Salesforce Tutorial - A Complete Guide for Beginners

Salesforce Introduction

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. In this Salesforce developer tutorial, you will learn about Salesforce so as to fully understand it. With Salesforce, you can create applications in 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.

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The question now arises: How does Salesforce work to offer its customers a platform like this? Salesforce functions as a cloud-based platform that equips its clients with tools to construct applications or platforms utilizing its own products.

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

Along with SaaS, Salesforce 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 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. Hence, is a major factor in growth.

SFDC stands for Salesforce.com, an 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 with 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 the cloud makes it accessible from anywhere in the world.

CRM is considered the most efficient technique for creating 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.

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 the cloud. This will allow 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 accelerate sales productivity and increase 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 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 real-time view of the sales team’s forecast, etc.

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Founded in 1999 by Marc Benioff, Salesforce began with a humble San Francisco origin. Its IPO in 2004 raised an impressive $110 million. The company’s significant milestone came in 2014 with the introduction of the Customer Success Platform, integrating sales, service, marketing, analytics, and more. Collaborations with Facebook and Apple further enhanced its offerings. Salesforce’s global presence expanded with services provided in 16 languages, serving a vast customer base exceeding 150,000. The company now boasts a dedicated workforce of over 20,000 employees, solidifying its position as a leading CRM platform.

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Salesforce offers a range of products tailored to diverse customer needs. Here are some of the notable Salesforce products:

• Sales Cloud: The primary Salesforce offering, Sales Cloud assists companies in managing their sales processes effectively.
• Marketing Cloud: Designed for digital marketing services, Marketing Cloud empowers companies to enhance their marketing strategies.
• Service Cloud: Service Cloud is geared towards customer support teams, enabling them to provide top-notch service and assistance.
• Commerce Cloud: With Commerce Cloud, users can effortlessly sell their products, streamlining their e-commerce operations.
• Experience Cloud: Experience Cloud grants users the flexibility to create customized platforms as per their specific requirements.
• IoT Cloud: IoT Cloud is utilized for processing and storing Internet of Things (IoT) data, enabling businesses to leverage IoT technologies effectively.
• Analytics Cloud: Analytics Cloud provides a robust platform for data analysis and storage, aiding organizations in deriving meaningful insights.
• Health Cloud: Health Cloud serves as a specialized CRM platform for healthcare and life science organizations, catering to their unique needs.

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 the 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:

• Cloud-based accessibility: Salesforce enables effortless data access from any location worldwide.
• Affordability: Salesforce caters to companies of all sizes, including startups, with cost-effective solutions.
• Versatile capabilities: The platform provides a wide range of features to develop and manage apps and businesses, attracting enterprises.
• Simplified setup: Salesforce eliminates the need for complex installations or repairs, allowing users to focus solely on app development.
• No software installation: Users can run business activities and build applications without the hassle of software installations.
• Seamless integration: Salesforce easily integrates with popular third-party applications like Gmail, expanding its functionality.
• User-friendly interface: Salesforce offers a user-friendly interface, swift app deployment, and efficient outputs.
• Cost reduction: Salesforce helps reduce development costs, making it an economical choice.

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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 most 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, 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 Salesforce architecture
• Partner ecosystem
• Data security
• Continuous enhancement 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:

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 with an internet connection and a device to access it. Instead of storing data on your device, uploading the data onto the cloud and 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)

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 to install 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 automatically takes care of it.

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 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 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 hosted centrally.

Salesforce uses SaaS, as there is no need for installation, download, or setup. You 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 to 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, or 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. Now, developers can straightaway build applications on the platform provided to them by Salesforce and release them to the cloud.

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

There are no prerequisites to taking up this Salesforce tutorial.