Salesforce Introduction

Let us start this Salesforce tutorial with a brief introduction of Salesforce to help you get a comprehensive understanding of the same. As customers have become the pivot around which the growth of any company revolves, it has become extremely important for companies to deploy appropriate customer relationship management (CRM) software solutions.

However, customer requirements are diverse, and most companies do not find a suitable CRM solution that best fits their needs. In this situation, Salesforce has emerged as a market leader. With flexibility and reliability as its primary features, Salesforce is most likely to continue dominating the marketplace in the coming years.

If you are a developer, you know the pain of following numerous code components in order to create an application. Well, Salesforce comes to your rescue here. In this Salesforce Developer tutorial, you will learn about Salesforce so as to understand it perfectly. With Salesforce, you can create applications in just a few days or weeks and make them visible to as many clients as you want with the provided customizations. Isn’t it amazing? By the end of this Salesforce Developer tutorial, you will start to love everything about Salesforce.

Here are the topics that will be discussed in this tutorial:

Watch this Salesforce Full Course Tutorial video:

Interested in learning about Salesforce? Enroll in our Salesforce Training now!

Now the question is how does Salesforce work to provide its customers with a platform like it? Salesforce is basically a cloud-based platform that provides tools to its clients for building applications or platforms by using Salesforce products.

Why Learn Salesforce?

Salesforce started off as a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) company providing a CRM platform on the cloud.

Along with SaaS, Salesforce now provides a platform where its clients can create their own applications; this is called Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS). Although most of Salesforce’s revenue comes through PaaS, SaaS is also used by many Fortune 500 companies.

Salesforce CRM

Salesforce CRM helps companies to manage relationships with their customers and integrate with other important systems. Salesforce CRM is a SaaS tool that aids companies in creating personalized solutions for their marketing, services, sales, and e-commerce problems.

All Salesforce CRM data is cloud-based, so it can be accessed remotely from anywhere. It helps accelerate a company’s productivity and hence, is a major factor in growth.

What is SFDC?

Salesforce Dot Com or SFDC is another name of Salesforce. SFDC is the official website of Salesforce. It was launched in 1999 by Marc Benioff.

You can visit the website and register on it. You can also start your free trial for 30 days. This will help you get hands-on experience of SFDC.

SFDC is laden with resources and demos that will help you get a better understanding of Salesforce.

Have a problem creating a campaign on Salesforce? Learn it from How to Create a Salesforce Campaign Blog.

Get 100% Hike!

Master Most in Demand Skills Now !

Why SFDC?

SFDC is a market leader in CRM. Here are some of the reasons why:

  • SFDC altogether reduces the development time and cost, and delivers the applications in a much shorter time.
  • SFDC allows the buying and selling of applications. SFDC’s AppExchange feature has proven to be a good marketplace for users to sell their custom made applications.
  • SFDC’s availability on cloud makes it accessible from anywhere in the world.

Traditional CRM vs Salesforce CRM

CRM is considered to be the most efficient technique to create relationships between customers. It can be used to target contacts, leads, and opportunities. You can also use CRM software for dealing with tracking, product planning, manufacturing, and shipping.

Traditional CRM Salesforce CRM
Hosted on a company’s own server Hosted on the cloud
Difficult to understand and use Easy to understand and use
Takes months or even years to set up Can be set up in a few days or weeks
Requires overall higher cost Requires overall lower cost

Next up in this Salesforce Developer Tutorial for Beginners, we will take a look at why Salesforce is gaining so much popularity.

Preparing for a Job Interview! Check out our Top Salesforce Lightning Interview Questions curated by Industry experts.

Salesforce Benefits

Salesforce offers its customers many benefits that make it a leader in the CRM space. Some of the benefits of Salesforce are mentioned here for your reference:

  • Salesforce is a complete feature-loaded solution for sales, marketing, service, community, and partner management.
  • You can store your Salesforce data in a cloud; this will help your team to access the data from anywhere in the world.
  • Salesforce is versatile and caters to companies of different sizes.
  • Salesforce offers its services on a pay-as-you-go service model.
  • Salesforce helps you in accelerating sales productivity and increasing customer loyalty retention and satisfaction.
  • Salesforce offers easy integration with third-party apps, which can help in the growth of your company.

