Sales should be a “thoughtful process” for any company. It has always been the backbone hence it cannot afford to be chaotic. The sign of an ambitious company that is suffering from a shortage of sales or a drop in sales is suffering from a very disorganized existing sales process.
In most of the developing economies of the world, where demand for commodities or services is growing at the fastest rate managing business is quite a task. Many ambitious companies or entrepreneurs, small or mid-sized have a common syndrome. They never take sales as a well-formulated process. Instead, they rely heavily on people’s talent and rush them to scavenge in the market for sales. This not only creeps in frustration within a pool of highly talented sales force but also the company hurts itself very gravely due to mismanagement of its sales activities and people. If at all a company gives some respect as an organized process, it still relies on an age-old practice of doing business through an excel sheet and few redundant desktop applications.
But I am sure they always wonder and try to figure out how their competitors of the same size and product or services are doing exceedingly well? Now don’t blame entirely on the sales force staff!! It’s unfair!
Well, here is the thing of difference and it is basically of an understanding of the modern-day business style, mindset, and requirement.
These successful, thriving businesses hired some of the highly customizable, business to business needs technological sales tools alongside a very talented human sales force. They have understood very clearly that relying on technology (basically creating a streamlined process) and people side by side only booms businesses. The combination has most certainly resulted in about 40-60% overall business growth. They have technology with which they can now find, track, record, streamline, quicken, and sell either to an existing client or a new prospect without needing a huge infrastructure or investment. Some companies like these even think further up to streamline their service level to provide the best services to their customers to keep them loyal to the company as customers.
So what is the Salesforce platform? What do we know about the company and its services?
Now to know about Salesforce.com we must first know about the company and its credentials.
Salesforce.com, inc., is an American cloud-based software firm. The organization’s revenue is estimated at a whopping US$126 million in 2020.
The company has around 49,000 employee workforce. Based on a survey in 2020 on Employee Satisfaction, Fortune magazine ranked Salesforce at number six on its 'List of Top 100 companies to work for',. Marc Benioff is the CEO and Founder of Salesforce.com. He is an American Internet entrepreneur, with a net worth of $7.8 billion as of May 2020.
The Salesforce platform is the #1 customer relationship management (CRM) service provider company in the world. It is a cloud-based platform providing solutions that bring companies and customers together. It is an integrated CRM framework that provides a single, unified view of every customer to all of your departments — including marketing, sales, logistics, operation, and analytics.
The Customer Relationship Management ( CRM) technology of Salesforce.com includes a range of broad categories: Commerce Cloud, Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Data Cloud (including Jigsaw), Marketing Cloud, Group Cloud, Analytics Cloud, App Cloud, and IoT with more than 100,000 clients.
Salesforce is the primary enterprise offering within the Salesforce platform. It offers businesses with a case management and task management interface, and a framework to route and escalate critical events automatically. The Salesforce customer portal provides customers with the ability to monitor their transactions, offers a social networking plug-in that allows users to join their company discussions on social networking websites, provides analytical tools and other features including email alerts, Google searches, and access to customer rights and contracts.
Their Lightning Platform (also known as Force.com) is a "Platform as a Service" (PaaS) that allows developers to build add-on apps that integrate into the Salesforc.com application.
Force.com applications are built using declarative tools, backed by Lightning and Apex, a proprietary Java-like programming language for Force.com, as well as and Visualforce, a framework including an XML syntax typically used to generate HTML. As of 2013, the Force.com platform has 1.4 million registered developers.
The Salesforce AppExchange was introduced in 2005 and is an online platform for third-party applications operating on the force.com platform. Applications are available free of cost, as well as through monthly or annual subscription models. Applications available range from integrations with SharePoint to mobile approval management. As of June 2016, it features 2,948 applications that have driven 3+ million installs. The "AppExchange" is also a place customers can search for cloud consulting partners to help them implement the technology in their organization. Salesforce's cloud consulting partners include large businesses such as IBM's "Bluewolf" and Accenture as well as smaller ones such as Cloudreach.
Other features and services include Community Cloud which enables Salesforce customers to build online web properties for external collaboration, customer support, channel sales, and other custom portals in their Salesforce case. Work.com is a social performance management platform that helps managers and employees improve work performance through continuous coaching, real-time feedback, and recognition. Salesforce's myTrailhead is an online training platform that can be tailored to suit its customers ' specific needs. Also recently, Salesforce introduced a Hyperledger Sawtooth-based blockchain platform to promote building blockchain network and CRM-integrated applications. In addition to the web interface, Salesforce also provides a programming interface (API) for the SOAP / REST Web Service framework that allows for integration with other systems.
Salesforce works on Model–view–controller architecture.
Apex is a proprietary programming language provided by the Force.com platform to developers similar to Java and C#. It is a programming language that is strongly typed, object-oriented, case-insensitive, using dot notation, and curly bracket syntax. Apex can be used to execute programmed functions during most processes on the Force.com platform including custom buttons and links, event handlers on record insertion, update, or deletion, via scheduling, or via the custom controllers of Visualforce or Lightning Experience pages.
In 2014, Salesforce made public the front end of its platform, called Lightning. This component-based framework is what the Salesforce mobile app is built on. Salesforce built on this framework in 2015 by releasing the Lightning Design System, an HTML style framework with default CSS styling built-in. This framework allows customers to build their components to either use in their internal instances or sell on the AppExchange.
The Salesforce Lightning App Builder is a tool for rapid application development of responsive web interfaces. This interface allows for different screens to be put together based on Lightning components. This can be used as layouts for records or specific applications.
Lightning Experience, launched in 2016, is Salesforce's new updated Process Optimization GUI. Since then, all the apps available on AppExchange need to be Lightning, and those based on Classic need to switch to Lightning, as Salesforce no longer updates Classic. The platform provides developers with an opportunity to employ migration techniques to make the new user interface and shift to Lightning.
Users of Salesforce can configure their CRM application. There are tabs like "Contacts," "Files," and "Accounts" inside the system. Every tab consists of associated information. With the addition of user-defined custom fields, a configuration can be done on each tab. Configuration can also be performed at the "interface" level by attaching configured applications to a Salesforce instance that adds sets of custom/novel tabs for particular vertical or functional levels (Finance, Human Resources, etc.).
Finally, let's know about the price Salesforce charges for each of its services, or better termed, solutions.
(You can click on the link https://www.salesforce.com/in/editions-pricing/ to know about the pricing in detail.)
Although, there are plenty of platforms which are similar to Salesforce and good ones like HubSpot CRM, Zoho, Freshsales, Pipedrive, Zendesk Sell, etc., but as a user of Salesforce I would still recommend Salesforce because it is easy to work on as well its got some great features such as contact management, workflow creation, task management, opportunity tracking, collaboration tools, customer engagement tools, analytics, and an intuitive, mobile-ready dashboard.
Thanks for reading!
Deep
[Note: This article/blog is written purely for information, educational & research purposes]
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Good read👍🏻
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