Unless you have been interested in the customer relationship management (CRM) software sphere, you probably have no clue what Salesforce is and what it can do for you. However, regardless of whether you are just curious about CRM’s top players or considering deploying the system in your organization, in a few paragraphs, we’ll make you an expert in questions like “What is Salesforce?”, “What is Salesforce used for?”, and “What are Salesforce benefits?”
Just dive into the topic with us.
Salesforce is a massive infrastructure of customer relationship management software products that help marketing, sales, commerce, service, and IT teams connect with their customers.
Although Salesforce started as a Software as a Service (SaaS) company, it has grown into a Platform as a Service (PaaS) company.
It means that their customers can buy not only a ready-to-use Salesforce CRM system but also build their framework components (Lightning components) and custom apps on top of the Salesforce Lightning platform (Force.com), become Salesforce partners and then market these software products on its app marketplace – AppExchange.
Also, Salesforce encourages users and companies to know their platform capabilities and features better and join their online training hub, Trailhead where they can get educational resources from learning modules like “Salesforce Platform Basics” or expert support from the Trailblazer Community.
To date, Salesforce has had over 150,000 customers worldwide and is behind the scenes of business behemoths such as American Express, Sony, and the Coca-Cola Enterprise.
Now, Salesforce dominates the CRM market with over 20% market share, and its share prices will only increase.
The company is also famous for its company and product acquisitions. Among the latest and most significant ones are ClickSoftware, Mulesoft, and Tableau.
Why do so many businesses, from start-ups to Fortune 500, jump on the Salesforce train?
To understand it better, let’s dig into the Salesforce and CRM market history and the history of the CRM market first.
We offer all types of Salesforce consulting services such as implementation, integration, customization, administration, AppExchange app development.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a technology aimed at improving your company’s relationship and interaction management with customers and potential customers. CRM software helps companies stay connected with their customers, streamline processes, and improve profitability.
Salesforce revolutionized technology and the CRM world in 1999, being one of the first cloud computing companies. What was unique about it? Salesforce started delivering its software through Internet browsers instead of company-hosted servers, thereby reducing building, installation, maintenance, and support costs.
Also, this platform enabled users to access their software from anywhere, not only from the office building. Salesforce also offered a combination of simplicity, scalability, and online accessibility to data from any point on Earth in its software solution, making them an instant hit and a global leader in the market.
Salesforce’s ecosystem hosts a number of various cloud platforms that allow you to interact with different data and service your customers in multiple capacities.
But despite numerous products, customer relationship management (CRM) is still the lifeblood of Salesforce’s entire model, optimized for different business niches in Salesforce Clouds.
Let’s discover these significant products.
Salesforce Product Ecosystem Infographic
The Sales Cloud is a CRM platform that was Salesforce’s first and most popular product. This product is designed for the management of your organization’s sales. Originally, this Cloud was created for B2B (Business-to-Business) companies to guide potential customers through a defined sales cycle. However, B2C (Business-to-Consumer) companies can now leverage the Sales Cloud.
Its main built-in objects include:
So, Lead can be converted into Account, Contact, and Opportunity objects, and Opportunity, in turn, can be scaled by different stages and probabilities. What’s more, the Sales Cloud has out-of-the-box features like quoting and opportunity forecasting.
Besides, all standard objects can be enhanced with custom fields relevant to your business. For instance, if you sell multiple services or products, you can wish to create an area to track the product interest of your Leads.
Task tracking and workflow automation in Sales Cloud can help you automatically create a set of tasks based on specific criteria. For example, whenever you create a new Lead, the system can generate a sequence of tasks for you to call or email this Lead.
To get a comprehensive understanding of Sales Cloud capabilities, watch this demo:
Further, Salesforce Sales Cloud can be enhanced with Salesforce Sales Engagement (formerly High-Velocity Sales), CPQ& Billing, Revenue Intelligence, Sales Cloud Einstein, Marketing Cloud Account Engagement, Sales Emails and Alerts, Partner Relationship Management, External Apps, Inbox, Einstein Conversion Insights, Einstein Relationship Insights, Sales Dialer for Essentials, Sales Enablement, Social Intelligence, Salesforce Maps, Salesforce Maps Territory Planning.
