Salesforce Tutorial for Developers—Learn Salesforce Online for Beginners

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:

• Why Learn Salesforce?
• Salesforce CRM
• What is SFDC?
• Why SFDC?
  • Traditional CRM vs Salesforce CRM
• Salesforce Benefits
• Features of Salesforce
• History of Salesforce
• Salesforce Products
• How to Access Salesforce?
• Why Choose Salesforce?
• Why is Salesforce Gaining Popularity?
• Differences between Salesforce CRM and Dynamic CRM
• Cloud Computing
  • Differences between the Services and Components Managed by IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS
• Problems with Traditional Software Methodology (Legacy Platforms)
• Recommended Audience
• Prerequisites

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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.

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 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.

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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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)

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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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.

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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

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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)

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

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.

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

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

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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.

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.

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.

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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.

There are no prerequisites to take up this Salesforce tutorial.

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