Customer relationship management (CRM) is a process in which a business organization administers its interactions with customers, typically using data analysis to study large amounts of information.

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Salesforce systems compile data from a range of different communication channels, including a company’s website, telephone, email, live chat, marketing materials and its social media channels. They allow businesses to learn more about their target audiences and how to best cater for their needs, thus retaining customers and driving sales growth.

Salesforce uses a cloud-computing, software distribution model that hosts applications and makes them available online.

Salesforce hosts numerous different cloud platforms that allow companies to interact with different data and service their customers in various capacities.

Salesforce has multiple different cloud platforms – a service cloud, marketing cloud, health cloud, app cloud, community cloud, analytics cloud and many more.”

The Service Cloud allows companies to connect with customers and deliver premium customer service through showing customer activity and resolving issues.

Salesforce’s Sales Cloud gives companies the ability to track contacts, opportunities and manage a sales team to increase sales.

It provides transparency of the sales process: how a prospective customer (Prospect) becomes a potential customer (Lead) and then a customer (Account) and their contact information (Contacts).

In the list of contact events and tasks, the colleagues see what tasks they need to perform.

Details of contact events and visit reports will be posted to the to-do list following closed appointments with clients.

Experience Cloud is a Salesforce platform that enables companies to connect customers, partners, and employees with each other — and the data and records they need to get work done.

This next-generation portal combines the real-time collaboration of Chatter with the ability to share any file, data, or record anywhere and on any mobile device.

A Salesforce implementation package that consists of a fast track deployment, basic system configuration and set up, data migration, and essential training.

It’s best for small businesses looking to get started with Salesforce quickly and efficiently for a single group of users.

Sales automation works with all stages in the sales cycle, from initially entering contact information to converting a prospective client into an actual client.

It implements sales promotion analysis, automates the tracking of a client’s account history for repeated sales or future sales and coordinates sales, marketing, call centers, and retail outlets.

It prevents duplicate efforts between a salesperson and a customer and also automatically tracks all contacts and follow-ups between both parties.

Service automation is the part of the CRM system that focuses on direct customer service technology.

Opportunities are deals in progress. Opportunity records track details about deals, including which accounts they’re for, who the players are, and the amount of potential business value.

The opportunity management is one of the top Salesforce CRM features and benefits to look for.

It offers a chance to view the activity timeline of your customers. Also, it depicts the various stages of a particular deal which helps you to decide your next move.

In addition, it shows the critical details of the activity timeline and the ready-made templates ensure hassle-free emailing to the clients.

Salesforce CRM automates three important elements, namely, configure, price, and quote (CPQ) to simplify the quote management.

With this, the salespeople can select the right quotes for the customers with the latest discounts.

The users can create accurate quotes and submit the proposal faster with Salesforce.

It also makes the invoice sending and the cash collecting process easy with Salesforce.

A free online learning community that teaches you how to use Salesforce.

Salesforce offers Trailhead to guide small businesses and startups. This application offers best-in-class services to customers by giving 360-degree customer view. There is a setup assistant to answer the customer queries quickly.

In addition, startups can learn a lot from the in-app tutorials. It also provides nitty-gritty and in-depth details on all the products of Salesforce.

The Salesforce mobile app allows users to access CRM data at anytime and from anywhere.

They can view meetings, events, and account updates at the fingertips.
View all business data in real-time, thus you can close the deal faster on the mobile application.

Further, you can collaborate efficiently with your team via instant conversations.

The files and document sharing become simple with the app, and it gives you more flexibility to work from anywhere.

The Salesforce document management system enables you to share files from any device at any time.

It ensures internal and external collaboration with versioning and commenting.

Salesforce is featured with powerful search functions like earch by attributes, combined searches, and full-text search that make it easy to find a specific document from a pile of files. Attribute-based access permissions provide protection from unauthorized data manipulation.

Many companies organize their salespeople into territories. A territory might be defined by geography, demographics, or some other criteria.
Territory management lets you easily see which reps are assigned to which accounts, regions, and opportunities.

You can then track your reps’ performance by territory and determine how best to marshal your resources going forward.
If you use Salesforce, you can take advantage of Salesforce’s Territory Management feature.

It’s a powerful set of tools that let you assign accounts and territories to your reps, track sales opportunities, generate detailed reports, and more.

Einstein Activity Capture is a productivity-boosting tool that helps keep data between Salesforce and your email and calendar applications up to date.

It focuses on three types of data : emails, events, and contacts.

In the case of a public cloud service, the servers are owned by an external service provider.

They have their own data centers, extensive server infrastructure and network connections.

The equipment servicing, maintenance, updates are carried out by the cloud service provider.

The resources are made available via the Internet, via a Public Cloud platform.

The Public Cloud is a continuously scalable solution.

Scaling can be done automatically (after prior configuration) or manually, by changing machine parameters or by purchasing additional ‘virtual machines’.

Public cloud providers ensure high availability of services, data security and stability.

They have extensive infrastructure and can handle network failures more efficiently than on-premise solutions (or private clouds).

Advantages of Public Cloud

• scalability – the user can use the resources of the public cloud almost without limit; scaling takes place automatically or manually

• flexible costs – costs are charged on a per-minute or per-second basis

• high degree of reliability – thanks to the complex infrastructure and the permanent connection between the data centers, the service provider can prevent emergency situations or minimize their effects if they do occur

Salesforce is a cloud computing service as a software (SaaS) platform that specializes in customer relationship management (CRM).

Salesforce’s services allow businesses to use cloud technology to better connect with customers, partners and potential customers.

Salesforce is a customer relationship management solution that brings companies and customers together. It’s one integrated CRM platform that gives all your departments — including marketing, sales, commerce, and customer service — a single, shared view of every customer.

It helps you better organize your customer data, quick decision making processes and brings your customers closer.

Salesforce gives companies a competitive advantage as they know better what their customers’ needs are.”

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A powerful B2B marketing automation tool to help marketing and sales and marketing teams find and nurture the best leads, close more deals, and maximize ROI.
Automation rules in Pardot allow you to perform specific marketing actions based on pre-defined criteria that you specify and to target customers based on their specific attributes.

The Website tracking Code helps you track the activities of your website. This Tracking Code analyses all the activities of the visitors on the website and understands the history of the visitors.

Pardot’s SEO and Keyword Tools help track the site’s rank in search engines like Google and Bing for the keywords used in the business content. It helps the marketer to know the ranking of the keywords, the average cost-per-click for keywords in Google Adwords.

A powerful B2B marketing automation tool to help marketing and sales and marketing teams find and nurture the best leads, close more deals, and maximize ROI.
Automation rules in Pardot allow you to perform specific marketing actions based on pre-defined criteria that you specify and to target customers based on their specific attributes.

The Website tracking Code helps you track the activities of your website. This Tracking Code analyses all the activities of the visitors on the website and understands the history of the visitors.

Pardot’s SEO and Keyword Tools help track the site’s rank in search engines like Google and Bing for the keywords used in the business content. It helps the marketer to know the ranking of the keywords, the average cost-per-click for keywords in Google Adwords.

Salesforce has been implementing artificial intelligence (AI) into their Einstein platform, which helps simplify the analytics workflow and produce more accurate forecasting and predictive analytics. Machine learning uses past data to predict what will happen in the future.

Einstein Lead and Opportunity scoring grants us predictive insight into leads and opportunities, so we can anticipate which is most likely to convert while nurturing our leads accordingly.

With Einstein Activity Capture sales reps can automatically update  any email or calendar data in Salesforce and store them under their related accounts, contacts, leads or opportunities.

Einstein Activity Capture will allow linking to Google™, Microsoft® Office 365®, or Microsoft Exchange 2013 or 2016 account. After connecting them to the system, you can see the activities from the accounts show up automatically in your Salesforce instance.

A Salesforce implementation package that consists of a fast track deployment, basic system configuration and set up, data migration, and essential training.

It’s best for small businesses looking to get started with Salesforce quickly and efficiently for a single group of users.

Marketing automation focuses on easing the overall marketing process to make it more effective and efficient.

CRM tools with marketing automation capabilities can automate repeated tasks, for example, sending out automated marketing emails at certain times to customers, or posting marketing information on social media. The goal with marketing automation is to turn a sales lead into a full customer.

CRM systems today also work on customer engagement through social media.

Salesforce CRM assures a hassle-free contact management by giving an access to critical data of the customers and interaction history.

It gives a complete customer picture including insights and engage-enhancement strategies. It helps business planning by thoroughly processing customer data by understanding their unique / specific behavior related to any product or service.

Cloud-based contact management enables you to easily collaborate in the organization and creates a knowledge-sharing workplace.

In addition, you can trace the movement of the deals by accessing all the contact data.

Quote management of the products becomes easy with this application.

You can simply track the products, which are part of your deal, and it includes the standard price, quantity, product code, and quoted price.

In addition, you can establish quantity as well as revenue schedule and it reflects the delivery terms and payment.

The app automatically quotes client data. It also creates PDF of the approved template and sends it as an email directly to the customer.

The Einstein Analytics offers you high business intelligence that helps to unlock complicated sales as well as service insights.

With Einstein Analytics, you can go to the next step faster. This analytics also connects the users to Sales, Service, and Experience Clouds with embedded dashboards. It consistently demonstrates data as well as insights to the employees and managers.

Data security is the prime aspect of Einstein. More than 150,000 business houses are sharing data and getting intelligent insights to grow business.

Salesforce Dashboard Components give us a visual representation of how your business is performing.
Users can recognize market trends, summarize and visualize activities.

In addition, you can inspect the performance of your team directly on the dashboard.
Create your own customized sales forecasting report with Salesforce.

With simple tools and procedures, users can adjust the fields, view and filter data.

Charts display real-time data and provide accurate insight into processes.

Salesforce integrates incoming emails into Outlook and Gmail.

It allows users to get a complete picture of how they communicate with customers.

Once integrated, they can view emails, contacts, and calendars from any device.
Salesforce enables you to sell your products and services smarter than any other such inbox with built-in intelligence.
It streamlines the workflows of the sales representatives by permitting them to update data in real-time in the sales pipeline.

Salesforce helps you to keep the most critical projects, team, and topics in a social feed for collaborating working groups.

It assists the team in working together to achieve a common goal.

The intelligent recommendation of Salesforce helps to discover the right people, information and file based on activities as well as interests.

It’s easy for users to identify experts and get their right information.

Flow Builder is the declarative interface used to build individual flows.

In Salesforce, a flow is a tool that automates complex business processes.

A Flow is an automation configuration saved in Salesforce with the structure of a flowchart.

Simply put, it collects data and then does something with that data.

Flow Builder can be used to build code-like logic without using a programming language.

E.g.  you need to perform mass updates across multiple unrelated records.

Salesforce mobile app enables your users to access CRM data anytime and from anywhere.

The application is available in both the Apple App Store and Google Play.

Most of the functionalities are also available on mobile phones and tablets, subject to the limitations of the screen size.

Field salespeople can see customers’ data, the communication with them, their orders, and other business events.

Managers can follow and manage their team’s work, manage approval processes and display business data and reports.

‘On-premise’ is a local IT environment operated by an internal IT department (or a service company).

The purchase (or rental) of the machines involves the construction and maintenance of your own infrastructure – software, network and server room – ensuring the conditions for the proper operation of the machines.

Scalability – in the case of an ‘on-premise’ solution – can be achieved by purchasing and configuring additional machines, and sometimes by expanding the IT team.

Disadvantages of on-premise systems

• scaling difficulty – in the on-premise model, scaling is done by purchasing additional machines, which may entail additional costs (e.g. expansion of the server room)

• you need your own (or rented) service room – preparing a special room and maintaining the right conditions can be cumbersome and expensive

• hardware maintenance – servers are owned by the company, so the IT team has to spend time physically servicing machines, which can sometimes come at the expense of development and support activities

• it requires own or outsourced IT service personnel

• we have to take care of the security of the entire IT system, data backup, skilled personnel and their training as well