. There are plenty of tools that help you in creating custom solutions based on your business needs. Today, Salesforce has expanded from just a simple product to a multitude of products.

Initially, it was started as SaaS (Software as a Service) Company then it was converted to PaaS (Platform as a Service) Company where one platform was given to the users to manage customer details and sales prospects. Soon, Salesforce was ranked as the largest customer success platform with various features listed below -

• Contact, leads and opportunity management
• Deal Tracking and Product planning
• Product Manufacturing and shipping

So, how did it all begin?

Initially, CRM (Customer Relationship Management) systems came into existence with a strategy to simplify interactions with the customers and enhancing the sales prospects to retain existing customers and generating new leads too. But traditional CRM systems were not the optimal choice for leading industries due to the following reasons –

• Higher in costs
• They were taking months to set up.
• They were hosted on a personal server of the Company and,
• They were difficult to manage and understand.

Here, enterprises were in emergency need of an affordable CRM system that can be set up within a few days only and easy to understand as well. This was the main idea behind the discovery of Salesforce.

Introduction to cloud computing

Before going into deep, let us have a quick on cloud computing and the popular cloud platforms too. Cloud computing is referred to as Internet-based computing that involves shared resources, software, and information provided via mobiles or computers. There are three popular cloud platforms used frequently by industries like –

• IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) – Here, cloud service providers largely focus on infrastructure services like hosting, server, storage services, etc.
• SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) – This is a software delivery model in which software is licensed on a subscription basis and hosted centrally.
• PaaS (Platform-as-a-Services) – This is a category of cloud computing services that provide a platform allowing customers to develop, run, and manage apps.

Service Nature of Salesforce:

1. Salesforce as SaaS (Software as a Service): There is no need for installation, setup or downloads but you just have to log in and start using the software apps across the cloud. Isn’t it more convenient and amazing? The answer is a big “YES” when using Salesforce CRM for your business.
2. Salesforce as PaaS (Platform as a service): Here, there is no need for a separate platform, but you can use code created by other developers to deploy apps. Obviously, you have to customize it as per your business needs, but it saves a lot of time and money as demanded by businesses today.
3. Salesforce as IaaS (Infrastructure as a service): Here, there is no need for installing any hardware or software program, but data and apps are stored securely on the cloud. Even you don’t have to take the backup, but the cloud will take care of it automatically.

How is Salesforce different from Traditional IT?

Traditional CRM:

• It was hosted on the Company’s server.
• It was taking months to set up traditional CRM systems.
• It was difficult to use and understand them.
• It witnesses unused data or data was not analyzed properly.
• It was not giving any personalized service.
• It results in high client attrition.

Salesforce CRM:

• It was hosted on the cloud.
• It is easy to set up within a few days only.
• It is easy to use and understand.
• It is able to manage all data properly.
• It gives plenty of personalized services.
• It witnesses high customer retention.

Brief History & Evolution of Salesforce

• It was discovered by ex-Oracle employees in March 1999 whose names were Marc Benioff, Frank Dominguez, and Parker Harris
• It was June 2004 when the Company was listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the stock symbol CRM and raised up to $110 million US dollars.
• In 2014, Salesforce was announced as the customer success platform with an amazing set of services that we will discuss in detail below. These are service cloud, sales cloud, marketing cloud, analytics cloud, etc.
• It was 2017 when Salesforce launched a Facebook analytics tool, and Salesforce partnered with Apple in 2018 to improve and build more powerful business apps.
• Today, Salesforce has translated its services into 16 different languages. It has more than 80K regular customers and over 2,100,000 subscribers.

Why Salesforce?

The answer to this question is quite simple. First of all, this was a cloud-based platform with better functionalities at much lower costs. Salesforce replaced the lengthy installations with a cloud environment where everything is accessed over the internet. Most importantly, they represent an attractive business model where licensing of the product was no more expensive, and it was affordable for every small business too.

Let us have a quick look at Salesforce in numbers and why you should opt for Salesforce training and certifications.

• Apps 2700+
• Market Share 20%
• Customer 1,50,000+
• Job opportunities 80% extra
• Installations 3 Million

Today, Salesforce gives you the right path from idea to app development and the best part is that you can focus on core development activities of your app, not the infrastructure as it is taken care of by the platform itself. Obviously, it results in time-saving and dollars savings at the end.

According to Salesforce customers, it is unique due to four popular reasons – Faster, Effective, affordable, and Easy to use.

• Traditional CRM systems were taking more than a year to deploy while Salesforce CRM systems can be deployed much faster within weeks only.
• Within Salesforce, you have to focus on app building only not the infrastructure; this is the reason why it is affordable for the enterprises.
• Salesforce is easy to use where you don’t have to spend much time learning, but you can drive meaningful business insights quickly.
• Salesforce CRM is effective because it can be customized based on business needs and requirements and converts lead to customers too.

