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 2022, when Salesforce reported $21.25 billion in total...

What is Salesforce CRM?

Salesforce CRM involves all interactions with an organization’s constituents. This includes prospecting, the sales process, retention, marketing efforts, and customer service. Out-of-the-box CRM functionality is a core aspect of Salesforce that is provided when you sign up for the platform. There are various editions of the core CRM product, each providing different features and per-user price points:

• Salesforce Essentials: A small-business CRM for up to 10 users
• Salesforce Professional: A complete CRM for any size 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 advanced customer service, Cases...

Differentiating Salesforce Classic and Lightning

Over the years, Salesforce has had a few UI makeovers to keep up with the latest trends in usability and design. The latest, and by far the biggest, UI change Salesforce has carried out is the introduction of Salesforce Lightning in 2015. This was a fundamental change to the look and feel that Salesforce users were used to and brought with it many new features that are only available on Lightning. Some of these features include the following:

• A modern UI
• The Lightning Component framework, which allows developers to build responsive applications for any device with less effort

Many organizations that have used Salesforce for a long time either plan to migrate, or have already migrated, to Lightning. When Lightning was released, the older Salesforce UI was renamed Salesforce Classic to differentiate between the two. The following screenshots show the exact same page in Salesforce Classic and Salesforce Lightning...

Navigating Salesforce

Once you get access to your development org, it’s time to log in. To log in to Salesforce, you need to go to https://login.salesforce.com/. This is important, as we’ll see later when we discuss sandboxes, as you have to go to https://test.salesforce.com/ to log in to a sandbox. Your Salesforce username has to be in the format of an email, but not an actual email address. This is a key point since you may have access to multiple Salesforce orgs and the username has to be unique. So, when you set up your account, there is a requirement for an email address as well, which does have to be a real email address since you will receive a verification confirmation for the first-time login. The username can be anything that takes the form of an email: so, for instance, my email might be [e-mail], but my username could be [e-mail].

Once you log in, you will notice all of the tabs at the top of the page:

Figure 1.3: Navigation...

App Launcher

On the upper left-hand side of the page, you will notice a few tiles under the cloud icon. These tiles take you to App Launcher, where you can access various apps in your Salesforce instance:

Figure 1.4: Sales and Marketing apps on the App Launcher, and the collapsible menu for All Items

Apps are a collection of tabs that can be customized. Changing the apps will change the tabs you see in your navigation. Some good examples of things you will see when you click on this tile are the Sales and Marketing apps. The Sales app has tabs such as Leads, Contacts, Opportunities, and others that are used for the sales process.

The Marketing app has these same tabs, along with the Campaign tab, which is heavily used in marketing. You will also see All Items, which shows you all the objects in case you need to access one of them and it is not a part of the specific app you have chosen.

Exploring search options

At the top of the page, you will notice the global search bar. This allows you to enter any search term and returns any objects where that term is included. In the following example, I searched for grand hotels. Notice that Salesforce returns the Accounts, Opportunities, and Contacts where this term is present:

Figure 1.5: Searching for a business also shows any Opportunities or Contacts related to that account

Once you have looked at the top results, you can narrow the search down to a specific object and refine the search further, if needed:

Figure 1.6: Using the SEARCH RESULTS menu on the left side of the screen to filter results

In the preceding example, I narrowed the search down to the Opportunity object and further refined the search by setting the Stage filter under Opportunities to Closed Won.

Using list views

List views are one of the most useful tools available to Salesforce end users. They allow you to sort, prioritize, and analyze records that are important to you within a given object using filter criteria.

You will notice that whenever you click on a tab that is connected to an object, you will always land on a default view called Recently Viewed. This view shows any records you have recently worked on:

Figure 1.7: Recently viewed accounts appearing in a list

You can also use the pinning option to change the default view from Recently Viewed to any other view you choose to be the default. You can create as many list views as you need to help facilitate your work as long as you have the required permissions. For example, let’s say you are an account manager and you only work with accounts in California. Let us see how to build this:

1. Click on New to create a new list view:

Figure 1.8: Creating a new list view

...

Salesforce Chatter

Chatter is a real-time collaboration tool within Salesforce. Think of it as Facebook within your organization. You have your own profile, and you can share updates, create Groups (label 1 of Figure 1.11), upload Files (label 2), keep track of Followers (label 3), set yourself to be Following other users (label 4), and much more! You can access your profile by clicking on the icon on the upper-right side of the page or by clicking on the People tab:

Figure 1.11: Profile details including Groups, Files, Followers, and Following on Salesforce Chatter

If you scroll down on your profile, you will see your feed:

Figure 1.12: Filters and Sort by options on the Chatter feed

The feed includes any posts you have made, any posts you follow, or updates to tracked fields on records you follow. The actions can be customized to include more than the post, poll, and question action.

If you click on the Chatter tab, you get an expanded view of the feed...

Customizing personal settings

To round out our general overview, let’s take a look at some personal settings:

1. To access your personal settings options, click on the profile picture in the upper-right corner of your screen, then click on Settings:

   

   Figure 1.14: Finding Settings in the profile pane

   On this page, you will see all of your options under a set of categories on the left-hand side:

   

   Figure 1.15: Categories on the Settings page

2. Under each one of these categories, you will find some personal customization options. Under My Personal Information, you have the option to add the following information:

   

   Figure 1.16: Expanding the My Personal Information category in Settings

   Below, we will go through the personal information options outlined in the above screenshot:

   • Advanced User Details: This page contains the fields on your user record that you can edit.
   • Approver...

Summary

By now, you should understand the core concepts of Salesforce CRM and the difference between Salesforce Lightning and Salesforce Classic. You should also now know how to navigate Salesforce and understand the different search options available to you. You should know how to build a list view, what Chatter is and how to use it, and what personal settings are available to you. Now that we have an overview of Salesforce, we will start our deep dive into the application, starting with activities in the next chapter!

Questions

This is a good time to review what you have learned in your development org and see whether you can answer some questions:

1. What is the Salesforce economy?
2. What does CRM stand for?
3. What are two advantages of using Salesforce Lightning?
4. Are all tabs objects?
5. What is an app in Salesforce?
6. What does a global search return?
7. What is the default list view that appears when you go to a tab for the first time, and can the default view be changed?
8. Which personal setting allows you to grant login access to Salesforce customer service?

Further reading

Check out the Learn CRM Fundamentals for Lightning Experience Trailhead module at https://trailhead.salesforce.com/content/learn/trails/crm-essentials-lightning-experience

Join our community on Discord

Join our community’s Discord space for discussions with the authors and other readers: https://packt.link/rlptF