Today, in the ever-evolving digital age, every new day, businesses encounter a new challenge of staying competitive and ahead of the curve.
While matching the steps of the advanced era, they miss the beat and experience a downfall. They bear numerous issues, like scattered data, limited customer insights, manual sales tasks, limited scalability, and more. You may relate this to your situation, but how to get over it?
Here arrives the need for a CRM platform that can address these concerns and help your business with automated sales and marketing processes, data analytics tools, improved customer relationships, and ultimate business growth.
One of the top names for CRM platforms that flash through one’s mind is Salesforce. What is Salesforce? Salesforce is the world’s number one customer relationship management (CRM) platform. It helps distinct teams of an organization, including sales, marketing, IT, service, and commerce, work collaboratively from anywhere to keep customers happy.
Next, you will ask how to use Salesforce CRM, how does Salesforce works, what does Salesforce do, and more.
This blog post holds the keys to every question you have for the Salesforce platform.
Let’s gear up!
What Is Salesforce?
People usually ask the question, “Is Salesforce a CRM?” The answer is yes.
Salesforce is a cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) platform that assists businesses in handling their interactions with existing and potential customers. It eases the jobs of different departments within a business by offering relevant tools, like sales, customer service, marketing, and more, all in one spot.
Is Salesforce a SaaS product? Started as a Software as a Service (SaaS) company, Salesforce has expanded into a Platform as a Service (PaaS) company.
It states that earlier customers had accessed and leveraged the power of ready-to-use Salesforce CRM through a web browser. There was no requirement for installation or maintenance on servers.
But, when it has grown as a PaaS, businesses, and developers can build custom apps on the Salesforce CRM platform. Also, it arrives with a complete set of services and tools that ease the application development, deployment, and management job.
Salesforce CRM Revenue And Market Share Statistics
Why is salesforce important? Salesforce is considered to be the world’s fastest-growing cloud-based software provider that delivers services to 150000+ businesses.
Organizations should opt for platforms that help to use customers’ information, and Salesforce is one of them.
What is Salesforce used for?
It is used primarily by small- and large-scale companies and Fortune 500 organizations.
You should also check the Salesforce market and relevant facts to know how Salesforce platform services can be advantageous for your business. Below, we discussed some statistics:
- Salesforce’s annual revenue is expected to grow and reach $34.86 billion in 2024. Its popularity attracts more companies to migrate to its platform, increasing the demand for developers and administrators.
- In the 2024 fiscal year, Salesforce’s annual revenue reaches about $24 billion.
- The business segment of the company that’s responsible for most of the continued sales boost is subscription and support, which drove about $32+ billion in revenue in the same fiscal year.
- Being the most significant player in the CRM applications market, Salesforce has nearly a 21.8% market share. It’s more than even a combined share of its four competitors.
The list of the latest Salesforce facts and figures is almost endless. These figures are enough to make an informed decision on how to reap Salesforce’s rewards.
How Does Salesforce Work?
Salesforce is a CRM and a centralized platform to manage customer accounts, activities, support cases, sales leads,s and a lot more. Users can easily access Salesforce via mobile apps, web browsers, and desktop applications. It enables users to create & customize custom objects, processes, fields, objects & reports to integrate with other products. When teams catch up with customers’ holistic view, it removes the time demand to resolve their issues. It also avoids communication redundancies to improve personalized interactions.
1. Implementation
It is a method to integrate Salesforce within an organization to align & use its functionalities to fulfill business requirements. This includes planning, customization, configuration, data migration, training, testing, and support.
2. Integration
It is a method to unite more than two applications and to connect available functionalities in the CRM platform with another software that generates a centralized user experience.
3. Development
Salesforce development involves creating and enhancing features, services, and applications within the Salesforce platform. Developers use code and Salesforce’s no-code tools to create custom apps and solutions. They use technologies like Apex, Visualforce, and Lightning Components to customize the software as per the client’s requirements12. Salesforce’s broad product suite includes sales, service, marketing, analytics, and more, providing diverse opportunities for developers.
4. Customization and Configuration
Salesforce customization means developing & coding new functionalities into CRM, where you may be required to customize Salesforce if a packaged version is not allowing you to do whatever you are doing.
Salesforce Configuration means developing the application quickly using available resources within the platform rather than customizing the code to make the app different.
5. Managed Services
It is a process to hire a maintenance support team that helps manage the application’s day-to-day activities by implementing new features and providing the latest updates to customize various services.
What Does Salesforce Do?
Salesforce offers businesses a way to manage sales operations, marketing campaigns & customer data management. It provides different tools & features for organizations that help to enhance customer relationships and visitor segmentation, streamline processes, improve profitability, & customer support. With Salesforce, various third-party services & applications can integrate with each other, and making an adaptable CRM service.
This platform is used by different companies because of its diverse cloud & application selection; it assists with tracking sales and spending & analyzing marketing trends performance & a lot. With CRM features, companies can understand the basic requirements of customers & facilitate user retention to improve customer experience.
What Is Salesforce Infrastructure And Architecture?
Salesforce applications store customer’s data online on a cloud that can be accessed using any device anytime. In order to develop a platform, it is necessary to understand its architecture and infrastructure.
