In recent years, we are hearing a buzzword 'Cloud Computing'.
There has been a big surge in cloud computing Technologies. Salesforce is one
of the front runners among those. In this blog, I will introduce you to
Salesforce and will answer:
- What is Salesforce?
- Why use Salesforce?
- Who should use the Salesforce CRM?
- How it makes your life easy in terms of
technology and marketing?
Q: What is Salesforce?
A: Before knowing about Salesforce, lets discuss why it was
needed and how it evolved. Prior to Salesforce, Customer Relationship
Management(CRM) solutions were hosted on local servers which were established
by company itself. It usually took months even years to build the setup which
was very costly. Also the results were not that fruitful.
As you all know necessity is the mother of invention, here
comes a feasible and affordable CRM solution in the name of Salesforce which is
offered as Software as a Service(SaaS), delivered entirely online.
Salesforce is a customer relationship management(CRM)
solution that brings companies and customers together. It's one integrated CRM
platform that gives all your departments — including marketing, sales,
commerce, and service — a single, shared view of every customer.
Q: Why use Salesforce?
A: There are hell lot of reasons you can go for Salesforce,
few are jotted below:
- Ease of Use: This is one of the primary reasons
that drive the Salesforce adoption rate. Sales Reps have better visibility into
their accounts, contacts, opportunities, tasks, all from a single place. They
have a complete 360-degree view of the customer, which in turn helps them to
make better business decisions and close deals faster.
- Customizability: There is always a need to provide
more features than out-of-box offers. Salesforce platform provides you Apex,
Visualforce and lightning apparatus to
achieve those goals.
- Scalability: Business is done keeping future
perspective open. With Salesforce you can scale up whenever needed in future.
- Reporting: Reports are the mirror of your
business. Sales Reps can create their own reports to see the Accounts they
haven’t worked on for a while, Opportunities present in the pipeline, products
they have sold, activities performed and tasks completed.
- Time and cost of Implementation: Being a Cloud
Platform, the implementation time for Salesforce is much lesser than standard
solutions, thereby lessening the Go-Live time-frame. The feature-rich solution
can be configured easily and even if any customization is required, it can be
incorporated in a systematic order easily. And cost incurred in this path is
also reasonably less in comparison to others.
Q. Who should use the Salesforce CRM?
A. The simple answer is everyone. Salesforce has editions for
all variety of users. It offers different editions like Group, Professional,
Enterprise and Performance (For Sales Cloud). An organization can select the
edition they, according their aims, and the features they require.
Salesforce covers all the areas of customer relationships,
ranging from marketing to service. Any organization that wants to manage their
customer relationships holistically can come in and use Salesforce without
losing time, and wasting money for software development or hardware infrastructure.
Q. How it makes your life easy in terms of technology and
marketing?
A. Keeping customer relationship healthy and keep getting
business from them is the top priority for a sales representative. Salesforce
makes sales reps life easy in this path.
- Infrastructure perspective:
- Don't have to worry about setting up of servers
and its installation. You just have to purchase the licenses. Its like
plug-n-play.
- All the patches and latest features are readily
available to you when they are released by Salesforce.
- Most business functionality is achieved via
configuration on Salesforce platform.
- Visibility to leads makes sales reps connect to
leads faster and get the business rapidly.
- Dynamic Reports and dashboard provide you the
latest status of the business, which make decision making faster.
- Ease to Use – It's quite informative and very
easy to use, which is also a big plus for sales reps.