You may have heard of Salesforce. Its market cap is approximately $200B, it has purchased a whole lot of companies and is heralded as a saviour for businesses. So what is it?

Salesforce is primarily known as a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) platform, but its capabilities go beyond tracking Accounts and Contacts. The easiest way of understanding Salesforce at a high level, is comparing it to a massive spreadsheet with a UI, automation,
and communication features.

Where there is a spreadsheet, there is a Salesforce use case.
In our world, it is easy to think everyone knows all about Salesforce’s capabilities. Salesforce is an extremely flexible platform. It can track anything that is currently stored in a spreadsheet. Track sales, sales reps, attribute sales to sales reps, donors, employees, bills, student applications to a school, customer issues, tasks, meetings, emails, products and so on. Its flexibility is achieved through a native feature called Custom Objects. Also, being a cloud based platform, it means Salesforce can be accessed anywhere with an internet connection and this includes a iOS and Android mobile app, so changes can be made on-the-go.

All this promotes Salesforce as the single source of truth for your organisation. No longer will different teams need to track information on different spreadsheets, leading to different teams singing from different hymn sheets. Your teams can be in sync and see all data
related to customers, prospects or other stakeholders. Better yet, customers/partners can be directly incorporated into Salesforce experience with Experience Cloud.

Automation.
Salesforce’s native features can reduce redundancies. Need a data change to be replicated in multiple places? Done. Need automatic submission for approvals based thresholds? Done. Alongside automation, there are duplicate record checkers, in-built communication, reports & dashboards and integration to Outlook or Gmail. Salesforce’s automation features can run daily or whenever specific changes are made.

Extend Salesforce.
In addition to Salesforce’s features, the platform can be extended through the AppExchange(similar to Apple’s App Store or Google’s Play Store). Apps providing eSignature, document generation, email campaigns, payment gateways and countless solutions are available as free and paid-for add-ons.

Not all implementations are created equal.
So now that you want/have Salesforce, what is needed to get you up and running? This is where a Salesforce Partner comes into play. Partners like CloudFig can understand your different use cases and have your Salesforce environment fit for purpose. We recommend walking before running and launching your Salesforce environment with a phased approach.
The deployment should include stringent testing throughout the deployment lifecycle. A big bang deployment can be overwhelming and delay the use of new features.

At first, Salesforce may highlight inefficiencies with processes and/or expose dissonance in data. This can be an opportunity to restructure your operations, integrate or migrate away from legacy tools. If your end goal is for Salesforce to be involved in all operations, the implementations can be a journey, but each milestone can transform your business.

Salesforce Partners will have numerous years of experience and at CloudFig, our team has experience as Admin, analysts and Salesforce Architects. We can guide you through best practices and ensure you are set up for long term success.