Salesforce Architecture:
Salesforce architecture consists of a series of layers which has different functionalities & features. Now, we will discuss each process, starting with the basic one:
1. Multi-tenant
In this, developers can create an application based on Salesforce & upload it to a cloud where multiple clients can access it. The customer’s data is placed in one database schema from which a server can host various tenants. Multiple users share similar servers & applications; hence, it seems to be cost-effective.
2. Metadata
With this, developers can focus only on application development. This platform can store data on different levels which point to specific clients. It is organized as a shared database, which makes customization & scaling easy. Additionally, metadata offers a better security aspect that helps to enhance the application’s working flexibility.
3. API
It is an essential source of API liberation that integrates various applications through which they can work together. Salesforce APIs connect each query to a data bank through which all automated systems can use them. API helps to deliver queries to data sources, gather all responses & return appropriate data to the user.
4. Enterprise Ecosystem
This ecosystem is designed on a huge range of partner applications that run on similar platforms. Salesforce integrates front, middle & back office operations, offering a panoramic view of the enterprise ecosystem.
Salesforce Infrastructure:
It is a backend system with different components like a database server, application designing environment, application server & integration platform that powers Salesforce’s Cloud computing platform.
This infrastructure is mainly designed to be highly fault-tolerant and scalable, which supports fulfilling the massive demand for salesforce applications. The engineers team constantly update & modify the applications as per the requirements.
How Can We Use Salesforce?
Salesforce helps organizations to keep track of sales data & customer interaction. Companies can easily access customers’ info, generating strong, connected, and personalized experiences. Here, we will discuss how Salesforce is used in different areas:
1. Salesforce for Sales
Salesforce helps the sales team of organizations to build a good relationship with the customers to manage leads and opportunities. The sales team gains a 360-degree customer view, enhances sales coaching & improves sales productivity via tracking different sales opportunities and conducting forecasts by checking out revenue growth status & other insights to generate better results.
2. Salesforce for Customer Services
Salesforce manages field services, online channels such as Chat and SMS, and social channels like WhatsApp and Messenger. It helps to recognize customer’s issues & provide rapid support to them. With this, the customer will get a customized service at each touchpoint that attracts and converts more leads.
3. Salesforce for Marketing
Salesforce supports businesses in marketing processes like dynamic customer journeys, multi-channel campaign execution, analyzing marketing performance, digital advertising, personalization & data management.
4. Salesforce for Ecommerce
It helps to simplify the order management process by optimizing order deliveries and their processing. It permits e-commerce businesses to set up different sites and design homepage banners to promote big events such as promo codes, festival sales, and new product launches. Salesforce creates a personalized journey that generates appropriate product recommendations to enhance customer engagement.
5. Salesforce for Education
Salesforce offers personalized learner relationships with artificial intelligence that help to drive productivity & insights with unified essential data. This will deliver a lifelong impact on the education platform with trusted CRM services.
6. Salesforce for HealthCare
It leverages marketing automation to reach patients and provide quick healthcare solutions. It uses customers’ health data like medications, diagnosis, medical history & insurance that make a substantial investment to ensure that information is only exchanged between hospitals and physicians. Salesforce offers a 360-degree patient perspective that helps to understand the basic requirements.
7. Salesforce for Finance
Salesforce is considered to be a suitable choice for financial services as it improves productivity, modernizes client journeys & makes appropriate account insights. It enables users to collect client data in real-time and help in making financial decisions & budget forecasts.
8. Salesforce for Analytics
Data analytics with Salesforce leverages specific information about a business that illustrates new trends, insights, opportunities, problems, performance & security. It offers a structured methodology to fulfill standard & pre-existing requirements, which accelerates the user’s journey to a new value.
9. Salesforce for Business Growth
Implementing salesforce with business applications provides an automated data flow between systems using different methods like user data, interface & business logic. With this platform, businesses can monitor lead info, implement sales forecasting, design user-friendly interfaces, enhance internal operations, and manage customer relationships to improve growth and revenues.
Salesforce Services
Salesforce is an unrivaled leader in CRM platforms, offering services that allow businesses to use cloud technology in order to connect with their customer and partners effectively. Still, people need clarification about the services, such as whether Salesforce is SaaS or PaaS. So, below, we discuss both of the services that will help you to understand different services:
Salesforce SaaS Services
Salesforce is the world’s number one customer relationship management (CRM) platform that offers a complete suite of Software-as-a-Service solutions crafted to help businesses enhance customer interactions, boost sales, and improve complete performance.
1. Salesforce Sales Cloud
This service is designed to modernize the sales process by offering automation tools array through which businesses can easily manage leads, close deals faster, & nurture customer relationships. Salesforce Sales Cloud provides key features like Sales Analytics, Collaboration tools, lead management & opportunity management.
2. Salesforce Service Cloud
It is an inclusive customer service platform that authorizes businesses to offer extraordinary support experience and manage customer interactions across various channels like social media, email, chat, web & phone. A few standout features are provided by the service cloud, such as self-service portals, Omni channel support, knowledge base & case management to offer consistent responses to the customers.
3. Salesforce Commerce Cloud
It is a vigorous e-commerce platform that enables businesses to manage, create & scale online mobile & store apps. With this, companies can offer a seamless user experience to the customer as it influences customer data & insights to deliver personalized shopping experiences to the shoppers. Included key features are multi-channel integrations, storefront design, order management & personalization.
