What is Salesforce?

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Salesforce is a cloud Customer Relationship Management (CRM)  platform.  Salesforce helps businesses manage customer interactions and data throughout the customer lifecycle. It offers a suite of cloud-based applications for sales, service, and marketing. The platforms focus is on improving the customer experience and increasing efficiency. Salesforce implements a customizable interface and integrates well  with other tools and systems, making it a flexible solution for many business needs. Additionally, Salesforce has a strong ecosystem of partners and developers, providing businesses with a  wealth of resources and opportunities to expand and enhance their use of the platform.

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Core Salesforce Clouds:

• Sales - Intended for supporting your Sales activities with the goal of helping you close deals faster.
• Service - Manage or review customer feedback.
• Marketing  - Manage or review campaign performance.

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Salesforce Key Terms

Multi Tenant Cloud - Multi tenancy states that a single instance can be used to serve multiple customers while keeping the data isolated and invisible from other tenants. Layman's terms, it can serve many people and keep your information secure.

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App Launcher:  Provides a link to your apps from a single location.

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Tabs: Allow you to find information quickly. You can create new custom tabs to enhance functionality. Access "List Views" by clicking on each of the tabs, aka Objects.

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Page Layout: Single record detail display.

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Field: Data such as text or number value.

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Object: Think of an object as a table of data. The records are rows and the fields are columns. Objects allow you to collect information about the people and businesses you come into contact with.

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The Salesforce standard objects are:

• Account - These are the people and organizations you do business with. They are linked to Contacts, Opportunities, and Cases.
• Contact - Individuals associated to the account.
• Opportunity - These are agreements or deals associated with the accounts.
• Lead - A person interested in your product or service.
• Campaign - A marketing initiative. How you attempt to reach out to consumers or interested parties.
• Case - Customer feedback, such as, questions, issues, problems.
• User - Individual associated with your Salesforce Org.

Sandbox - A copy of a Production organization that allows you to create code, configure changes, test and train in a separate environment without negatively affecting Production. For the uninitiated, Production is the live system, meaning the system that the real-world uses. Typically, for developing and testing, you have a Development Environment, a Test Environment, and the Production Environment. Salesforce allows you to make a copy of your Production environment or even a copy of another sandbox. You can develop, test, and perform user testing in the sandbox without worrying about breaking your live system. Once you have completed all the necessary testing in the sandbox, you can move (deploy) your changes to a staging environment (another sandbox) for further testing, or into Production, the live system. The playground you have access to in Trailhead is a Sandbox. I will demonstrate how to create a sandbox in my next post. The ability to create sandboxes is not a feature available in Trailhead. I will be demonstrating how to create a sandbox on a Salesforce training platform. It is literally just the matter of a few clicks.

Salesforce Funnel Visualization

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• Campaign - Reach out to a potential customer. Converted to a lead if they are interested in your product or business. Think advertisement, email, tradeshow. All the various ways you can meet a potential customer.
• Lead - Someone interested in your product or service.
• Account - An account is created once the lead purchases your product or service.
• Contact - Contact information for the account is stored in Salesforce, once the account is created.
• Opportunity - You have an opportunity to create additional agreements for other products or services your organization may offer.
• Cases - Feedback from your client on the product or service they have purchased from you.

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Standard Object Relationships:

• One Account can be related to multiple records, i.e. contacts, opportunities, and cases. If you delete the account, you will delete all associated contacts, opportunities, and cases. Also known as parent/child relationship.

Look up relationship:  In a look up relationship, there is no direct relationship. A lookup relationship links to items together, so that you can "look up" one item based on another items attributes. You can delete one item without affecting the other.

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Salesforce Tour Using Trailhead Playground

Below you will see deck demonstrating how to log into a Trailhead playground and:

• View/Update your profile
• Find other users.
• Find user profiles
• Access the sales cloud and access the various objects.

It is not an in depth tour, but if will show you how to log in and take a peak at what is behind the tool. More to come. We are just getting started.

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