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Salesforce is a cloud-based company renowned for its customer relationship management technology. It was founded in 1999 with its flagship product, Sales Cloud, and has expanded into many clouds and services. The platform evolved and became a comprehensive CRM that empowers businesses of all sizes to connect, understand, and engage with their customers more effectively.
Salesforce has been recognized as the leading CRM platform by IDC and boasts an impressive market share of 21.7%, outpacing its competitors.
At its core, Salesforce centralizes customer data from sales, service, marketing, and every customer-facing team into a single platform. This eliminates data silos and delivers actionable insights in real-time.
Salesforce offers a wide range of products and services designed to meet everything from niche business requirements to various individual aspects of a company’s operations.
Moving forward, this blog will help you with a detailed understanding of Salesforce, its product suite, features, editions, and pricing.
Let’s get started!
Salesforce operates on a highly sophisticated backend infrastructure that supports its cloud platform capabilities to scale as your business grows. What lies behind it? Let’s explore:
Salesforce is built on a multi-tenant architecture. This means multiple users or tenants share the same software and hardware resources, resulting in easier management and cost savings due to shared infrastructure costs and economies of scale.
The data is isolated through logical separation and not physical separation. This means all the tenants share the same application code and database schema, based on logic.
It uses metadata to define the structure, configuration, and behavior of applications. Metadata refers to data about data. Simply, it describes the blueprint of your Salesforce environment. This metadata-driven approach enables a highly customizable platform without requiring changes to the underlying code.
Salesforce runs on its next-generation Hyperforce cloud infrastructure. It enables Salesforce applications to run on AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and other public clouds, and more. The data is stored in region-specific cells or data centers that allow you to access Salesforce applications across the globe.
Hyperforce automatically adjusts its computing powers based on how much you utilize Salesforce at a given time. With this, new updates and features can be rolled out faster.
Salesforce leverages a cloud-native relational database. This database stores data in a way that it never changes or deletes existing records directly. Instead, new changes are added or “appended” as new pieces of information. This approach helps keep data safe, always available, and reliable as it avoids accidental loss or corruption.
It uses a Long-Structured Merge Tree (LSM) to organize data, which simplifies storage, speeds up accessibility, and manages how and when data is written and updated.
SalesforceDB separates computing and storage for improved scalability, while tenant-specific encryption enhances security and isolation among customers.
The platform is organized into several layers described as the user interface layer, the business logic layer, and the data layers. This approach isolates different layers, eliminating the effect of changes in one layer on the other. Moreover, the business logic is implemented in Salesforce’s proprietary languages, such as Apex and Lightning Components.
Salesforce provides APIs, including REST, SOAP, and Bulk, for third-party integration and automation. These APIs help integrate third-party applications that extend the functionality of Salesforce.
Salesforce has a robust observability ecosystem, utilizing tools such as OpenTelemetry and Apache Druid.
OpenTelemetry is an open-source framework that collects, generates, and manages telemetry data such as logs, metrics, and traces from applications. With this, you can monitor how parts of Salesforce and connected systems are performing. It enables unified, consistent monitoring data across different programming languages and platforms and helps quickly pinpoint issues in complex, cloud-based environments.
Apache Druid is a database that is designed to perform real-time analytics on large volumes of event data, like logs and metrics. Druid works in the backend for rapid querying and fast analysis of observability data. This is especially required for dashboards and analytics that require real-time operational insights. It is ideal for collecting, summarizing, and filtering vast amounts of system data very quickly.
Here is a list of key products offered by Salesforce:
Salesforce Sales Cloud is an AI-powered sales management platform that helps businesses manage their entire sales processes from lead generation to deal closures.
It acts as a single platform for all the information a sales representative might need, such as contracts, accounts, leads, and opportunities.
Salesforce Service Cloud is a customer service platform enabling businesses with AI to deliver positive experiences from the first point of the customer case to final case resolutions across different channels.
It helps support agents understand customer queries by summarizing the cases, offering a step-by-step guide, and suggesting next best actions through AI intelligence. All this helps resolve customer queries swiftly.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a complete digital marketing platform that helps businesses streamline their marketing efforts.
It automates marketing activities, manages and optimizes marketing campaigns that drive personalized experiences across the customer journey, provides in-depth data analysis, and fosters better cross-department collaboration.
Salesforce Commerce Cloud is a complete e-commerce platform for business-to-business (B2B), business-to-consumer (B2C), and direct-to-consumer (DTC) businesses.
It helps to build personalized and scalable e-commerce experiences through a unified platform that enables the management of your online storefronts and streamlines operations.