4. Salesforce Marketing Cloud
Salesforce Marketing Cloud is an integrated tools suite designed to help businesses in managing, creating & analyzing multi-channel marketing campaigns. It helps streamline marketing activities & automate repetitive tasks to decrease manual efforts. The key features of this service are marketing automation, email marketing, campaign analytics & social media management.
5. Salesforce Experience Cloud
This is an integrated tool to create online communication with customers, employees & partners. It helps businesses develop various forums, sites, portals, and mobile apps & helps centers manage content and address the growing demand for connected digital experiences. It offers various features like a lightning bolt, chatter collaboration, branding, customization, and business integration.
6. Salesforce Analytics
It is a native analytics platform that offers actionable & AI-based insights that help businesses to quickly respond to users’ concerns that will, improve workflow, generate practical recommendations, & predict possible results. Analytics offers vital features such as fast customer resolutions, event monitoring analytics, in-built dynamics, automatically retrieving insights, and quick customer issue resolution.
7. Salesforce Health Cloud
This platform offers a comprehensive 360-degree view of patients, including health records, treatment plans, patient profiles & health records. It helps eliminate toggle requirements b/w platforms & screens to save valuable time by improvising patients’ digital healthcare experiences. Features include service operations, self-service experience, service process management, contact center, and field services.
8. Salesforce Financial Cloud
This platform has rich feature portals that share financial info with agents & clients. It is commonly designed to drive good client relationships, deliver extraordinary services, and provide proactive & personalized advice on customer issues. It comprises features like a filtered people list depending on financial characteristics, easy customization, and quick access to critical opportunities.
9. Salesforce Manufacturing Cloud
This Cloud offers various objects, apps, tools & features designed only for manufacturing industries. It helps you to manage the overall lifecycle of business & customer services while enhancing transparency & collaboration b/w partners, sales & operations. The features that are included are sales agreements, account-based forecasting, community cloud, and Einstein Analytics.
10. Salesforce NonProfit Cloud
It combines non-profit programs, outcomes, CRM, fundraising, and marketing engagement in one product. It commonly uses outcome management to state your change strategies, data collection, progress tracking & identification of program progress. This cloud includes features like fundraising management, Communications, program management, reports & dashboards.
11. Salesforce IOT Cloud
IoT cloud means processing & storing massive amounts of generated data by interconnected devices in the cloud instead of local servers. It is an immense network that supports IoT applications and underlying servers, storage, and infrastructure required for real-time operations. Key features are flexibility, management, data storage, scalability, and real-time analytics.
12. Salesforce Integration Cloud
Salesforce Integration allows businesses to integrate their data, functionalities, and applications to streamline strategies available in the SaaS CRM platform to other CRM systems to make a centralized user experience. It comprises case escalation, customization, branding, data sharing, and integration builder.
13. Salesforce Vaccine Cloud
Vaccine Cloud offers an end-to-end vaccine management platform for the community. With this service, health authorities can easily plan and manage vaccination efforts to connect with people, track inventory, communicate, look for outcomes in real time, and evaluate vaccination rates. Included features are vaccine outcome monitoring, appointment scheduling, inventory management, vaccination validation, automation, and clinical vaccine administration.
14. Salesforce Revenue Cloud
It is a cloud-based platform of revenue management that permits organizations to modernize revenues & maintain customer relationships. It helps to automate different activities from product to cash, consisting of pricing, order management, billing, contracts, product catalogs, and quoting. It consists of various features such as forecasting, revenue recognition, automated capabilities, and enhanced revenue streams, giving you access to multiple data.
15. Salesforce Data Cloud
Salesforce Data Cloud is a valuable platform for businesses looking to unify and activate their customer data from varied sources. It combines data from marketing automation, CRM, analytics, and other system to provide a single view. Besides, this cloud cleanses, deduplicates, and enriches data to make it accurate and consistent.
Salesforce SaaS services provide a complete set of capabilities and tools that assist companies in attaining their desired objectives.
Salesforce PaaS arrives with a flexible and robust platform for businesses to create and deploy custom apps that fulfill their unique requirements. By using the platform’s low-code development tools, scalability, and integration power, organizations can build innovative solutions that support business growth.
Salesforce Paas Services
The PaaS (Platform as a Service) model offers an entire designing, development & deployment environment. It has various tools for testing, designing & running apps that allow developers to mainly focus on the coding part, not on the infrastructure, such as Heroku, Microsft Azure, and many more.
1. Apex
It is a proprietary programming language that is specifically designed for the Salesforce platform. It permits the development team to create customer apps as per the business requirements. It allows developers to add business-related logic to system events like record updates, button-on clicks, VF pages & Aura components. It has different capabilities like using sensitive language, being user-friendly, upgrading automatically, and offering a multi-tenant environment.
2. Visualforce
This framework allows your team to design customer UIs for salesforce apps. By integrating JavaScript, CSS, HTML & specific tags, you can create a visually appealing & user-friendly interface as per the requirements. This ensures a better user experience, resulting in increased process efficiency.
