What Exactly Does Salesforce Do? What is it used for?

Last Updated on September 20, 2022

Since a few years back, Salesforce has been climbing the charts, whether for increasing productivity, predicting sales revenue, improved customer visibility, efficient pipeline management, etc.

You also probably have heard about Salesforce before even using its services for your business. 

But, do you know what Salesforce is about, what it’s used for, working, tools, and more. 

This post includes details relevant to Salesforce; we hope it will prove valuable to you. 

Let’s start with what Salesforce is.

Salesforce is the world’s number one customer relationship management (CRM) platform that assists commerce, sales, service, marketing, and IT teams of organizations to work from anywhere and keep their customers happy. Moreover, it’s a cloud-based platform that offers software and services to build related customer experiences. 

What Does Salesforce Do?

Many brands encounter a pain point regarding their customer data as they find it challenging to read and share, know more about them, their needs, and more.

Let’s take an example to get it better; as we know, customers’ data stay confidential with the sales team, and marketing fails to see when the customer is connected with customer service. 

So, to get a solution to such a pain point, Salesforce comes in. 

Salesforce, founded by a former Oracle (ORCL) – Get Oracle Corporation Report executive Marc Benioff, Dave Moellenhoff, Frank Dominguez, and Parker Harris in 1999, is one of the top global companies using cloud-based CRM software successfully. 

Salesforce builds and supports CRM software that aids in breaking down the technology silos between different departments to allow companies to get complete details about their customers when they interact.

When we integrate Salesforce technology with our organization, employees of every department, be it marketing, sales, or IT, all find it easy to share customer views from any device, anywhere worldwide. 

Businesses usually pick the Salesforce Customer 360 platform because it includes a stack of robust apps that facilitates a holistic view of customers from wherever they go and connect with your company. 

What Is Salesforce Used For?

Salesforce is a CRM platform; it’s software, so we shouldn’t confuse it with hardware as it houses in the cloud. 

In brief, no matter where the sales, marketing, service, commerce, and IT teams are, Salesforce permits them to connect on a single platform. 

Customer 360 by Salesforce is known as the world’s number one CRM that eases the communication and details sharing between teams, customers, and partners to make digital workflows flawless and find a new way to perform better. 

This digital workspace turns out to be a helping hand for government agencies, businesses, non-profit organizations, and educational institutes to deliver matchless experiences for whom they work. 

How Does Salesforce Work?

Again, Salesforce’s Customer 360 provides apps that connect all the teams, sales, service, marketing, IT, and commerce around a single; shared customer data view on an integrated platform. 

Even employees get access to the information they want to perform best. Also, they can easily connect and align with colleagues. Ultimately, this results in customers’ personalized, connected experiences, crafting stronger links. 

When the teams catch up with a holistic view of all the customers, it diminishes the time companies demand to resolve customer issues. Moreover, it avoids redundancies in communication and permits highly personalized interactions. 

How Can Salesforce Be Used For Marketing?

When it comes to customizing marketing messages to send them to the right person on the right channel at the right time, Salesforce emerges as a helpmate. Besides, it helps in improving lead generation, upselling and cross-selling, and customer acquisition opportunities. 

Here, Customer 360, by Salesforce, facilitates the accumulation and management of first-, second-, and third-party data and reconciles data from your known or unknown prospects and customers. Furthermore, Salesforce finds it easy to integrate data sources. 

AI integration also assists your team plan and optimizes all the customer interactions. This way, you can easily and quickly make data-backed decisions relevant to your new target customer segments. 

Plus, Salesforce helps build linked brand journeys that adapt depending on the customers’ interactions and offer them valuable personalized experiences. 

So, for marketing automation, enterprise-level email, data management, digital advertising, analytics, or whatever be you need, Salesforce takes a stand to cover it all. 

Being a business owner, you need to update your data with this changing world. Salesforce’s digital marketing software, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, can help you. 

You can take your data and leverage it entirely to launch a campaigns series at the right time through the Salesforce Marketing Cloud. Post that, you can measure those campaigns to ensure that you are serving your clients better and getting more ROI. 

Marketing Cloud by Salesforce starts with understanding your customers, personalizing their journey with your brand, and altering your campaigns to enhance your performance. You can learn more about Salesforce Marketing Cloud here. 

How Do You Use Salesforce For Sales?

It’s always essential to build deep connections with customers, manage and observe your business in real-time and act quickly in this ever-changing world. And here, to meet such needs, Sales Cloud takes an entry.