Our Salesforce consultants provide advisory services on the best practices of the Sales Cloud implementation. With Ascendix’s expert guidance, you will enrich your organization’s productivity by employing a well-optimized CRM solution with functionality tailored precisely to your needs.
Salesforce CPQ, which stands for “Configure, Price, Quote,” was acquired through the Steelbrick purchase back in 2015. Customers may sell intricate sets of Salesforce goods because of its ability to go beyond Opportunities Products & Quotes’ basic capability.
Product and pricing rules, as well as a quote-generating engine, are components of CPQ that assist salespeople in creating proper quotations with complicated product sets.
Salesforce Billing solution enables completion of the customer Order-to-Cash lifecycle. This product takes care of billing, invoice generation, payments, and revenue recognition once the quote has been finalized.
Advanced Revenue Cloud facilitates complex Quote-to-Cash use cases that exceed the capabilities of standard Salesforce CPQ, Billing, and Subscription Management products.
This cloud enables advanced approval, standalone order/multi-cloud billing, finance logging, customer asset lifecycle management, tax, and customer storefront integration.
The Salesforce Service Cloud is a service platform from Salesforce for your company’s customer service and support team.
It is designed to speed up customers’ case tracking and resolution via multiple channels like email, live chat, or phone to encourage efficient communication.
In addition, Service Cloud enables users to create self-service customer service portals and offers pre-prepared communication via automated responses for specific outcomes.
Its standard features include:
The base functionality can be optimized with social networking plugins for effective online brand reputation management that help to monitor and respond to customers’ posts. Also, Service Cloud is telephony-friendly and allows integration, which is particularly useful for large enterprises with significant customer service centers.
You can boost Salesforce Service Cloud with Field Service, Appointment Assistant, Digital Engagement, Workforce Engagement, Visual Remote Assistant, Service Cloud Einstein, Self-Service, Service Clod Voice, Salesforce Feedback Management, Customer Lifecycle Analytics, Salesforce Survey Response Pack, Salesforce Scheduler, Employee Productivity, IT Service Center.
The Marketing Cloud is a powerful digital marketing platform for B2C and B2B marketers where you can connect with your customers, track the customer journey across multiple communication channels, and manage your social media presence, email promotions, digital advertising campaigns, content creation, and data analysis.
Its broad spectrum of features allows you to market to your customers via email, SMS, social networks, and digital advertising platforms and to interact with your customers and particular pieces of content. Moreover, within the Marketing Cloud users can customize their marketing efforts via various built-in creation studios.
This Salesforce platform can be boosted by Einstein Segmentation, Data Studio, Einstein Engagement, Journey Builder, Mobile Connect, Field Level Encryption, Sender Authentication Package, Google Analytics 360 Integration for Marketing Cloud, Marketing Cloud Advertising, Media Planning Centre, Media Impact Optimisation, Einstein Vision for Social Studio.
As has been mentioned, the Salesforce Marketing Cloud unifies several products, so let’s discuss them separately:
Pardot is Salesforce’s B2B email marketing automation tool topped up with the ability to build landing pages and forms. It is used as an email marketing platform for sending emails to prospects on behalf of sales reps and qualifying leads that get passed to sales reps.
Pardot fits better for smaller databases with higher-value sales and can be integrated with Sales Cloud or any other CRM solution.The key functionality of Pardot can be elevated with Salesforce Engage, Engagement History Dashboards, and B2B Marketing Analytics Plus.
Advertising Studio enables campaign management and targeting solutions for digital marketing campaigns.
Distributed Marketing & Marketing Cloud Connect provides a managed package that is installed in your CRM environment. Thanks to it, distributed teams of advisors, partners, and more can view, personalize, and send the content directly from CRM.
You can install Distributed Marketing content blocks in your Marketing Cloud environment to easily enable powerful content collaboration. All send use the power of Marketing Cloud to help teams of all sizes engage with their books of business reliably and at scale.
Einstein for Marketing gives marketers the tools to make every customer journey and interaction effective and understand customers better with predictive insights. It helps to create personalized messages and content and receive suggestions on when and how to engage with a customer.