3. Salesforce Lightning Platform
This platform provides a tools & services suite through which developers can create & deploy customer components, applications & UI’s. Salesforce lightning platform offers the latest responsive interface, improving navigation & ease of use for your developer team. Developers can easily create customer apps & pages to optimize the organization’s operations.
4. Heroku
Salesforce acquired Heroku in 2010, which supports developers to develop, run & scale applications in various languages. It flawlessly integrates with Salesforce, enabling the development team to create an app that influences processes & data through which the team can only focus on creative & innovative ideas to develop different applications using various programming languages.
What Is Salesforce AI?
Salesforce AI is a pack of artificial intelligence tools and abilities crafted into the Salesforce platform. It utilizes innovative technologies, such as machine learning, predictive analytics, and natural language processing, to improve varied factors of customer relationship management (CRM).
Key Benefits and Features of Salesforce AI
- Einstein Language
- Einstein Prediction Building
- Einstein Bots
- Einstein Vision
- Einstein Discovery
Salesforce AI focuses on automating tasks, enhancing efficiency, and offering deep insights into customer behavior. Thus, companies can improve their customer experiences.
Key Steps To Salesforce Implementation
Salesforce implementation can be a revolutionary process for companies looking to enhance customer relationships, ease operations, and boost growth.
Following the steps below, you can successfully implement Salesforce.
Step #1: Identify Business Requirements and Goals
You should start by assessing your business’s needs and objectives. It includes recognizing your specific targets, understanding your current operations, and addressing the challenges you focus on confronting with Salesforce.
Step #2: Salesforce Configuration
The next step is to configure Salesforce to meet your specific needs. It embraces customizing fields, objects, workflows, and other components to match with your business processes and data structure.
Step #3: Data Migration
Now, it’s time to migrate your current sales and customer data into Salesforce. It demands a carefully crafted plan and execution. Thus, you can ensure data integrity and accuracy. You can opt for Salesforce’s data migration tool or connect with a Salesforce implementation company.
Step #4: User Training and Adoption
Your existing staff may need help to work with an innovative and new platform. You need to offer complete training to your employees for seamless Salesforce adoption. Make them well-versed in Salesforce key features and functionalities. Besides, offer resources and support to ensure your staff maximizes Salesforce in their routine jobs.
Step #5: Go Live and Ongoing Implementation Support
After your Salesforce implementation is attained, you can go live and reap the benefits of the platform. Offer post-implementation support and maintenance to locate the issues that may surge. Ensure the platform meets the evolving business requirements ahead of time.
Implementing Salesforce is a significant investment businesses should take to catch up with increased customer satisfaction and business growth.
Salesforce CRM Capabilities
Salesforce assures hassle-free contact management to access customers’ critical interaction data. In other words, technology can be defined as managing a company’s relationship with potential customers and partners. It offers various features to businesses like email integration, workflow, lead management, sales forecasting, interaction management, data insights, and many more. Let’s discuss each feature one by one:
1. Account and Content Management
The Content Management System (CMS) in Salesforce is a hybrid platform that empowers users to create, manage, and distribute content across channels without technical expertise. It connects seamlessly to customer data, enabling personalized experiences. Additionally, Salesforce’s account and contact management unifies sales, service, and marketing efforts, allowing integrated campaigns and better decision-making. These solutions enhance collaboration, streamline processes, and drive better results.
2. Opportunity Management
Opportunity management in Salesforce involves the processes, workflows, and guidelines for organizing and managing data related to sales prospects. It helps sales teams capture details of sales deals, stay connected with stakeholders, and access the information they need to close deals effectively.
3. Salesforce Engage
With this feature, you can increase the selling power & share the marketing content with sales. It acts like a bridge that fills the gap between sales & marketing, offering current data alerts per customer engagement.
4. Sales Collaboration
Sales collaboration permits the sales team to collaborate appropriately with social tools. It enables the experts to grow sales and share competitive data from any place through which business opportunities and productivity will be enhanced.
5. Sales Performance Management
This feature is mainly categorized as compensation management that helps to enhance sales execution rate day-by-day. It also offers a metric-based goal for teams through which they can get constant feedback & rewards from their clients.
6. Lead Management
This helps to evaluate potential customers and nurture them to conversion from lead generation. With lead management, a sales team can track the lead’s information, guide them with a process to become a customer & follow their sales cycle.
7. Salesforce Mobile App
It enables users to make several calls, look at checkboards, and reply to hot leads from any location. With this feature, you can manage updates, meetings & events that can be accessed anytime.
8. Workflow and Approvals
It permits you to automate & design business strategies with a drag-drop workflow option as it’s an automated process that generates flexible processes for sales expenses, discounts, and a lot.
9. File Sync and Share
With this feature, you can easily share different file sets, make file alliances, publish specific content & track real-time activities, which helps you mitigate sales risk.
10. Sales Forecasting
Sales forecasting helps businesses analyze sales results and determine what will happen in the future using real-time data. This will help to easily track the leaderboard in order to identify top performers by checking out all business perspectives.
11. Reports and Dashboard
The dashboard offers a live data business view at a glance. This allows businesses to make a forecasting report on each sale without any intermediate help.
12. Analytics
It is a data visualization tool that analyzes customers’ data and helps them make better decisions. Analytics has customizable dashboards, real-time visualizations, predictions, data sources, and case routing through which business can improve their growth rate.