Salesforce is a cloud-based platform so that it can be accessed from anywhere, anytime just with the help of a smooth internet connection and a web browser. Salesforce is changing rapidly with the speed of your business, and Salesforce solutions are highly scalable as needed by the Companies.

Salesforce can be seamlessly integrated with third-party tools like Gmail, Yahoo, etc. Even if you wanted to integrate it with your accounting software; you can do that. If we look at other existing CRM systems, then integration is the most difficult task and almost impossible to achieve success. These all capabilities are the reason why every small business or even start-ups should opt for Salesforce – the largest customer success platform today.

Salesforce Highlights

Here the key reason for using Salesforce CRM and what makes Salesforce so popular among cloud-based CRM users:

Read: How to Create a Free Salesforce Developer Account?

• It is a feature-rich CRM solution for sales, marketing, service, community management, and partner management, etc.
• Salesforce CRM stores the data over the cloud so that anyone can access it from anywhere worldwide by using a simple internet connection.
• It is designed to cater to the needs of all-sized business either it is small or medium in size.
• Salesforce CRM works on the pay as you go model and helps in reducing the overhead costs too.
• It has increased customer retention, loyalty, and satisfaction over time.
• It helps in accelerating sales productivity as needed by businesses.
• It can be quickly integrated with third-party users when needed.
• It is a clear witness for the overall growth of your business.
• It helps in the continuous optimization of campaigns based on market response and closure interaction with channel partners.

Salesforce.com offerings – A customer success platform for the future

To get a better understanding of the platform, you first need to discuss the Salesforce.com overview, Salesforce offerings, and how to use them. You can access plenty of services and products within the cloud that helps business in the ultimate growth and sales profits.

Salesforce.com offers a group of CRM products or services that are specially designed to fit into an organization more effectively and efficiently. Moreover, this is a set of IT services like IT development, deployment, etc. over the internet. Some of the most popular cloud services and the products offered by the Salesforce includes –

1). Sales Cloud

As the name suggests, the sales cloud CRM platform is basically used to manage organization sales, marketing, and customer support services. It helps you to close deals much faster as compared to traditional CRM systems. In case, some business is engaged in business to business or business to customer activities, then sales cloud is the right fit to accelerate the organization growth.

2). Marketing Cloud

The marketing cloud offers one of the most powerful digital marketing platforms to manage different marketing activities of a Company. The possible activities that can be managed through marketing cloud include – content creation, content marketing, data analytics, web personalization, social media activities, etc.

3). Service Cloud

The service cloud is the platform to manage the support activities of the customers inside organizations. This cloud not only helps you to handle customer queries gracefully, but they will get direct access to the answers for more satisfaction in real-time.

4). Community Cloud

If you need a social platform to connect with your employees, partners, and customers, then the community cloud is just the perfect choice to start your journey. The platform can be used to exchange most important details like images, data in real-time. Also, you can connect with the companies that are already using Salesforce and a few Companies that are planning to switch Salesforce shortly.

5). Analytics Cloud

The analytic cloud provides a business intelligence platform for businesses looking to work with large data files and wider customer details. This is the Einstein AI model, where meaningful business insights are calculated from the collected data, and it helps sales representatives in taking quick actions at the right time. It is optimized for data visualization, and they can be integrated with other Salesforce tools too quickly.

6). Salesforce App cloud

To design and deploy customized Salesforce apps, you need the app cloud. It offers a complete collection of the development tools that make app building easier, faster, effective, and most affordable too.

Here we have discussed popular Salesforce offerings; there are a few business-centric Salesforce products too that can be utilized as per your business needs. These are:

• Commerce Cloud: The Salesforce product allows your organization to provide seamless customer experiences and services.
• IoT Cloud: Companies use the IoT cloud for developing more connected products.
• Health Cloud: This cloud product is used by health industries to understand patients beyond their charts.

Salesforce Tutorial: What is Architecture?

Salesforce architecture is divided into different components, as discussed below:

Read: What is SFDC? What does SFDC stand for?

A). Trusted multi tenant Cloud

Here, different instances of multiple apps operate separately in a shared environment. The instances are also named as tenants that can be quickly separated from each other. Although all tenants physically stay in the same hardware, it offers the maximum-security levels as needed by organizations.

B). Scalable Metadata Platform

This is another popular component that helps you in customizations. It helps in increasing the overall amount of data and concurrent user instances too.

C). Enterprise Ecosystem

The enterprise ecosystem is bigger as different partners contribute to the platform and help in maintaining this platform effectively.

D). APIs

Salesforce offers a robust suite of APIs for developing mobile apps. It makes app development easy and more flexible for programmers.

F). CRM and Related Functionality

Salesforce contains all popular features of CRM and also offers extra features for apps creation and customizations.