Email Studio empowers you to craft refined, individualized emails with customizable dynamic elements and scripting languages. This solution helps to fine-tune and automate email journeys and build more personalized relationships with your clients.
Mobile Studio is similar to Email Studio but focused on generating marketing content for mobile devices. This tool enables you to craft messages that can be delivered via SMS, MMS, Chat, and Push notifications.
Advertising Studio enables campaign management and targeting solution for digital marketing campaigns.
Distributed Marketing & Marketing Cloud Connect provides a managed package that is installed in your CRM environment. Thanks to it, distributed teams of advisors, partners, and more can view, personalize, and send the content directly from CRM.
You can install Distributed Marketing content blocks in your Marketing Cloud environment to easily enable powerful content collaboration. All send use the power of Marketing Cloud to help teams of all sizes engage with their books of business reliably and at scale.
Einstein for Marketing gives marketers the tools to make every customer journey and interaction effective and understand customers better with predictive insights. It helps to create personalized messages and content and receive suggestions on when and how to engage with a customer.
Customer 360 Audiences, previously known as Salesforce DMP, is another part of the Salesforce Marketing Cloud products ecosystem.
It is a data-first digital marketing platform for unifying all of your customer data, humanizing every interaction. Customer 360 Audiences allows building segmented lists of your customers and tailoring communication to the exact audience segment you want to target.
Advertising Studio is another marketing enhancer for centralized digital advertising. This platform unifies the management of Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, and Google Ads advertising campaigns.
Marketing Cloud Personalization, like any other marketing automation product, elevates customer engagement to a new level. It helps you understand what your customers want, make the best decision automatically, and modify the AI algorithms powering your personalization strategies.
It helps deliver cross-channel personalized experiences at every step of the customer lifecycle with campaign management and aligns your message across every marketing channel.
Marketing Cloud Intelligence enables connection, analysis, and taking action on all your data in one marketing dashboard to drive ROI, speed, and growth across your business.
Salesforce announced the introduction of loyalty management in January 2021 with the goal of assisting businesses in engaging and rewarding their consumers.
The technology enables companies to create scaleable loyalty programs using clicks rather than coding. Numerous systems, such as tiered memberships or points-per-purchase, might be developed.
For client signup and content delivery, Loyalty Management can be set up to work with Experience Cloud and Marketing Cloud, respectively.
The Community Cloud is a social platform for external collaboration and custom portal creation. This tool can help your organization centralize and facilitate communication among your employees, partners, and customers. In addition, the Community Cloud allows you to use this platform to exchange documents, images, and other data in real time.
Community Cloud can be easily integrated with Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, and App Cloud and customized to fulfill your business needs. Community Cloud lets you automatically source data and images from your Salesforce and significantly reduces time on content management.
The core functionality of Experience Cloud can be improved with Digital Engagement, Einstein Bots, Mobile Publisher for Experience Cloud, Experience Analytics, CPQ for Partner Experience, and Distributed Marketing for Partners.
We will teach you how to use CRM software to the fullest without overpaying for unnecessary functionality.
The Commerce Cloud offers best-in-class features and functionality to provide excellent customer service and experience irrespective of your customer’s presence (online or offline). It also frees your business from the demands of managing a technical roadmap and enables customer data integration to give your consumers a better experience.
If your focus is on providing your clients with a positive, engaging customer experience, then Commerce Cloud will be the best fit for you.
B2C Commerce helps businesses connect with today’s modern shoppers via centralized marketing, service, and order fulfillment experiences. Companies can leverage a full set of commerce APIs, developer tools, and in-built features.
Commerce Cloud Einstein (formerly B2C Commerce Einstein) empowers merchants with point-and-click tools to boost productivity and e-commerce revenue. With Commerce Cloud Einstein, brands can get spot-on recommendations, tailored product sorting, meaningful search experiences, and anticipate shopper search intent.
Order Management is a customer-centric order management system that connects commerce and service to deliver an excellent post-purchase experience. With this platform, businesses can leverage localization, multi-currency, and multi-language capabilities.
Commerce for B2B (formerly B2B Commerce) enables online ordering, reducing costs with a self-service B2B Commerce portal.