13. Email Automation
Email automation is a process that creates an email that reaches the appropriate individual with the right message at the correct time. It offers an entire view of the connected customer where users can compose & send emails to any contact anytime.
14. Customer Support
Currently, customers want fast & personalized support where the CRM platform offers high-quality services. Your users can raise any issue that will generate an interaction record through which they will get answers quickly on their problems.
15. Einstein AI
Salesforce Einstein is a solution that delivers a reliable user experience to answer various questions, generate content & dynamically automate actions to bring enhanced productivity, higher margins, and deeper customer relationships.
16. Integration
Salesforce also works with third-party apps like Quickbooks, DropBox, Docusite, Gmail, G Suite, and many more. These integrations operate with CRM to offer an even team transition. It uses an AppExchange system that helps to identify the software working and product sales rate.
Why Choose Salesforce?
Salesforce is considered a strong & flexible CRM platform as it offers various interfaces with external services & software. It provides multiple benefits such as tracking leads, enhanced lead qualification, email tracking, and management of customer relationships that help to boost productivity by creating effective sales & automating repetitive tasks.
Below, we will discuss several benefits of salesforce in different industries:
A. Sales
- Enhanced Lead Management: Sales cloud offers professionals the ability to improve customer acquisition, partner collaboration, decision making & opportunity-to-win ratio. This software anticipates the requirements of customers & fulfills them by keeping track of different campaigns.
- Close more deals with AI: It helps the sales team to generate appropriate sales insights using machine learning & AI technology and allows businesses to automate various operations, assisting team members in conversion rate & prioritizing potential leads.
- Sales Forecasting: Businesses use predictive analysis processes to forecast future outcomes by using customer data. With this, salesforce permits you to spend less time guessing & more time acting, which will help to build a good customer relationship. Sales forecasting is a simple strategy to generate multicurrency support & make informed decisions.
- Improved workflow: Workflow in Salesforce automates business processes. This platform permits organizations to personalize workflow by allowing teams to respond quickly to customers’ problems, through which you will get a clear picture of the performance.
B. Customer Services
- Better Customer Satisfaction: With this platform, Salesforce users can connect with customers via live agents and build a good relationship with them. This will improve customer satisfaction, retention & loyalty and enhance the brand’s credibility.
- Improved case management: This functionality helps businesses modernize their channel and handle all customer support cases rapidly. Salesforce users can add filters to evaluate the priority cases, add notes for better communication, assign cases to dedicated teams, categorize customer contacts, and create specific labels.
- Enhanced Customer data security: Data security seems to be a vital factor as all customer information is available in one place. This platform consists of platform encryption, data management, and event monitoring features that improve the customer’s data security.
- Reduce the Support Team’s Workload: Support agents can work from anywhere via this platform. This convenient management option helps them to enhance agent’s productivity & reducing workload. With features like skill-based routing, email-to-case, and milestone tracking, agents can pick the cases to help the customers via different channels.
C. Marketing
- Multichannel marketing: It is used to spread marketing messages via various media channels like email, social media, display ads, and more. Allowing multiple channels for customer interaction across various touchpoints helps to maintain a comprehensive campaign.
- Personalized Customer Journey: This helps organizations to bring personalized experiences depending on the customer’s segment & their data. It may include targeted ads, website personalization, and email campaigns that enhance customer engagement & generate better results.
- Predictive Analytics and AI-Powered Insights: It helps foresee future behaviors & trends that allow businesses to make data-driven decisions by predicting customer preferences, potential opportunities & sales forecasts.
- Email marketing automation: With this feature, organizations can identify and attract customers. In the Salesforce marketing cloud, email studio helps to send emails easily to new visitors and repeatable buyers to maintain customer engagement.
D. Commerce
- Mobile Friendliness: Since many users use mobile devices to make various purchases, Salesforce adapts user experience to interaction format and improves customer experience by offering user-friendly applications.
- Advanced Analytics: This feature helps attain actionable insights into businesses’ e-commerce performance by allowing Salesforce users to track key metrics, evaluate opportunities, and track sales trends.
- Manage Multiple Stores: Salesforce users can promote their products and services with effective strategies across multiple online channels. This helps organizations span countries and languages and comprises optimal information depending on website design, management of multi-sites, etc.
- Storefront Globalization: Organisations may have complete control of their global branches by managing all locations from one interface, which will help accomplish shops instantaneously.
E. Others
- Cross-Functional Insights and Reporting: The integrated platform helps identify individuals who click on specific mail, how often that email opens, why they call customer support, and much more. This means that the collected actionable data helps communicate with the audience and generate a report. This report will benefit the decision-making process and monitor statistics.
- Actionable Data Dashboard: Using spreadsheets to manage customer data means inputting & importing all info manually and evaluating prioritized tasks to derive appropriate insights to generate a graphical representation of data.
- Customer-Centric Automation: It allows businesses to set up automated email series to speak with specific audiences & triggered by particular actions.
- Increased Revenue: Customer attainment is an essential factor in driving revenue. Because of this, companies focus on new customer engagement without altering current customer satisfaction. As with acquiring new customers, salesforce users can expand their customer base, which improves revenues.
- Improved team collaboration: Salesforce users can enhance collaboration by consolidating, accessing, and sharing customer data from various systems such as SharePoint, Google Drive, and Box.
