Sure, you’ve heard of Salesforce. There’s no doubt you’ve seen Astro (the little boy in the bear suit) parading on advertisements on the metro or the city bus with the little blue cloud in the corner of the panel. Maybe you have friends gabbing on and on about Salesforce, throwing around words like “optimization”, “customization”, or even “trailhead”. You’re asking yourself one simple question:
“Why on Earth is everyone so crazy about Astro, Cody, and the rest of the Salesforce gang?”
Or even:
“Why does a CRM company have so many mascots? Seriously, why is a bear teaming up with Einstein to talk analytics with me?”
Sadly, I can’t answer those last two. That’s a question for the Salesforce creative design team. There is light to be shed, however, on the reasons why Salesforce has been the leader in the CRM arena for years. We’ll start with three, but feel free to dig deeper into our Salesforce Experience offering for more reasons why your corporate friends are obsessed with their trailhead badges.
1. Flexibility and Customizability
No matter what type of business you’re running, Salesforce is flexible enough to meet the needs of your industry. Additionally, as your business continues to grow, Salesforce can be there every step of the way. Salesforce is fully customizable, meaning you can add any number of robust features to your CRM platform, all leaving a scalable impact on your business experience. There are so many ways to begin customizing this incredibly flexible platform: Do you start from scratch or do you modify an existing layout/theme? How do I want to store my data? Do I need Salesforce Lightning? The level of customization is fully up to you.
Maybe you want to add a new form to your site, or maybe you want a complete redesign of the way your company manages and collects data from its users. All of that is Salesforce customization. Nothing good ever comes easy, and Salesforce is no different. Sure you can add a simple customization or configuration to your current Salesforce system, no problem. But when you’re changing everything, you want to plan ahead. Luckily, we’ve got a handy guide to walk you through that process here.
Of course, not every business is ready for these Salesforce features. Sometimes it’s not the right time to switch CRM platforms, and you need to make sure your current system is ready to be moved before you make the switch. Or maybe you’re not ready for the full switch? Salesforce can still help you in any capacity.
2. Access and Maintenance
Salesforce prides itself as a cloud-based CRM, meaning the only things you need to access your data are a web browser and a connection to the internet. Nothing needs to be installed onto your computer, and there are no tedious updates. Since Salesforce is cloud-based, updates occur at convenient times and force the site offline only for a little bit, to ensure a seamless transition from one version to the next.
The easy to use platform also allows for any user to organize their records however they want. Each user gets their own set of customizations, allowing for them to get the most out of their own individual experience. You can prioritize your own reports, allowing for higher rates of customer retention as your management system improves over time.
Salesforce also centralizes all of your data into a single platform, allowing for easy access to anything and everything you could possibly want. Analytic tools allow for easy navigation and trend spotting, and Salesforce even has an Einstein mascot (yes, another mascot) with built-in AI to help point out trends you might not have seen yourself! You can connect third party apps, or simply connect Salesforce to your applications of choice, to migrate data into other programs or vise versa.
3. Learning and Development
This all might sound a bit complicated. Yes, you can migrate data to other apps and analyze said data with a built-in AI that points out trends, but how could you ever take the time to learn how to do that? The answer: Trailhead. Trailhead is Salesforce’s online learning platform, free to any Salesforce user. You can learn everything from creating a customized field for a radio button to adding music to your VisualForce emails. Every step of your Salesforce journey can be found in any number of lessons on Trailhead, with full explanations and your own “playground” to test out all of your functions before you ever try and implement them on your main site.
With badges and bright colors, Trailhead makes you forget you’re learning a CRM platform. Instead, you could be building a fully functioning lemonade stand from scratch, utilizing multiple Salesforce features and customizations to add different flavors, sizes, and menu items. Upon completion of objectives, you earn badges, notifying your friends that you now have a new Salesforce skill under your belt. These badges aren’t just for fun, either. They carry over into the real world, letting you put them on your resume to show the workforce just how much you know about Salesforce.
Salesforce is the single largest CRM-platform in the world, and upon doing a bit of research you can begin to understand why. It is accessible, flexible, and honestly, kind of fun. I would much rather watch Astro parade around my screen when I get a new Salesforce administrator badge then have Clippy pop up in the corner of my screen to give me copy and pasting tips. The full flexibility of the program is astounding, and any business can have their own personal Salesforce experience with the full range of customizations available on the platform. The decision to switch to Salesforce is easy, but the correct implementation of the platform is a bit harder. Check this out to ensure you make the most out of your Salesforce implementation.