Salesforce Experience Cloud, previously known as Community Cloud, is a digital experience platform. It helps businesses to build branded experiences like websites, portals, community forums, and more. This increases brand recognition and gives a stronger competitive edge to the business.
Experience Cloud has built-in analytics and reporting capabilities to analyze the performance of digital experiences to help you understand your strengths and weaknesses and work on them.
Salesforce Data Cloud is a hyperscale data engine that helps businesses to ingest, harmonize, and analyze the data from multiple sources to build a 360-degree view of customers. It can easily ingest data from sources including Salesforce applications, external systems, and third-party applications, breaking down data silos and creating a single source of truth for customer information.
Salesforce Agentforce is a digital labour platform that helps businesses to create and train custom AI agents for performing role-specific tasks across different departments like sales, service, marketing, and more. It integrates AI agents into these business processes, which leads to streamlined workflows and automated tasks.
Agentforce AI agents are powered by the Atlas Reasoning Engine to stimulate human-like reasoning and thinking. It processes information and makes decisions based on data and rules. Therefore, enabling the AI agents to reason, answer customer queries, and perform tasks in real-time.
Slack is a communication and collaboration tool for workplaces. It facilitates both one-to-one and group conversations, file sharing, access updates, and workflow automations. Not only the internal communication, but also, it also streamlines the business team-to-customer communication.
Tableau is an end-to-end analytics platform helping businesses to understand and act on the data. It is a low-code platform, so businesses can connect the data from all the sources they work on with no coding required.
Tableau and Salesforce Data Cloud integration brings in a multitude of benefits for businesses, such as enhanced customer insights, cross-departmental collaboration, data-driven and intelligent decision-making, and more.
MuleSoft is a native Salesforce integration platform that has pre-built connectors to allow integrations with applications and databases, whether hosted on the cloud or on-premises.
You get a unified platform, reusable assets, and automation capabilities that allow businesses to connect disparate systems and innovate faster.
Net Zero Cloud is a unified platform to manage and create disclosure reports of ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) initiatives by the array of frameworks and regulations specific to your organization. This helps improve brand reputation and regulatory compliance while attracting customers who prioritize sustainability.
Heroku works as a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) model that enables Salesforce developers to build, deploy, and scale applications, shifting infrastructure responsibilities to Heroku. While it also accelerates time to market for businesses.
Salesforce Einstein brings artificial intelligence capabilities to the customer relationship management platform. It is available across Salesforce products like Sales, Marketing, Commerce, and Salesforce Orgs, among others.
Einstein offers a versatile suite of products and services. You get Copilot, which allows you to customize actions; AI for businesses that includes Sales AI, Service AI, Marketing AI, and Commerce AI, and more.
Salesforce has a purpose-built solution called industry-specific clouds tailored to meet the unique needs of various industries. These industry clouds are built on the Salesforce Customer 360 platform, using industry-specific workflows, data models, and business processes.
Here is a list of the Salesforce industry-specific products:
| Industry | Product |
|---|---|
| Healthcare & Life Sciences | Health Cloud |
| Life Sciences Cloud | |
| Automotive | Automotive Cloud |
| Communications | Communications Cloud |
| Consumer Goods | Consumer Goods Cloud |
| Education | Education Cloud |
| Energy & Utilities | Energy & Utilities Cloud |
| Financial | Financial Services Cloud |
| Retail | Retail Cloud |
| Manufacturing | Manufacturing Cloud |
| Media | Media Cloud |
| Nonprofit | Nonprofit Cloud |
| Public Sector | Government Cloud |
Here is a list of key features:
Salesforce brings all the customer information from all Salesforce products, like Sales, Service, and Marketing, along with data from third-party platforms. This is how Salesforce works to unify all the customers’ data:
Salesforce enables businesses to provide personalized customer service across all preferred channels by giving support agents a unified view of customer interactions. For example, if a customer reports an issue via email and later contacts a support agent by phone, they expect the conversation to continue seamlessly from where they left off.
Salesforce helps customer service agents with a unified view of all customer interactions across all the channels, like purchase history, conversation history, and more. Additionally, Salesforce CRM is powered by intelligent routing and prioritization capabilities, enabling the routing of the customer’s inquiries based on the agent’s availability, skills, and workload. This ensures that the right agent is working to solve customer inquiries.
Self-service capabilities of the Salesforce CRM help customers seek resolution for their low-level queries, such as password resets, independently with the help of the knowledge base. Knowledge base refers to the directory of FAQs, tutorials, articles, and more that can help customers resolve a query.
Salesforce allows businesses to build customer portals directly into the CRM, enabling customers to track orders, access personal information, and submit service requests. This portal is powered by the CRM data and can surface the relevant content in response to common queries and guide them to solve customer queries.