Salesforce Acquisition
Acquisitions enable Salesforce to effectively integrate the latest technologies, improve its ability to meet customer requirements & expand its product portfolio in a fast-changing industry. Below are a few Salesforce acquisitions:
| Company Name | When (Year) | How Much (Acquisition Price) |
|---|---|---|
| Tenyx | 2024 | Not Disclosed |
| Zoomin | 2024 | $450 million |
| Own Company | 2024 | $1.9 billion |
| Phennecs | 2022 | $16.4 million |
| LevelJump | 2021 | Not Disclosed |
| Servicetrace | 2021 | Not Disclosed |
| Slack | 2021 | $27.7 billion |
| Tableau | 2019 | $15.7 billion |
| MuleSoft | 2018 | $6.5 billion |
| Demandware | 2016 | $2.8 billion |
| Exact Target | 2013 | $2.5 billion |
| ClickSoftware | 2019 | $1.35 billion |
| Quip | 2016 | $750 million |
| Dataorama | 2018 | $800 million |
| Heroku | 2010 | $212 million |
1. Slack
When: Salesforce acquired Slack in July 2021 for $27.7 billion, mostly in cash, offering its users a friendly team collaboration app.
Why: Salesforce & slack merge to manage customer services or sales pipeline effectively. Users can easily access the features of various data records, search for instances, and more. This will also help you to send messages b/w Salesforce chatter & Slack channels. Together, they built a Salesforce for Slack app, which is a low-coded foundation that provides access to get approval notifications on time.
2. Tableau
When: Salesforce gets Tableau in 2019 for $15.7 billion without making any alterations in product features, & intellectual properties.
Why: Tableau’s starters for Salesforce help you to get success with actionable data analysis. With a few clicks, you can maintain overall advanced visualization and create a data-rich dashboard on quarterly results and account tracking. It enables organizations to be more data-driven and explore & manage different data sets that will change the entire business process.
3. Mulesoft
When: The acquisition of Salesforce and Muelsoft was completed in May 2018 for $6.5 billion to unite data across various cloud platforms.
Why: Muelsoft’s acquire Salesforce permits businesses to improve their market position while enhancing their competitive advantage. Salesforce can differentiate itself from CRM-based software providers, offering comprehensive solutions with integrated capabilities.
4. Demandware
When: With the rapid growth in ecommerce for brands and retailers, salesforce acquired Demandware in July 2016 for $2.8 billion, paying for upgraded cloud-based applications & artificial intelligence solutions.
Why: This deal offers a significant role to the salesforce in the cloud-based e-commerce platform when demands increase, helping to compete with IBM Commerce, Amazon web service, Shopify Commerce, HubStop Commerce, and many more. As Demandware’s forte in B2C, the acquisition allows Salesforce to support the high vendor’s strategies, focusing on particular reports to respond to every customer request.
5. ExactTarget
When: Salesforce entered the market in June 2013 for $2.5 billion to empower digital marketing across social media.
Why: Salesforce acquisition ExactTarget sought an enterprise marketing suite backbone that offers on-demand one-to-one email marketing software apps. This helps to empower businesses to plan, automate & optimize data-driven interactive marketing.
6. Click Software
When: In August 2019, Salesforce acquired ClickSoftware for $1.35 billion to expand its reach in the fast-growing FSM (Field service management) market with new customers & technology.
Why: This acquisition helps to enhance optimization and streamline the FSM market. The salesforce ecosystem has enormous integration, mobile capabilities, and AI-driven insights that help to improve customer-centric FSM efficiency.
7. Quip
When: The acquisition of Quip, a collaboration & productivity company with Salesforce, was completed in July 2016 for $750 million.
Why: Quip decided to acquire Salesforce to improve its functionalities & features in the collaborative document editing area & to integrate a cloud-based apps suite. This integration offers seamless integration, improved analytics & reports.
8. Datorama
When: In July 2018, for $800 million, Salesforce gets Datorama, a leading cloud-based enterprise with an AI-powered analytics platform & marketing intelligence.
Why: Combined, they drive collaboration & transparency across supporting agencies, teams & managed partners. Datorama with Salesforce helps you to deal with competitors by offering compelling insights into KPI optimization.
9. Heroku
When: In December 2010, for $212 million in cash, salesforce got Heroku to enhance developer experience with various programming languages like Java, PHP, Ruby & Python.
Why: Integrately, they help manage data and develop app capabilities. It offers fully scalable options for databases that help to derive insights. Heroku Connect combines data to your Heroku Postgres database with accounts, contacts & custom objects in the CRM database.
10. Servicetrace
When: Salesforce acquired Servicetrace in 2021, which is now a part of Mulesoft, a Salesforce company.
Benefits Earned: This acquisition facilitates end-to-end business automation. Servicetrace’s robotic process automation (RPA) capabilities are now Mulesoft RPA. They are crafted to take the place of repetitive digital jobs with software bots that can smartly operate any UI, process PDF docs, type data in a spreadsheet, etc.
11. LevelJump
The global CRM leader, Salesforce, acquired LevelJump, a sales readiness and enablement solution crafted on the Salesforce platform.