Through Salesforce’s Sales Cloud, your sales team can invest less time in data entry and more in connecting with your customers. 

Salesforce tools assist sales reps and the support team in developing and implementing an accurate and repeatable sales process. 

Better than all is by connecting sales with service, marketing, and more, one can increase opportunities and offer seamless and engaging customer experiences. 

With Sales Cloud, you can grow your revenue more quickly than ever. 

The key features of Sales Cloud target what’s essential for your business, the growing connections and closing deals, anywhere and anytime. 

It Helps In:

• Contact Management to deliver personalized sales experiences with profound contact and account management.
• Sales forecasting predicts your revenue growth status and drives enhanced impact with data-driven insights.
• Opportunity management tracks the sales opportunities and moves ahead faster with a perfect customer activity timeline. 
• Mobile CRM to sell actively through a single app that permits you to access, update, and manage your CRM data.
• Process Automation to streamline and automate routine sales tasks, such as email alerts, activity tracking, and workflows. 

Plus, it helps in adapting to this dynamic world and staying connected. You can strengthen your team with easy-to-use apps for virtual selling, forecasting enablement, and planning, regardless of their location.

Moreover, Sales Cloud comes with the tools for reps that assist them in selling more and closing more deals faster.  You can learn more about Salesforce Sales Cloud here. 

Can Salesforce Also Work For B2C And B2B Shopping And Commerce?

Yes, Salesforce comes with various tools that help build seamless, simple business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) commerce experiences that assist in engaging customers, growing revenue, and connecting commerce to the rest of the teams. 

Commerce Cloud by Salesforce helps with easy implementation and adaptation from anywhere. Also, it helps in converting more customers by offering a personalized buying experience. 

Through Commerce Cloud, you can grow your revenue and connections with an entirely well-connected digital customer journey. 

Moreover, you can personalize your engagement with customer-centric commerce. It helps unify data, personalized every interaction, and grow your revenue across channels with AI and automation. 

Besides making your customer journey seamless, it converts more customers and drives loyalty from marketing to commerce, sales, fulfillment services, etc. 

Salesforce B2C Commerce Assists In Many Ways:

• It increases productivity, engagement, and revenue across channels.
• Connects the customer journey from social to storefront, commerce, and marketing to service, subscriptions to curbside pickup, and more
• Its headless APIs, code, or clicks make experiences with a brand quite faster, like payments and embedded commerce. 

Besides, Salesforce B2B Commerce Assists:

• Catch market faster and enhance sales with a digital storefront.
• Offers a personalized and intuitive buying experience to business buyers
• Diminish costs, customize websites, and drive efficiency through easy-to-use tools. 

Moreover, Commerce Cloud Delivers Flawless Post-Purchase Journeys By:

• Connecting commerce to service to bring together self-service and call center experiences.
• Offering complete transparency into orders to customers.
• Delivering omnichannel shopping and fulfillment.

You can learn more about Salesforce Commerce Cloud here. 

What About Customer Service? Are There Salesforce Tools For That?

Salesforce delivers personalized, consistent customer service across all the customer interactions, from service automation to chatbots powered by Artificial Intelligence. 

Moreover, it helps manage various touchpoints, including self-service channels, customer service, digital channels, and field service, like Facebook Messenger, SMS, chat, WhatsApp, etc. 

Salesforce can help you resolve cases faster, offer immediate support, and ensure that agents have an informed and complete view of your customers during all interactions. 

Service Cloud, the #1 customer service software, helps strengthen your customer relationships by offering a personal touch. 

Moreover, it helps in:

• Supporting customer interaction on any channel.
• Smart productivity tools to enhance call center management.
• Intelligent workflows automate business processes.
• Easing upsell and driving revenue using AI power. 
• Providing shared and actionable insights into all the customer interactions. 

Moreover, with Customer 360, you can break silos and get the details of every customer interaction from their first click-through to the last purchase and ahead. 

Service Cloud by Salesforce is the top-rated and well-recognized customer service software solution. This software lets agents and customers connect faster and resolve customer issues by phone, chat, web, or email.

Service Cloud customer service software incorporates customer access across all channels, case management, queue management, integration with legacy data systems, knowledge base, pre-built integration apps, routing and escalation, and support ticketing. 

Customer support software can assist the brands in streamlining service team processes and calls, lowering average call times. This robust customer service software can also improve problem resolution and customer satisfaction. 

What About IT?

Information Technology (IT) tools hold the caliber to assist your organization in developing modern apps to meet partner, employee, and customer needs, whether your team is tech-savvy. 

