Tom Wong - Salesforce.com For Dummies

Salesforce.com For Dummies, 5th Edition

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Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2013948032

ISBN 978-1-118-82214-2 (pbk); ISBN 978-1-118-82583-9 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-82584-6 (ebk)

Manufactured in the United States of America

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Chapter 1

In This Chapter

Solving business challenges

Extending the value of what you have

Deciding what Salesforce size fits you

You might not realize it yet, but every time you log in to Salesforce, youre accessing an extremely powerful lever of change for you, your group, and your company.

Sounds like a tall order, but consider this: What value do you put on your customer relationships? Your partner relationships? If youre a sales rep, its your livelihood. And if youre in management, you have fewer assets more valuable than your existing partner and customer base. What if you had a tool that could truly help you manage your partners and customers?

Salesforce wasnt the first customer relationship management (CRM) system to hit the market, but its dramatically different than the other CRM systems you might have used (spreadsheets and sticky notes count as a system, too!). Unlike traditional CRM software, Salesforce is an Internet service. You sign up and log in through a browser, and its immediately available. We currently call this cloud computing, where the customers access the cloud (that is, the Internet) for their business needs, and are not required to install any traditional software on, presumably, Earth. As long as you have an Internet connection, you can be anywhere in the world and have access to the clouds. Some of you may already be at companies that use cloud-based applications, as salesforce.coms success has spawned a whole new marketplace full of business applications done in the cloud. Others may just be entering the workforce but are very familiar with the use of Internet-applications in their personal life (think Facebook). For other readers, this is your first foray into cloud computing, and you might be taking a first step by yourself or with the rest of your company. Dont worry your company made the right choice by picking Salesforce.

Salesforce customers typically say that its unique for three major reasons:

• Fast: When you sign on the dotted line, you want your CRM system up and running yesterday. Traditional CRM software can take more than a year to deploy; compare that to months or even weeks with Salesforce.
• Easy: End user adoption is critical to any application, and Salesforce wins the ease-of-use category hands down. You can spend more time putting it to use and less time figuring it out.
• Effective: Because its easy to use and can be customized quickly to meet business needs, customers have proven that it has improved their bottom lines.

With Salesforce, you now have a full suite of services to manage the customer life cycle, divided into three product families: Sales Cloud, Marketing Cloud, and Service Cloud. These services include tools to pursue leads, manage accounts, track opportunities, resolve cases, and more. Depending on your teams objectives, you might use all the Salesforce families from Day 1, or you might focus on just the functionality to address the priorities at hand.

The more you and your team adopt Salesforce into your work, and you determine how you want your business process to be reflected within the technology, the more information youll have at your fingertips to deepen customer relationships and improve your overall business.

In this chapter, we reveal the many great things that you can do with Salesforce. Then we describe how you can extend Salesforce to work with many of the common applications that you already use. Finally, we help you decide which Salesforce edition is right for you, just in case youre still evaluating your options.