Here is how Salesforce’s self-service capabilities can help you:
Salesforce CRM has AI capabilities with products like Agentforce, Prompt Builder, AI for businesses, and more, while maintaining the security of the customer’s data. It is driven by the Einstein Trust Layer, a collection of security principles and protocols like data masking, dynamic grounding, zero-date retention, and more.
Here is how Salesforce features keep customer information safe while allowing them to leverage generative AI capabilities:
Salesforce CRM has a suite of customizable reports and dashboard tools enabling businesses to understand and act on customer data. Analytics Home acts as a single location for accessing all your reports and dashboards, and its customizable capabilities can be tailored to meet your specific data needs.
Here is a detailed overview of the reports and dashboard capabilities:
From automating repetitive low-touch tasks to executing specific tasks automatically when defined events occur. Salesforce has intelligent automation capabilities powered by Salesforce Flow Builder.
Flow Builder is a declarative automation interface that enables businesses to apply automation to simple or complex business processes without writing any code. These business processes could include anything from sending follow-up emails, updating records, and approval orchestration, among others.
Salesforce is a highly customizable CRM, enabling organizations to get the capabilities tailored to their needs. Beyond the Salesforce features, it allows businesses to build custom applications to meet their specific needs. You can hire a Salesforce developer to build customizable applications on the Salesforce platform.
Salesforce also has a pre-built library of third-party solutions accessible through the Salesforce AppExchange. These solutions can be easily integrated into your Salesforce, expanding its capabilities.
Pidilite leveraged Salesforce to reduce its team’s reliance on a traditional setup that is on spreadsheets and project trackers. Due to the manual efforts that are required in managing them, their teams faced challenges related to sales, key accounts, and engaging customers. There was a clear need to divert effort from routine tasks to enriching customer experience and improving efficiency.
The business used Sales and Service Cloud to streamline the sales and service processes. It offered a unified view to track leads, manage opportunities, and automate responses.
The results:
Jaipur Rug’s shift from a B2B export model to B2C resulted in the growth of their staff to 100 employees within five years. However, they still relied on spreadsheets, emails, and online folders, requiring manual efforts. This became unsustainable, creating data duplication, a lack of visibility, and inefficient workflows. The CRM in place was underpowered for these evolving needs.
Scattered data created a hindrance in service continuity as sales reps had to start from scratch when taking over customer accounts. The absence of a unified system for service created inconsistency in managing cases from multiple channels, such as emails, web chat, and more.
Jaipur Rugs leveraged Salesforce to transform its fragmented and manual sales and service operations into a streamlined, intelligent, and data-driven customer engagement platform.
Salesforce offers various editions tailored to different business needs and budgets. Therefore, these editions differ in pricing as well as the features they offer. Here is a quick overview of the same:
| Editions | Price in dollars (per user/month) | Key features |
|---|---|---|
| Essentials | $25 | You get basic CRM tools and features for small teams, such as lead and contact management, email integration, and more. |
| Pro Suite | $100 | It offers more advanced CRM, custom dashboards, forecasting, and more. This edition is suitable for growing businesses. |
| Enterprise | $175 | You get advanced customization, automation, API access, and more. Popular in mid- to large-sized businesses. |
| Unlimited | $350 | All features, unlimited custom apps, 24/7 support, premium services |
| Agentforce 1 | $550 | Offers a comprehensive AI agents suite |
Salesforce is not just a customer relationship management platform; it is a strategic partner for businesses to navigate today’s digital landscape. It is helping businesses of all sizes, from enterprises to small businesses, to understand their customers and deliver a personalized experience to them.
Just like Pidilite and Jaipur Rugs have seen remarkable benefits, your business can experience transformative results too.
Looking to implement Salesforce for your business? At Smart IT Staff, we specialize in Salesforce consulting and staff augmentation services, offering expert Salesforce developers who help organizations effectively understand and leverage Salesforce for their unique needs.
Connect with us to explore how Salesforce CRM can be customized to enhance your operations and drive success.
Salesforce is both SaaS and PaaS. As a SaaS (Software as a Service), Salesforce gives you ready-made CRM apps like Sales Cloud and Service Cloud that you can use through your web browser. It does not require a physical setup. As a PaaS (Platform as a Service), Salesforce offers you a platform where Salesforce developers can build, customize, and launch their own apps on top of Salesforce.
Salesforce is very secure and trusted by thousands of businesses worldwide. It uses advanced security features like data encryption, strong passwords, multi-factor authentication, and access controls. By following compliance standards like GDPR, HIPAA, it ensures strict privacy laws. Regular updates and security monitoring help keep customer data safe.
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