Career Transition

Features of Salesforce

Salesforce offers many features to its customers to help them grow their businesses. Here, we have mentioned some of those features for your reference:

  • Contact Management: Pulls a customer’s data such as customer communication, activity history, etc.
  • Marketing and Sales Lead: Measures customer engagement through email activity tracking and converts leads to customers
  • Build and Run Innovative Apps: Builds, scales, and manages apps
  • Salesforce Analytics: Builds dashboards, pulls data, and performs analysis
  • Sales Community: Helps companies to connect with customers, employees, and partners
  • Salesforce Engine: Helps build personalized contacts with customers for various campaigns designed by the marketing team
  • Lead Management: Helps track the progress of leads
  • Partnership Management: Helps build partner communities and share goals, activities, and objectives
  • Workflow and Approvals: Offers a simple interface to simply drag and drop.
  • Sales Forecasting: Offers real-time view of the sales team forecast, etc.

Features of Salesforce

Preparing for a Salesforce Admin Interview! Check out our Salesforce Admin Interview Questions and Answers.

History of Salesforce

Salesforce had a humble beginning in San Francisco, just like many other tech giants. It was founded in 1999 by Marc Benioff, an ex-Oracle employee, Frank Dominguez, and Parker Harris. As the company grew, its IPO was listed on the New York Stock Exchange and raised US$110 million. In 2014, Salesforce announced the development of a Customer Success Platform that would merge all its services such as sales, service, marketing, analytics, etc. In 2017, Salesforce launched the Facebook Analytics tool; in 2018, Salesforce collaborated with Apple to improve its apps for businesses. Later, Salesforce started offering its services in 16 languages worldwide. Today, Salesforce has 150,000+ customers and employs more than 20,000 employees.

Learn more about Salesforce through Salesforce training in Noida!

Salesforce Products

salesforce cloud services

There are a number of Salesforce products that cater to the different requirements of the customers. Some of the products are mentioned below:

  • Sales Cloud: Sales Cloud is the primary Salesforce product. It helps companies with their sales.
  • Marketing Cloud: Marketing Cloud helps companies with digital marketing services.
  • Service Cloud: Service Cloud helps customer support teams.
  • Commerce Cloud: Commerce Cloud enables users to sell their products.
  • Experience Cloud: Experience Cloud lets users create different platforms as and when required.
  • IoT Cloud: IoT Cloud is used to process and store IoT data.
  • Analytics Cloud: Analytics Cloud provides a platform for data analysis and storage.
  • Health Cloud: Health Cloud provides a CRM platform for healthcare and life science organizations.

How to Access Salesforce?

You can access Salesforce by registering for a 30-day free trial. Let us now discuss the procedures for accessing Salesforce.

  • Visit this link here (official Salesforce website link for registering)

salesforce website

  • At the bottom, click on the Start Free Trial button
  • Add all the mandatory information required

start your free trial

  • It will take some time to set up the free trial account

 

account created

  • Once it is set up, you can see the welcome screen with the demo data.

Welcome Screen

  • Create a New Account for your company by clicking on New in the Account tab.

new account

  • A pop-up will flash wherein you must add required data in the respective fields.

add required data

  • At last, click on Save, and you will be redirected to the welcome screen where you can now see your new company account.

Check out our tutorial on Salesforce Data Types and Field Types!

Why Choose Salesforce?

The following are some of the reasons that make Salesforce the no. 1 CRM platform currently:

  • Salesforce is a cloud-based CRM platform that helps in accessing data easily from anywhere in the world.
  • Salesforce is affordable for even the smallest companies or startups.
  • Salesforce offers a multitude of capabilities to build and run apps or businesses, which attracts large companies.
  • With Salesforce, you do not have to worry about the setup, installation, repairing, etc.; you can just focus on building apps. You also do not have to install any software to run business activities or to build an application.
  • Salesforce can be easily integrated with third-party applications such as Gmail, etc.
  • Salesforce is easy to use—its interface is simple, it deploys apps swiftly, and it offers efficient outputs.
  • Salesforce reduces development costs.