Benefits Earned: Salesforce integrated LevelJump’s latest, result-based coaching and enablement within the Sales Cloud interface, guiding and leading better engagement and a noticeable impact on the sales process.
12. Phennec
When: In April 2022, Salesforce accomplished Phennecs’ acquisition process. Salesforce has always been working to favor its customers. This time, it aimed to ease its customers’ build compliance into their data lifecycle.
Benefits Earned: The company provides compliance, privacy, and data management solutions developed on the Salesforce Platform. Salesforce can help developers with improved data management, privacy compliance, and security by bringing Pennecs in-house.
13. Own Company
When: Salesforce signed a definitive agreement in Sep 2024 to get Own Company, a reliable data protection and data management solutions provider.
Benefits Earned: Through this attainment, businesses get a more comprehensive solution for handling Salesforce customer experiences. By combining the power of Salesforce’s CRM and Own’s proficiency in digital experience platforms, companies can offer more engaging, personalized, and effective interactions across multiple channels.
14. Zoomin
Salesforce signed an agreement to acquire Zoomin, a trusted data management provider, in Sep 2024 for unstructured data. It’s anticipated to close in Salesforce’s fiscal year 2025.
Benefits Earned: Salesforce Data Cloud and Zoomin’s power will pace up the free-up of unstructured data to facilitate AI agents. Thus, they can be more context-aware and personalized in every customer interaction.
15. Tenyx
When: Salesforce is to sign an acquisition agreement with Tenyx that will reflect after October 2024. The company is an AI-powered voice agent developer that crafts engaging and natural conversational experiences, improving customer service.
Benefits Earned: By integrating its advanced voice AI solutions, the company will enlarge Salesforce’s autonomous agent power for Agentforce Service Agent. It’s best customized for service use cases. Also, by collaborating with the strength of Tenyx, Salesforce focuses on improving its AI-driven solutions, leading to more seamless and intuitive customer interactions.
What Is Salesforce AppExchange?
Salesforce AppExchange is a marketplace where users can discover various apps, websites, solutions & many more. It can be considered a store that provides solutions to several problems & extends services with CRM technologies. This platform is mainly used by admins, users, and developers to make teams more fruitful & processes more effective.
It offers a surplus of paid & free apps segregated into different categories, industries & collections to cover various activities such as customer service, real estate, education & manufacturing. AppExchange offers various components that help solve business issues and enhance productivity.
What Tech Stack Used In Salesforce?
In today’s world, salesforce technologies seem to be popular in-demand tools used by different organizations to manage sales operations, marketing campaigns & customer relationships. The most common technologies are service cloud, commerce cloud, marketing cloud, & sales cloud. Additionally, it offers various services like Salesforce Einstein, App Cloud & Salesforce IQ that can be accessible with an internet connection from anywhere.
Salesforce offers different functionalities & features, which are discussed below:
1. Database:
- Multi-Tenant Database: It commonly uses multi-tenant architecture with a database structure through which different organizations share similar infrastructure to maintain data security & isolation.
2. Programming Languages:
- JavaScript: Frequently used in lightning components & Visualforce pages for front-end development.
- Apex: It is a programming language mainly used to create business strategies. Triggers & customer logic on the same platform.
3. API’s & Integrations
- Bulk API: Intended to manage bulk data loading & data volumes.
- REST API: Used to create interacting & integrating structures using HTTP methods.
- SOAP API: It is used for complex integrations that require web services.
4. User Interface
- Lightning: This is the latest User interface framework used to create dynamic & responsive interfaces, including app designing, lightning components & many more.
5. Security & Identity
- Salesforce Shield: Offers updated security features for critical data.
- OAuth: Used for Authorization & authentication
- Single Sign-On (SSO): Assimilates different identity providers for unified app access.
6. Middleware & Integration Tools
- MuleSoft: Salesforce attained Mulesoft to improve the integration capabilities through which different APIs and systems get connected.
7. Analytics & Reporting
- Salesforce Einstein Analytics: It offers Artificial Intelligence based insights & analytics. It provides predictive analytics & data exploration that help salesforce users to be smarter for their customers.
8. Deployment & Continuous Integration
- Version Control: This tech repeatedly uses version control systems such as Git to manage the code alterations.
- Developer Experience (Salesforce DX): It is a tool & tech set for developing the latest software.
9. Infrastructure & Cloud Services
- Salesforce Heroku: This platform helps developers build and deploy web apps that connect to Salesforce.
- Salesforce Platform: This framework is used to design software using programming languages & encompassing apps from web development to data analysis.
- Salesforce App Cloud: It offers various tools to manage, deploy, and develop multiple applications on the same platform.
Who Uses Salesforce And Why?
How many companies use Salesforce?
Salesforce is a globally opted CRM platform that a varied range of businesses from distinct industries use. Its power of scalability and flexibility makes it the best CRM choice for organizations of all sizes, whether it’s a startup, small, or large enterprise.
Salesforce, for businesses, provides a centralized hub for handling customer relationships, marketing, service, and sales. With Salesforce implementation, organizations can increase customer satisfaction, boost sales, and drive business growth.
