Salesforce is headquartered in San Francisco, California. It is an American cloud-based software company. Salesforce sells a complementary suite of enterprise applications that mainly focuses on customer service, analytics, application development, and marketing automation and provides customer relationship management services.
It has a broad category of services such as Data cloud, service cloud, App cloud, analytics cloud, marketing cloud, and many more. By the end of this article, you will have a clear understanding of Salesforce, its features, benefits, and disadvantages.
Salesforce – Table of Contents
What is Salesforce?
Salesforce is the world’s most popular customer relationship management platform that aims at helping its customer’s marketing; sales, service, commerce, and IT team to work together from anywhere.
With the help of customer 360, these teams in an organization can work together as Salesforce is one integrated CRM platform that powers the entire suite of connected apps. Firstly, it helps the employees focus on what is more important for the organization right now. Secondly, it stabilizes the business, reopens, and gets back to delivering exceptional customer experience. The Salesforce developers have always believed in doing good to the world as a company and since when it is started, it hasn’t disappointed its customers. Lastly and most importantly, they commit their time, equity, and products to fulfill their goals of improving education, equality, and the environment for everyone.
Why Salesforce?
Salesforce is one of the largest, most popular, and the best cloud platform provider around the globe. Their software such as marketing automation, customer relationship management system, etc gives them a lot of advantages over their competitors that their customers love. Salesforce helps the users to engage their customers with relevant and empathetic digital marketing from anywhere. It sells smarter and grows the business faster, quickly launches, and scales eCommerce built around the customer provides great customer service, and is digitally fast to empower the teams to work from anywhere anytime. Above all, it is a platform with so many advantages being provided to their customer which leaves no reason for them to not take the help of Salesforce for their organization.
Why you should use Salesforce?
There are many systems available that enable businesses to manage their customer relationships seamlessly but there’s no other CRM platform as Salesforce. Salesforce has a large fan following since when it has started and here are some reasons why one should use Salesforce:
- It is an investment. It not only takes care of the business requirements but also takes care of the future needs as well. Salesforce can scale up your business and which company doesn’t want this assurance?
- Its performance remains intact whether you are dealing with large clients or small clients. Every client has the access to one platform and one infrastructure which means everyone has common networking, software, and hardware platform.
- When a customer becomes a Salesforce AppExchange partner, they have access to its wide range of free and popular apps. Users can even develop apps and market them for Salesforce.
- Data security is one of the most important aspects that Salesforce focuses on. This application has pre-installed security features and companies usually don’t pay attention to security as much as Salesforce does.
- This software is less expensive than others as it provides innovative SaaS solutions that enable the organizations to use a common platform and it improves their sales efforts and communications.
- It has many unique features such as contact management, opportunity tracking, customer engagement tools, etc that no other CRM solution provides.
Salesforce Features
With the help of Salesforce cloud, the organizations can do everything faster whether it is finding new customers, growing accounts, or closing deals as it offers the following features:
- Account and Contact Management – Customer information, key contacts, activity history, internal account discussions, and communications can be done with it.
- Opportunity Management – Helps you stay connected with the people and allows you to see the stage, quotes, competition, and more.
- Lead Management – Helps you track your leads, optimize campaigns, and make smarter decisions.
- Sales Data – It helps connect with key decision-makers and increases the sales and marketing productivity of the organization.
- Mobile – Turns your mobile device into the sales office. You can log calls, work opportunities, or respond to leads.
- Workflow and Approvals – Helps deal with discounts and expenses and rapidly design and automate business processes.
- Files Sync and Shares – Makes it easy to share files securely, discuss and publish the content and track it in real-time.
- Reports and Dashboards – Allows creating detailed reports and accessing them from anywhere. Dashboards provide a real-time picture of businesses.
- Sales Forecasting – Users can get a real-time view of the team’s forecasts. Provides in-line editing, multicurrency support, override visibility, etc.