Salesforce is a must in every business industry nowadays. Check out our blog on the importance of Salesforce now!

Why is Salesforce Gaining Popularity?

Why is Salesforce Gaining Popularity

Source: Salesforce

It is quite evident from the graph how Salesforce has topped the market consecutively since 2017, leaving behind Microsoft and Oracle. Although it costs more, Salesforce provides the best user-friendly interface when compared to any other CRM software.

Salesforce offers an entire range of applications, which can be very useful in lead generation and improving sales and deal closure. Along with that, Salesforce also helps in the domains of marketing, customer service, and analytics.

The following are some of the reasons why Salesforce is gaining so much popularity:

  • Scalability and customization
  • Multi-tenant architecture
  • Partner ecosystem
  • Data security
  • Continuous enhancing of the application and the platform

Check out this blog to learn about Aggregate Query in Salesforce!

Differences between Salesforce CRM and Dynamic CRM

In today’s market, there are a lot of options for choosing a CRM platform. The major players are Salesforce, SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft Dynamic. The battle is between Salesforce CRM and Microsoft Dynamic CRM. So, let us discuss the differences between Salesforce CRM and Dynamic CRM:

Capabilities Salesforce CRM Microsoft Dynamic CRM
Accessibility It offers web and mobile app accessibility from anywhere It also offers web and mobile app accessibility from anywhere
Deployment Options It only has the cloud deployment option It can be deployed in Cloud, on-premise, and even at partner hosting
Storage It offers storage of 1 GB per user for users ranging between 1–20 It offers 10 GB of shared storage for 1–20 users
Language Interface It offers limited language support It offers support in 35 languages
Pricing It has a pricing rate of USD25–300 per user per month It has a pricing rate of USD65–135 per user per month

Cloud Computing

Cloud Computing is internet-based computing that involves shared resources, information, and software, which has been provided by computers and mobiles.

In other words, a cloud is a unique place where you can store as much data as you want, to make it accessible from anywhere in the world by just having an internet connection and a device to access it. Instead of storing data on your device, uploading the data onto the cloud and then viewing it from some other place is called accessing the cloud.

There are three types of cloud services:

  • Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)
  • Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)
  • Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)

Paas

IaaS SaaS PaaS
Concentrates on infrastructural services such as server, hosting, storage services, etc. The software is licensed on a subscription basis and is hosted centrally Provides a platform for its customers to develop and deploy apps
Salesforce does not use IaaS as there is no need for installing any software or hardware Salesforce uses SaaS as there is no need for installation, downloads, or setup Salesforce uses PaaS as it takes care of the underlying infrastructural parts, and the users are given predefined tools using which they can build their own applications

Now, let us talk about whether the salesforce is a SaaS or PaaS and the difference between SaaS, IaaS, and PaaS.

Differences Between the Services and Components Managed by IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS

Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)

When a cloud service provider uses IaaS, they mostly concentrate on infrastructural services such as servers, hosting, storage services, etc.

Salesforce does not use IaaS as there is no need for installing any software or hardware program. Instead, all data and apps are stored securely on the cloud. There is also no need for any backup as the cloud takes care of it automatically.

Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)

PaaS provides a platform for users to develop and deploy apps. Users can customize this according to their business needs. They just need to manage their data and application resources. PaaS is primarily used by developers. The provider takes care of the underlying infrastructural parts, and the users are given predefined tools using which they can build their own applications. PaaS is also used by Salesforce.

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)

SaaS is a software delivery model wherein the software is licensed on a subscription basis and is hosted centrally.

Salesforce uses SaaS as there is no need for installation, download, or setup. You just need to log in to your Salesforce account and start using your subscribed apps over the cloud.

manage

Do you know How Much A Salesforce Developer Makes? Check out our blog to know Salesforce Developer Salary.