Salesforce Analytics Cloud consists of two types of analytics products – Einstein and CRM Analytics for various clouds.
Einstein product family involves Einstein Discovery for the automatic discovery of relevant patterns based on customer data, and Einstein Next Best Action for the display of actions based on unique criteria.
CRM Analytics (formerly Tableau CRM) empowers Salesforce CRM users with actionable insights and AI-driven analytics.
Salesforce offers a powerful feature set for educational institutions like:
Nonprofit Solutions include products set for fundraising and building relationships and fund impact, volunteer project management, engagement solutions to connect with people across more channels to power more impact, and solutions for grants management.
Salesforce App Cloud platform unites multiple products for app development like:
Read our Salesforce implementation guide to know the best implementation practices from our experts.
The Customer 360 Platform comprises several solutions: AppBuilder, Heroku, Mulesoft, Lightning Web Components, Flows, Process Builder etc.
AppBuilder enables the development of custom applications on the Lighting Platform and across the following key areas: Salesforce fundamentals, data modeling, and management, business logic, and process automation, user interface, and App deployment.
Heroku is a cloud platform-as-a-service (PaaS) tool, which is used to grow, manage, and deploy modern apps. Besides that, Heroku is used to develop customer-facing Apps, whilst the Platform may be used to create Apps for your users within Salesforce.
The Customer 360 platform also includes integration services that combine Mulesoft (an integration service as a cloud), Salesforce traditional APIs (SOAP, Bulk), and newer async APIs like Salesforce Events.
Also, it encompasses Lightning Web Components to deploy blazing-fast apps on the Lightning platform, and various mobile capabilities like Salesforce mobile app, Salesforce Mobile Publisher, and Salesforce Mobile SDKS.
The Customer 360 product set covers Salesforce platforms, process automation tools like Flows and Process Builder, and security tools like Platform Encryption, Event Monitoring, and Field Audit Trail.
MuleSoft’s technology allows you to quickly connect to any system using a variety of out-of-the-box connectors, making it a crucial purchase for Salesforce in 2018.
MuleSoft is replaced by the Anypoint platform, which enables you to manage your API connections, carry out integrations, monitor, and generate reports all from a single cloud-based platform. MuleSoft’s hundreds of pre-existing connections are among its key selling points since they allow you to link with mainframes, ERP systems, and SaaS apps utilizing tried-and-true templated solutions.
A lightweight, Salesforce-integrated version of MuleSoft called Salesforce MuleSoft Composer was also recently introduced by Salesforce.
Salesforce purchased Tableau back in 2019 to enter the wider business analytics market. Tableau product family is represented by Tableau Platform and Tableau Content.
Tableau Platform has on-public cloud (AWS, Azure, or GCP), on-Tableau Cloud, and on-premises options.
By acquiring Vlocity in 2020, a company that concentrated on many additional Industry-specific clouds to meet the needs of specific industries.
Salesforce Industrial Solutions
The scope of industry categories that Salesforce is ready to support is quite impressive:
Don’t see your industry on the list? Check AppExchange, the Salesforce marketplace, where Salesforce Partners publish and sell their tools. For example, our company sells AscendixRE, focused on commercial real estate companies.
Net Zero Cloud, one of Salesforce’s newest offerings, is a carbon-accounting platform that enables you to accept responsibility for your company’s carbon impact.
It enables you to submit data from supplier chain contributions, company trip expenses, and gasoline, electricity, and gas bills. You may quickly find the key areas of concern, trends, and potential action areas with the use of out-of-the-box dashboards.
Salesforce’s formal entry into Web 3.0 technology is the NFT Cloud. Salesforce’s own event, Connections ’22, where NFT Cloud was introduced, gave us an early peek at the brand-new platform.
You can build, sell, and manage NFTs using the Salesforce platform with NFT Cloud, producing digital assets to boost client engagement.
The largest acquisition Salesforce has ever made was Slack, which they purchased for $27.7 billion in December 2020.
Slack is a business-oriented messaging service that lets you send direct messages to your coworkers or use channels that have been set up just for that purpose. You may utilize a channel, for instance, for a project or your regional office.
