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 using Salesforce. Packed with realistic use cases, this book will show you how to to employ Salesforce to achieve your business goals.
If you are new to Salesforce and want to learn it from scratch, an administrator looking to build your Salesforce skills, or a student looking to start a career in Salesforce, this book is for you. This book will explain Salesforce CRM functionality within the context of business use cases for end-users and admins.
Chapter 1, Getting Started with Salesforce and CRM, provides your first look at Salesforce CRM. You will learn basic CRM concepts, the difference between the Classic and Lightning UI, how to log in and navigate Salesforce, how to search for records, and how to maximize list views.
Chapter 2, Understanding Salesforce Activities, covers the basics of Salesforce activities, including what activities are, what the different types of activities are, and how to use activities across all objects.
Chapter 3, Creating and Managing Leads, introduces Salesforce leads as the first part of the sales cycle. This includes what leads are, how lead status helps you manage leads, what it means to convert a lead, and how to use Web-to-Lead.
Chapter 4, Business Development with Accounts and Contacts, covers the basics of Salesforce accounts and contacts. Here you will learn what accounts, contacts, and relationships are, and how these objects are used by a business.
Chapter 5, Driving the Sales Cycle with Opportunities, continues your knowledge of the sales cycle by covering opportunities, including what opportunities are, how stages function, how the sales path helps you visualize your workflow, how contact roles function, how products and pricebooks function, how quotes function, and how opportunities drive forecasting.
Chapter 6, Achieving Business Goals Using Campaigns, covers how to generate leads by using Salesforce campaigns. You’ll learn what campaigns are, how you can keep track of campaign members, the campaign hierarchy, and how campaigns interact with third-party apps.
Chapter 7, Enhancing Customer Service with Cases, teaches you how to handle customer relations using cases. You’ll learn related case functionality such as escalation rules, entitlements, and service console, as well as how to create cases through Web-to-Case and Email-to-Case.
Chapter 8, Business Analysis Using Reports and Dashboards, covers the basics of reports and dashboards, such as report types and dashboard components.
Chapter 9, Setup and Configuration, provides an extensive overview of the Setup page in Salesforce, covering each section and tab one-by-one – use this referentially.
Chapter 10, An Overview of Sharing and Visibility, covers security concepts related to sharing and visibility, such as org-wide defaults, the role hierarchy, sharing rules, profiles, and permission sets.
Chapter 11, User Management and Data Security, explains how user management concepts are related to data security, covering record ownership and issues with ownership skew.
Chapter 12, Managing Projects with Sandboxes and Change Sets, covers the basics of sandboxes and change sets, including what sandboxes are and what types are available, what change sets are, and how to deploy a change set.
Chapter 13, Using Data Modeling to Configure Objects for Your Business, covers page layouts, record types, custom fields, and custom objects as well as data modeling.
Chapter 14, Lightning Experience Customization, covers the basics of setting up and configuring Lightning pages, including what components and layouts are available for Lightning pages and how to use them, and how to activate and assign a Lightning page.
Chapter 15, Extending Functionality with Third-Party Applications and Salesforce Mobile, covers the basics of third-party applications, managed packages, unmanaged packages, and the Salesforce AppExchange.
Chapter 16, Salesforce Flow, teaches you how to build a flow in Salesforce Flow. Using the laid out instructions, you will also learn how to extensively create and test multiple types of flows.
Chapter 17, Approval Processes, introduces you to approval processes, including entry criteria, approval steps, final approval and rejection actions, and recall actions.
Chapter 18, Assignment Rules, covers the basics of assignment rules, including what assignment rules are, lead assignment rules, and case assignment rules.
Chapter 19, Data Integrity with Formulas and Validations, introduces you to formulas and validation rules, covering what formulas and validation rules are, and how to create them.
Chapter 20, Testing and Debugging, covers the basics of code deployment and debugging. Here you will learn about the path to production when deploying code, how to manually test functionality, and how to create debug logs.
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