Next, let us talk about the legacy systems and platforms in Salesforce.

Problems with Traditional Software Methodology (Legacy Platforms)

In the traditional software methodology, to create an application, developers had to follow these steps:

  • Formation of an idea for building an application
  • Buying and setting up hardware
  • Installing software
  • Defining users and providing them with different accesses
  • Setting up means for reporting and analytics
  • Building security around the application
  • Making the application mobile phone accessible

Want to become a Salesforce expert? Take up Intellipaat’s Salesforce Administrator Certification!

A usable application is created, but the entire process is tedious and time-consuming. It generally takes around 6–12 months to implement these steps.

Traditional System

To solve this problem, Salesforce came into the picture and became popular.

With Salesforce, developers are not worried about buying and setting up the hardware, installing the software, defining users, setting up means for reporting and analytics, building security around the application, and making it mobile phone accessible. All these core components come as a single package in Salesforce.

Build app

Developers can go ahead and create an application and release it to their clients. As the developers do not need to worry about any of the core components, Salesforce has gradually increased their productivity as well. Now, developers can straightaway build applications on the platform provided to them by Salesforce and release them on to the cloud.

Wish to crack Salesforce job interviews? Intellipaat’s Top Salesforce Interview Questions are meant only for you!

Recommended Audience

This Salesforce tutorial is beneficial for anybody who wants to learn about CRM. Software developers, administrators, cloud computing professionals, and project managers can all learn and benefit from this Salesforce tutorial.

Prerequisites

There are no prerequisites to take up this Salesforce tutorial.

Come to Intellipaat’s Salesforce Community if you have more queries on Salesforce!

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Salesforce and why it is used?

Basically, Salesforce.com is a SaaS company that leverages cloud computing to design Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software for organizations. This CRM software can be used by salespeople to track sales, support people to track the resolution of queries and cases, and the entire workforce of a company to collaborate with each other.

Is Salesforce easy to learn?

Though Salesforce is extensive, it is not difficult to learn. If you put your mind and concentration into learning the Salesforce CRM and at the same time take up this online Salesforce Training course, you will be able to master Salesforce within weeks.

What’s so great about Salesforce?

The capability of Salesforce in building on-demand software reduces the cost of end-customers. This is because it provides a common platform for managing networking, hardware, and software. Thus, Sales and communication can be improved significantly and that too in a cost-effective manner.

Is it good to learn Salesforce?

Yes, it is good to learn Salesforce. The demand for Salesforce administrators and developers is on the rise. Numerous companies are in pursuit of skilled people who can help manage the Salesforce suite. For this particular reason, Salesforce is definitely a career option to opt for.

Does Salesforce has a future?

Ever since Salesforce replaced Oracle’s Seibel around 2 decades ago, it has continued to dominate the CRM world. And, Salesforce is still evolving at an alarming rate in terms of functionalities and features. So, yes! Salesforce has a future undoubtedly, and you can incline the course of your career with the rapid evolution of Salesforce by being a certified individual.

What companies use Salesforce?

Salesforce CRM is leveraged by several big companies. The most prominent ones are Spotify, AWS, U.S. Bank, Toyota, Aldo, and the New York Post.

Does Salesforce require coding?

Salesforce does involve coding when it comes to operating around its inherent programming languages ‘Apex’ and ‘Visualforce’. But no matter, these languages resemble a great deal with Java. So, if you have an understanding of Java, you will face no hurdles while mastering Salesforce.

Course Schedule

Name Date Details
Salesforce Certification 25 Mar 2023(Sat-Sun) Weekend Batch
View Details
Salesforce Certification 01 Apr 2023(Sat-Sun) Weekend Batch
View Details
Salesforce Certification 08 Apr 2023(Sat-Sun) Weekend Batch
View Details

3 thoughts on “Salesforce Tutorial for Developers—Learn Salesforce Online for Beginners”

  1. Good thing I have read this kind of article. It was very helpful, including your graphic research, it makes me understand it better. Thanks for sharing!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *