Introduction

There are several systems available in the market that enable enterprises to manage their sales and customer relationship processes seamlessly and these are known as Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software or systems.

One of the long standing and possibly, the best CRM available today is Salesforce. Salesforce is not just a CRM software or platform, but it is an entire eco-system consisting of implementation and sales partners, complementing products and a training & certification platform.

The below figure is a typical Salesforce implementation architecture for any enterprise

When customers think of implementing CRM, the first name that would cross their mind is Salesforce and there are several reasons why it is so.

Customizable

While most of one's business needs can be addressed by appropriate configuration of Salesforce, enterprises always have something unique about their requirements and operations. Salesforce provides huge number of options to include such unique requirements through programming interfaces such as LWC and Apex, which are open in nature as well as through various integration mechanisms.

Within an enterprise, it is also recognized that each user may have unique needs and through Salesforce's personalization feature this becomes a breeze.

Scalable

Implementing CRM for any enterprise is an investment. Enterprises' main purpose is to grow in revenues and profitability, which is achieved through growth in no. of employees, locations, product lines etc. So enterprises would look for a CRM that is able to nicely scale with the growth of their business over several years without any degradation of performance. That is what Salesforce is, a scalable platform that lets enterprise smoothly spread its usage as it grows.

Customer Focus

The platform is optimized to enable enterprises to focus on their customers and their satisfaction. Though customer relations are cultivated through multiple departments, sales and marketing teams often play a significant role towards customer satisfaction. Salesforce provides several features that are tailored to the needs of sales and marketing professionals such as statistics, configurable dashboards, customer interaction tools, prospect & lead tracking, multitasking etc.

Integration with Social networking platforms and email clients, and a variety of other role-specific capabilities help the sales and marketing teams to focus on customers. Add to this the mobile friendliness of the platform, which will help the sales team to be close to the customer at the same time being able to access critical customer specific data & analytics through the mobile app.

Security

Securing data is one of highest priorities of any enterprise. Data breaches and security vulnerabilities can have a negative influence on an enterprise's reputation as well as its business. Security is the heart of Salesforce. Security is provided starting from the lowest level of fields and records without limiting access to those who need to access these. Admins can easily grant permission to only those employees who require access.

Multi-tenant Architecture

In a multitenant architecture, all users share the same infrastructure and the same version of the Salesforce platform. Unlike in single-tenant platforms, in multi-tenant platforms upgrades are released automatically and simultaneously to all users. This helps enterprises to focus on their core business rather than worrying about buying and maintaining physical stack of hardware and software, or making sure that their applications always have the latest patch installed etc.

AppExchange

Salesforce AppExchange is a great place for both Providers and Consumers. For Providers it is a great place to showcase their products and create a business model around this. And for Consumers, it helps them not to spend time & efforts to reinvent something that is already available.

CRM++

For most of us, what comes first in our mind when thinking about Salesforce is Sales & Marketing functions. Salesforce offers a variety of services and tools which together target several functions of any enterprise. These tools are called “clouds,” because they’re all served via cloud computing. Some of the popular “clouds” include Sales, Marketing, Commerce, Service, Experience and Analytics. However, there is lot more to it than what seems obvious.

Conclusion

An enterprise can virtually handle all their computing needs using Salesforce through its rich set of cross-cloud features such as Standard and Custom objects, Workflow, Task management, Opportunity tracking, Collaboration tools, Customer engagement tools, analytics, an intuitive, mobile-ready dashboard, social media & email integration and the list goes on. It is virtually a one-stop platform which helps enterprises to migrate from chaos to control with respect to their computing needs.