Let’s know what business type uses Salesforce and for which purpose.
| Business Type | Use Salesforce For |
|---|---|
| Small and Medium Businesses (SMBs) | Simplified operations, affordable solutions |
| Large Enterprises | Scalability, integration |
| E-commerce Companies | Customer Relationship Management, marketing automation |
| Financial Services | Compliance, client relationship management |
| Healthcare Providers | Patient relationship management, clinical trials management |
| Nonprofits | Donor Management, volunteer management |
| Marketing Teams | Campaign management, lead generation |
| Customer Service Teams | Case management, knowledge base |
Now, check out the top names of companies that use Salesforce from different industry verticals.
| Industry | Companies |
|---|---|
| Retail and E-commerce | Uber Eats, UNIQLO, Ralph Lauren, Boohoo, Benetton, Kate Spade, Marc O’Polo |
| Manufacturing | BlueScope Steel, Kone, Schneider Electric |
| Automotive | Toyota, BMW, Ford, General Motors, Mahindra, Bentley, Motors |
| Finance | PayPal, American Express, Wells Fargo, Western Union, Moelis & Co. |
| Travel and Hospitality | Airbnb, Hyatt Hotels Co., Marriott, Hilton |
| Media and Communications | New York Magazine, Global Broadcaster, Comcast, Tapad |
| Education | University of Delaware, Bosie State University, Louisiana State University, California State University |
| Healthcare | United Health Group Inc., McKesson Corporation, Baptist Health, Slalom Consulting, Novo Nordisk A/S, PricewaterhouseCoopers |
| Energy and Utilities | ENGIE, Pollinate Energy, Tritium |
| Consumer Goods | Loreal Americas, Nestle, PepsiCo, Unilever |
1. Case Study of Azizi Developments
Background:
Azizi Developments was established in 2007; since then, it has delivered 11000+ residential properties to international & local investors. This company is famous for its assurance of customer-centric & transparency, which has driven it to implement Salesforce to transform business digitally. It offers luxury properties across Dubai to all the residential destinations. Dubai Healthcare City, Studio City, downtime Jabeli Ali, Palm Jumeirah, Meydan, AI Furjan, and Sports City are the most famous.
Location: Dubai, OAE
Industry: Luxury commercial & residential Real Estate Development
Salesforce Services & Products:
- Service Cloud
- Sales Cloud
- Salesforce integration
- Salesforce implementation
- Marketing Cloud
- Einstein Analytics
Common Challenges:
- Lack of customer journey visibility
- Disintegrated operations related to sales, broker, marketing, after-sales, and their management
- Complex internal department structure
Solution:
- Implementation & integration of Salesforce Sales Cloud with Tableau CRM, property finder, social media channels, and company website to allow lead scoring based on various criteria such as lead’s preferences, language spoken, and more.
- Service Cloud is deployed to manage customer complaints, follow-ups, and queries related to property management and payment collection automation.
- A broker portal based on the cloud helped third-party brokers interact directly with Azizi Developments.
- Rollout of marketing cloud offers a way to personalized SMS, email campaigns, sales functions integration & social media monitoring.
Results:
The implementation of Salesforce reduced the sales cycle time to 70% and the email bounce rate to 8% from 30%, which helped to enhance quality and lead scoring. Previously, it took a week to close a deal, but now it is taking a day and a half.
How Can EmizenTech Help You With Salesforce Implementation?
EmizenTech, a leading Salesforce development company, can offer complete assistance throughout your Salesforce implementation journey.
Being a reliable Salesforce implementation partner, EmizenTech helps businesses offer the following services:
- Needs Assessment and Strategy
- Configuration and Customization
- Data Migration
- User Training and Adoption
- Integration with Other Systems
- Ongoing Support and Maintenance
Partner with EmizenTech to benefit from their years of experience, proficiency, and commitment to deliver successful Salesforce implementation.
Key Highlights of Choosing Emizentech
- Awarded by Clutch
- Experts Team of Salesforce Consultants
- On-time Delivery
- Salesforce Certification
- Competitive Pricing
- Customer Salesforce Development Services
- Robust Industry Expertise
- Follow Methodologies
Conclusion
Salesforce is a powerful CRM platform that provides a complete suite of tools for businesses of all sizes. By offering a centralized hub for handling customer interactions, marketing, sales, and service, the platform is ruling the market.
You can also opt for Salesforce implementation to improve efficiency and boost your business growth.
Connect with a Salesforce implementation partner with years of experience and expertise that can help you with custom Salesforce implementation services.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
1. Why Do Businesses Use Salesforce CRM?
Salesforce allows businesses to run effectively by lowering costs and connecting with potential customers. With this, companies can easily track customer’s activity, past history, and behavior.
2. What Is Salesforce Best Known For?
Salesforce is best known for its cloud-based platform, user-friendly interface, robust ecosystem, and scalability, which offers a huge range of customizable functionalities and features.
3. How many products are there in Salesforce?
There are a total of 55 Salesforce products, such as Revenue Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Service Cloud, Sales Cloud, and Commerce Cloud.
4. Is Salesforce a product or platform?
Salesforce is a platform that helps businesses to grow and drive positive changes for customers. It seems to be a powerful method to create an app, all by harnessing the cloud features.
5. What comes under the Salesforce Customer 360?
Salesforce Customer 360 is a customer relationship management (CRM) platform that puts customer data and departments in one place. Many products come under this category, such as Sales Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Data, AI, and CRM.