Salesforce for Beginners

A step-by-step guide to creating, managing, and automating sales and marketing processes

Sharif Shaalan

• Publisher: Packt Publishing
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781838987008
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: System Administration
• Index: Computer Science

Get a 360-degree view of the Salesforce platform and learn how to use it for sales, service, marketing, and automating business processes.

Key Features

• Understand how to use core Salesforce objects for maximum efficiency
• Build various dashboards and reports to analyze results and improve visibility in your business processes
• Learn the basics of Salesforce administration and mobile app set up

Book Description

Salesforce is the world's leading Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software, helping businesses connect with their constituents and partners. This book will give you a comprehensive introduction to managing sales, marketing, customer relationships, and overall administration for your organization. You'll learn how to configure and use Salesforce for maximum efficiency and return on investment.

You'll start by learning how to create activities, manage leads, and develop your prospects and sales pipeline using opportunities and accounts, and then understand how you can enhance marketing activities using campaigns. Packed with real-world business use cases, this Salesforce book will show you how to analyze your business information accurately to make productive decisions. As you advance, you'll get to grips with building various reports and dashboards in Salesforce to derive valuable business insights. Finally, you'll explore tools such as process builder, approval processes, and assignment rules to achieve business process automation and set out on the path to becoming a successful Salesforce Administrator.

By the end of the book, you'll have learned how to use Salesforce effectively to achieve your business goals.

What you will learn

• Understand the difference between Salesforce Lightning and Salesforce Classic
• Create and manage leads in Salesforce
• Explore business development with accounts and contacts in Salesforce
• Find out how stages and sales processes help you manage your opportunity pipeline
• Achieve marketing goals using Salesforce campaigns
• Perform business analysis using reports and dashboards
• Gain a high-level overview of the items in the administration section
• Grasp the different aspects needed to build an effective and flexible Salesforce security model

Who this book is for

If you're new to Salesforce and want to learn it from scratch, this book is for you. No prior knowledge of Salesforce is required to get started with this book.

Section 1: Salesforce for Sales, Marketing, and Customer Relationship Management

In this section, we will cover the Salesforce standard objects and how they interact across the sales, service, and marketing business units.

We will look at the following chapters in this section:

• Chapter 1, Getting Started with Salesforce and CRM
• Chapter 2, Understanding Salesforce Activities
• Chapter 3, Creating and Managing Leads
• Chapter 4, Business Development with Accounts and Contacts
• Chapter 5, Using Opportunities Effectively
• Chapter 6, Achieving Business Goals Using Campaigns
• Chapter 7, Enhancing Customer Service Using Cases
• Chapter 8, Business Analysis Using Reports and Dashboards

Getting Started with Salesforce and CRM

Once upon a time, before Facebook and iPhones, businesses ran their operations using on-premises software. These operations included managing customers and their interactions with the sales, customer service, and marketing departments of the organization. On-premises meant that the servers that ran this software were within the physical infrastructure of the business. Having the servers onsite meant huge maintenance and upkeep costs, as well as long deployment times for the smallest of changes. In 1999, Marc Benioff and his co-founders started Salesforce.com. As Benioff states in his book, Behind the Cloud, the idea was to make software easier to purchase, simpler to use, and more democratic, without the complexities of installation, maintenance, and constant upgrades. Salesforce was at the forefront of Software as a Service (SaaS) and cloud computing.

Fast-forward to 2019, when Salesforce.com reported $13.3 billion in total revenue in FY 2018 and is now constantly expanding the platform and acquiring new companies. This led to the Salesforce economy, which Salesforce projects to have created 3.3 million jobs by 2022. How did Salesforce get to this point? It started as a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool; then, over the years, it morphed into a powerful business platform with various clouds, including Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Analytics Cloud, Community Cloud, and many more.

In this book, we will focus on Sales Cloud and Service Cloud. These two clouds contain all of the core CRM functionality, which is the foundation of all the other clouds and sets up the path for you as the end user or aspiring admin to continue learning.

Salesforce is a platform to build your entire business on. Don't let the word sales mislead you. The platform supports the ability to manage all aspects of a business, including sales, customer service, marketing, finance, and much more, through out-of-the-box functionality and customization.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• Understanding the core concepts of CRM
• Understanding the difference between Salesforce Lightning and Salesforce Classic
• Learning how to navigate Salesforce
• Learning about the different search options
• Learning how to use list views across all objects
• Learning what Salesforce Chatter is and how to use it in your organization
• Learning the personal settings options available to end users

What is CRM?

CRM includes all interactions with an organization's constituents. This includes prospecting, the sales process, retention, marketing efforts, and customer service. The core of Salesforce is the out-of-the-box CRM functionality that is provided when you sign up for the platform. There are various editions provided by Salesforce; each edition provides different features and per-user price points. The four editions of the core CRM product are as follows:

• Salesforce Essentials: A small-business CRM for up to 10 users
• Salesforce Professional: A complete CRM for any size of team
• Salesforce Enterprise: A deeply customizable sales CRM for your business
• Salesforce Unlimited: Unlimited CRM power and support

Salesforce uses the concept of different clouds to bring together specific features. For example, all of the core features of running a sales operation, such as lead and opportunity management, are included in Sales Cloud. Features such as cases and knowledge bases fall under Service Cloud. There are also other clouds, such as Marketing Cloud, Analytics Cloud, and so on. The preceding editions in the bullet list focus on Sales Cloud and/or Service Cloud.

There is also a developer edition. The developer edition is one of the most valuable training tools when starting to learn how to use Salesforce, especially if you don't have access to a Salesforce environment of your own to practice what you are learning. Developer edition orgs are free, full-featured enterprise orgs with less storage and a limit of two licenses. These orgs are made for you to try out and develop features in an environment that is not directly tied to a paid production org. You can sign up for unlimited developer orgs. Regardless of the edition, the core objects are the same; we will cover them in detail in the following chapters of this book.

In this book, we will use the terms environment, org, and instan...