Salesforce Features you should know

• Leads generation and Sales productivity: It helps you to measure customer engagement by tracking email activities and converts them into potential customers.
• Quotes & Opportunities: it helps vendors to create quotes and opportunities.
• Contacts Management: It helps in pulling customers’ data like activity history, customer communications, frequent contacts, etc.
• Build apps: It helps in building, running, scaling, and managing more innovative apps as needed by your business.
• Analytics management: it helps in accessing the data, performing analysis, and creating dashboards, etc.
• Sales communities: you could enable online community software that enables organizations to connect with partners, customers, employees, etc.
• Email Integration: Salesforce provides third-party integrations dedicated to customer services, support, and customer experiences.
• Salesforce Engine: This is one more amazing feature focused on personalized contacts with the help of campaigns designed by the marketing team.
• Sales Collaboration: It helps you in addressing customer feedback and queries more effectively than usual.
• Leads Management: It allows you to create multiple territory models. You can preview before rollout and help you in optimizing and balancing territories.
• Workflows & Approval: This is an interface that offers simple drag-drop options and can be used by anyone.
• Partners Management: This feature helps in building partners and communities to share business objectives, goals, activities, etc.
• Files Management: This feature enables the sales team to share multiple files and update them whenever needed.
• Sales Forecasting: This feature allows you to get a real-view of the sales team forecasting.
• Reports & Dashboards: This feature offers a real-time picture of the business at a glance in the form of reports and dashboards like charts, graphs, etc.

How are Companies using Salesforce?

Here is a quick idea of Companies who have used Salesforce and implemented this CRM successfully.

Type of Industry	Company Name	Application
Healthcare	Health Leads	The Company was able to view the patient data and coordinate with doctors.
High Tech	Sony	The company used the Salesforce service cloud to communicate with its customers effectively.
Communications	Comcast-Spectator	The Company used Salesforce to manage detailed customer profiles and find their biggest fans to develop an effective marketing technique.
Media	Coca-Cola	The Company used Salesforce CRM to connect better with their customers and staff people.
Finance	American Express	The Company used Salesforce to connect with their employees across organizations, branches, and time zones.

How to access Salesforce?

Salesforce is available for 30-days trial and we will register for the same.

Step 1 – Go to the Link to register your profile as given: https://www.salesforce.com/in/form/signup/freetrial-sales/?d=70130000000EqoP

Here, you should add the required details as shown like Name, Email ID, Job Title, Phone number, Company name, Country, etc.

Step 2- Once you are done, click on “Start my Free Trial” option.

Step 3 – it will take time in setting up the Salesforce profile, so have patience, and you will be directed to the login page momentarily. Here is the screen you can see after the Login.

Read: Difference Between Salesforce and Servicenow

Step 4 – At the Welcome screen, there is one Accounts option on the top.

Here, you have to click the “New Account” option and add the necessary details to create a new account quickly.

Step 5 - Click the Save option, and you are done. A new account is created successfully. The user-interface of Salesforce CRM is very self-explanatory, and you can perform other operations too in the same way with ease and more convenience. All the Best!

What is APEX?

APEX is an object-oriented programming language that allows developers to execute the transactional control and flow statements on Salesforce server by using an API. It also helps developers in adding business logic to their programming codes. Here are a few advantages of utilizing APEX language in Salesforce.

• APEX uses easy syntax and semantics that can be understood quickly and offers much faster and effective results.
• APEX language is designed in such a way that multiple queries and DML statements can be threaded together to a single unit on the Salesforce server.
• APEX uses direct references to schema objects like objects or fields names, etc.

Summary:

Let us quickly go through the blog summary what we have discussed in the blog and highlights of the Salesforce Tutorial:

• Cloud computing is all about storing, managing, processing data on a remote server instead of using a local server.
• CRM is a popular software these days used by organizations to store customer details and maintain a long-term relationship with customers.
• Salesforce is a SaaS CRM, and Salesforce.com helps you to manage customer relationships, it can be quickly integrated with other systems, and even helps in building cloud-based apps.
• Salesforce is a feature-rich CRM solution for sales, marketing, service, community management, and partner management, etc.
• Ex-Oracle employees discovered salesforce in March 1999 whose names were Marc Benioff, Frank Dominguez, and Parker Harris
• The major components of Salesforce architecture can be given as - Trusted Multi-tenant Cloud, Scalable Metadata Platform, Enterprise Ecosystem, APIs, CRM, and Related Functionality are important salesforce components
• The three service nature of the platform is SaaS, IaaS, PaaS.
• Important Salesforce Products are Sales Cloud, Market Cloud, Service Cloud, Analytics Cloud, Community Cloud, Commerce Cloud, IoT Cloud, Health Cloud, etc.
• Salesforce is used in various Industries like Communications, Finance, High Tech, Health Care, Media, etc.

Final Words:

That’s all for the day! I make you sure that this ultimate guide for Salesforce admin and Salesforce Developer will take you through all the important aspects of the cloud-based CRM system that are necessary for you to know before you actually start using the platform. To explore more on the platform, you may enroll yourself for the Salesforce training and certification course with JanBask training right away. We wish you luck for a glorious future in the Salesforce space with us!

Read: Top 50 Salesforce Interview Questions and Answers in 2020