Slack product set includes Slack Launch, Slack Extend, and Slack Migration.
In 2016, Quip was purchased, and as a result, the firm now has Bret Taylor as a co-CEO. Quip is a combination of Google Docs and Slack. It offers robust spreadsheet and word-processing capabilities with a focus on collaboration.
The platform has tools like Quip Chat, Quip Slides, and Salesforce Integration to integrate real-time data into the document.
Based on Salesforce statistics, companies using Salesforce generally see a 34% increase in customer satisfaction, a 32% increase in lead conversion, and a 27% increase in sales revenues. What are the key elements of platform success among its customers? Let’s take a closer look.
What Salesforce is Used for
Salesforce poses itself as an innovative CRM leader and justifies its title by constantly improving its products regarding user-friendliness, customizability, and new features. The platform is fully customizable and can meet the requirements of any business. That’s why over 150,000 companies around the globe have selected it as their CRM solution.
Since Salesforce is a holistic ecosystem with its development platform, AI technology, big data processing engine, collaboration portal, and app marketplace, the platform is enabled to meet all the technology needs of your CRM system while integrating other Salesforce-friendly third-party tools.
Your business is evolving and expanding, and so should your Salesforce. Salesforce platform architecture and functionality allow your CRM to grow with your organization without disrupting your software.
The world is becoming increasingly mobile. It is when Salesforce comes in handy and allows you to access your product anywhere. The Salesforce Mobile App enables you to get an equally full version of your product on your phone or tablet to what you have on your desktop.
Yes, it may sound weird, but the more popular this platform becomes, the better it is for you. Why? So, you don’t have to spend hours searching for tools that can be integrated with your product — plenty of offers already exist. Also, you can easily find any Salesforce expert that can deploy, optimize, configure, or customize your software because there are already many specialists.
Of course, all the benefits are not limited to the above-mentioned, and each Salesforce user can find something special for themselves. Just see what our clients say about positive changes in their work processes after we helped them implement Salesforce-based software solutions.
If you are about to welcome Salesforce CRM into your company and you are a big fan of simplicity, then our Salesforce consulting services will be the best fit for you.
Our consultants will make complicated processes easy for you. We at Ascendix are ready to take on any Salesforce-related challenges and successfully overcome them.
Our broad range of Salesforce services, industries in focus, over 20 years of experience, and the number of happy clients speak for themselves. And all you need is to contact us and share your project ideas or difficulties, and we will be glad to share our expertise with you.
We specialize in the implementation, optimization, and customization of Salesforce products like:
Also, if you’ve been using any CRM software for a while and noticed that it lacks some of the essential features, our professionals can help you with CRM system audit and migration to Salesforce. Need help with Salesforce implementation? Contact us and we’ll help you to implement Salesforce in your organization, train your team, and ensure they adopt it.
Salesforce is a Software as a Service (SaaS) company and a Platform as a Service (PaaS) company that sells software products and components that help marketing, sales, service, and IT teams connect with their customers. Its best-selling products include Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Pardot, and CPQ Cloud.
Salesforce is used for streamlining sales, service, and marketing activities via industry-specific products and seamless software integration. It offers solutions for various needs such as Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Community Cloud, Field Services, CPQ and Billing etc.
Anzhelika specializes in B2B content marketing and has in-depth expertise in promoting the company's products and services through high-quality content. On the Ascendix Technologies blog, Anzhelika shares her insights of Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM tips & tricks as well as overviews of new CRM tools and technology trends on the market.
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Great content you have here. I enjoy every bit of all you put out.
Great content would love to look at more salesforce content.
Very well explained.
Fantastic blog! Thank you for sharing your original thoughts. They seem worthwhile to me.
An impressive share!
Thanks, I’ve just been searching for information about this topic for a long time and yours is the best I have come upon so far.
Nice content. Can u please share content on each of the salesforce clouds in depth.
Hi Jitendra,
Thank you very much for your interest in our content.
You can learn more about Sales, Service, Marketing Cloud, Experience Cloud, and Pardot in the following blog posts:
What is Salesforce Experience Cloud?
Salesforce Sales Cloud vs Service Cloud
Please let me know if there is anything else I can help with.
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