Salesforce, guide you towards a path following which you can increase your productivity by automating the processes that assist your organization’s teams in improving transparency, scale, and security as you want it. 

Salesforce can transform the way we handle our customer base and drive results for all your departments and roles. 

Salesforce Platform assists in building apps faster compared to other App Builders. Using this platform, you can build apps quickly and run on any device without writing even a single line of code. 

Heroku, by Salesforce, is a platform as a service (PaaS) that allows developers to develop, run, and operate apps entirely on the cloud. It helps deliver personalized, engaging experiences that your customers may love. It allows you to:

• Scale your applications to millions of users.
• Make the team collaborate easily.
• Create improved experiences based on your CRM data.

See An Example Of Salesforce At Work

Salesforce has much to share when it comes to its customer stories. 

Right now, we will go with the example of Customer 360.

A beauty brand e.l.f. Cosmetics started with a target of ensuring all the online customer touchpoints were related and consistent across its channels. 

So, the company stepped ahead to implement a combination of Commerce Cloud, Service Cloud, and Marketing Cloud to convert and connect to its business functions. 

And do you know, the outcome appeared to be the best, making the shopping, marketing, and customer service experience intuitive and seamless.

These solutions perform together to offer a complete view of the brand’s shoppers to the company leaders before and after purchase. This way, the company got a chance to quickly adapt to customers’ cosmetic needs in real-time, allowing the brand to give a personalized touch to the interaction with their consumers.

Such innovations made the e.l.f. ‘s eCommerce website attain the first position in its sector, reaching an impressive retention rate of 65% from 55%. 

We can customize Customer 360’s powers as per our specific needs by integrating data, AI, or analytics into our process or training-relevant requirements. 

Why Is Salesforce Obsessed With Customers?

According to most customers, A Salesforce report says the brand’s experience for customers sounds to be essential as its products and services. So, what you provide to your customers weighs more, but what’s more important is when, where, how, and why we should reach them. 

Today’s customers want to trust what they are getting from you when they are in need. They wish to witness effortless experiences and become loyal to brands they can rely on. 

And Salesforce comes to the surface when you want to offer such customer experiences and earn their trust. 

Business Problems Salesforce Helps Solve

As per a study, let’s review some challenges that business leaders face today:

• Around 58% of business owners agree that through Salesforce, they are catching up with prospects/customers and arrange data from numerous sources that make essential sense quickly.
• Moreover, about 58% of them acknowledge that non-availability of an enterprise view of prospect/customer data may emerge as an issue.
• Approximately 56% of business leaders accept that organizational silos affect the quality of their prospects’ or customers’ experience.

Global Problems Salesforce Helps Solve

Besides innovating CRM technology, Salesforce does much more. 

Since the start, Salesforce has laid more emphasis on resolving global issues. 

Salesforce rolled out a tracking tool in 2019 and put its efforts to reach the figure of one trillion trees to promote reforestation. 

Additionally, as per Salesforce’s 1-1-1 philanthropic model, it has donated about $240 million and more in grants, bestowed around 3.5 million hours of community service and offered product donations for 39,000+ educational and non-profit institutions. 

So, we can conclude that Salesforce crafts CRM-based solutions and tools for all-sized businesses. 

How Is The Future Of Salesforce?

We can predict that Salesforce’s future is pretty bright with exceptional growth. 

A SaaS company, Salesforce is in-demand today and has instilled a rise in the CRM market growth. 

By 2026, the SaaS CRM solutions will likely catch a deployment rate of about 90-95%.

Also, many businesses have rated Salesforce as the #1 CRM platform globally. 

About 70% of businesses worldwide have reported their success through Salesforce. It assists in business management and customer interaction. 

Moreover, it’s reporting a yearly hike of about 33% in revenue.

The software arrives with numerous features that help businesses run successfully. Besides, it’s also beneficial from jobs perspectives. 

Conclusion

So, Salesforce is the #1 CRM worldwide that connects service, sales, commerce, marketing, and IT teams to personalize customer experiences. 

It emerges with perfect solutions for all-sized businesses to meet their needs. 

Also, about 96% of customers agree that Salesforce has met, even exceeded their ROI expectations. 

So, you can also start your Salesforce journey for your business to meet your target of offering seamless customer experiences. Also, if you ever need assistance on a Salesforce project get in touch with Emizentech. We have a experienced salesforce development team which is constantly working and fulfilling business needs of global clients.