Salesforce Architecture
Salesforce gives an excellent experience to its customers, partners in an organization, and employees. It is used to customize standard functionality and create custom apps, pages, and components. It becomes easy to work faster on this platform because of its superb architecture. In this section, we will learn about its architecture in brief:
The core architecture of Salesforce has three layers namely:
- Multi-tenant
- Metadata
- API
Now, moving deep into these layers:
- Multi-tenant – In this layer, there is one common application present which is serviced to multiple clients. The developer can thus create an application, upload it on the cloud, and can share it with multiple clients. This is very cost-effective as the cost of development and maintenance of the application can be shared making it economic per client. Even if the developer wants to update the application, he/she can do so by updating it in one place.
- Metadata – In this layer, all the data is stored on different layers and in the stored database due to which the security issues get sorted. The metadata thus points to a particular clients’ data in a shared database.
- API – Salesforce provides a powerful source of API. The APIs help in the development and customization of mobile applications. In addition, they enable diverse bits of programming so that they can interface with each other and trade the data. They are comparable and without going into details, it can help you connect your apps with different apps.
Salesforce Benefits
There are a lot of features, operations, and benefits that come with a Salesforce subscription. It provides its customers with every feature that they need to fulfill all their business requirements which is why it is the most popular CRM platform to date. The benefits are as follows:
- Customer Information – It retrieves a decent amount of information – both quality and quantity. Users can look at every person’s account, contact, event, and task which gives the company a lot of information before approaching potential customers.
- Account Planning – Users have all the customer information at their fingertips that they require which helps them make plans for accounts independently. In short, it helps them make a connection with the client and modify their plans to achieve the best result possible.
- Time Management – With all the necessary customer information and the wealth of planning resources comes the benefit of excellent time management. Users can prioritize their work accordingly and organize tasks for different accounts helping them manage their time for each customer.
- Team Collaboration – It lets the users communicate with each other easily as it has this chatter feature enabling them to talk to individuals or groups about work.
- Accessibility – It is available wherever there is an internet connection. Moewovwe, it has great accessibility as it allows the users to stay in touch with the business and the team even with mobile devices.
Salesforce New Offerings
There are a few new features been added to the Salesforce software which makes working on it fun and easy for the users. It gives hands-on experience to everyone, whether they are a beginner or an experienced user. Here is a list of the new offerings:
- Trailhead added which makes learning fun and easy. It has several learning modules that help the user work efficiently and effortlessly.
- Salesforce sandboxes provide the developers and admins the freedom to test their innovative ideas in an isolated and safe environment using real org data and IT organizations can even choose which apps they wish to deploy and when.
- Salesforce connect feature allows the users to connect and access the data from other Salesforce org and external sources. It reduces integration time and helps incorporate data from other departments.
Advantages and Disadvantages of Salesforce
A comprehensive review of any software’s pros and cons is very important for a buyer’s benefit. Like every software and system application, Salesforce also has some advantages and disadvantages so in case you decide on making this platform your CRM choice, you should look into them. They are as follows:
Advantages –
- Salesforce is cost-effective and is accessible anytime anywhere worldwide.
- It manages and distributes new leads across team members and populates leads to work.
- It is easy to use, it maximizes outreach and it has an effective tracking system.
- This software works perfectly fine for both large and small organizations that have a variety of goals as it has a lot of options and flexibility for customization to suit an individual’s needs in an organization accordingly.
- It is user-friendly and intuitive; it has easily adaptable modules and integrates well with other existing software platforms.
- This application helps organize and digitize the company sale records thus it improves the overall organization of the company.
- Finally, salesforce requires no capital investment.
Disadvantages –
- Its reporting system needs to be improved. It is difficult to use and quite confusing and it sometimes yields different results for the same criteria of reports once they are run.
- It doesn’t have any up to date design. Other products are constantly upgrading their tools which make Salesforce outdated.
- It can be hard to use for a newcomer.
- In the process of automation, users can lose a personal touch.
- At times, the application is not accessible as it has its maintenance schedule since it runs on its cloud server.
- There is sometimes a lot of customization due to which interface is filled with cumbersome tools that can prove to be distracting.
- Users face transition between transactions as some have to go through multiple screens to process them.