Sharif Shaalan - Salesforce for Beginners

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Early Access Publication: Salesforce for Beginners

Early Access Production Reference: B18426

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Once upon a time, before Facebook and iPhones, businesses ran their operations using on-premises software. These operations included managing customers and their interactions with the sales, customer service, and marketing departments of the organization. On-premises meant that the servers that ran this software were within the physical infrastructure of the business. Having the servers onsite meant huge maintenance and upkeep costs, as well as long deployment times for the smallest of changes. In 1999, Marc Benioff and his co-founders started Salesforce.com. As Benioff states in his book, Behind the Cloud, the idea was to make software easier to purchase, simpler to use, and more democratic, without the complexities of installation, maintenance, and constant upgrades. Salesforce was at the forefront of Software as a Service (SaaS) and cloud computing.

Fast-forward to 2022, when Salesforce.com reported $21.25 billion in total revenue in FY 2021 and is now constantly expanding the platform and acquiring new companies. This led to the Salesforce economy, which Salesforce projects to have created 9.3 million jobs by 2026. How did Salesforce get to this point? It started as a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool; then, over the years, it morphed into a powerful business platform with various clouds, including Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Analytics Cloud, Experience Cloud, and many more.

In this book, we will focus on Sales Cloud and Service Cloud. These two clouds contain all of the core CRM functionality, which is the foundation of all the other clouds and sets up the path for you as the end user or aspiring admin to continue learning.

Salesforce is a platform to build your entire business on. Don't let the word sales mislead you. The platform supports the ability to manage all aspects of a business, including sales, customer service, marketing, finance, and much more, through out-of-the-box functionality and customization.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• Understanding the core concepts of CRM
• Understanding the difference between Salesforce Lightning and Salesforce Classic
• Learning how to navigate Salesforce
• Learning about the different search options
• Learning how to use list views across all objects
• Learning what Salesforce Chatter is and how to use it in your organization
• Learning the personal settings options available to end users

CRM includes all interactions with an organization's constituents. This includes prospecting, the sales process, retention, marketing efforts, and customer service. The core of Salesforce is the out-of-the-box CRM functionality that is provided when you sign up for the platform. There are various editions provided by Salesforce; each edition provides different features and per-user price points. The four editions of the core CRM product are as follows:

• Salesforce Essentials: A small-business CRM for up to 10 users
• Salesforce Professional: A complete CRM for any size of team
• Salesforce Enterprise: A deeply customizable sales CRM for your business
• Salesforce Unlimited: Unlimited CRM power and support

Salesforce uses the concept of different clouds to bring together specific features. For example, all of the core features of running a sales operation, such as lead and opportunity management, are included in Sales Cloud. Features such as cases and knowledge bases fall under Service Cloud. There are also other clouds, such as Marketing Cloud, Analytics Cloud, and so on. The preceding editions in the bullet list focus on Sales Cloud and/or Service Cloud.

There is also a developer edition. The developer edition is one of the most valuable training tools when starting to learn how to use Salesforce, especially if you don't have access to a Salesforce environment of your own to practice what you are learning. Developer edition orgs are free, full-featured enterprise orgs with less storage and a limit of two licenses. These orgs are made for you to try out and develop features in an environment that is not directly tied to a paid production org. You can sign up for unlimited developer orgs. Regardless of the edition, the core objects are the same; we will cover them in detail in the following chapters of this book.

In this book, we will use the terms environment, org, and instance interchangeably. These three words mean the same thingthe configuration that you see when you log in to a unique version of Salesforce. This can be a development org, a client's production org, or a sandbox. We will cover sandboxes in Chapter 12, Manage Projects Effectively Using Sandboxes and Change Sets.

Now is a good time to go to https://developer.salesforce.com/signup and sign up for your own developer edition.

As we walk you through the concepts of this book, you can follow along on your own org. As you sign up, you will be asked to enter a company name. If you don't belong to a company, don't worryjust re-enter your name for the company name since it is a required field.

Over the years, Salesforce has had a few UI makeovers to keep up with the latest trends in usability and design. The latest, and by far the biggest, UI change Salesforce has carried out is the introduction of Salesforce Lightning in 2015. This was a fundamental change to the look and feel that Salesforce users were used to and brought with it many new features that are only available on Lightning. Some of these features include the following:

• A modern UI
• The Lightning Component framework, which allows developers to build responsive applications for any device with less effort

Many organizations that have used Salesforce for a long time either plan to migrate, or have already migrated to Lightning. When Lightning was released, the older Salesforce UI was renamed to Salesforce Classic to differentiate between the two. The following screenshots show the exact same page in Salesforce Classic and Salesforce Lightning. Notice the option to toggle between the two interfaces. This means any user you grant this permission to can switch back and forth between Classic and Lightning. This feature helps with adoption when you first bring users on to Lightning.