Salesforce.com For Dummies

Chapter 2

Discovering Salesforce.com’s Products

IN THIS CHAPTER

Selling effectively with Sales Cloud

Enhancing leads with Marketing Cloud

Improving customer service with Service Cloud

Deciding what Salesforce size fits you

Now that you have a general idea about what Salesforce is, let’s delve into the various products that Salesforce.com offers. Generally speaking, the products we cover here fall into the three major categories or departments traditionally used to understand customer relationship management (CRM): sales, marketing, and service.

You may not have thought about it yet, but if you think about the basic structure of CRM, it follows the customer journey from pre-sales to sales and finally post-sales. In other words, marketing departments market the business to spark interest in a customer base and attract potential leads for your sales teams. When those leads are good and qualified, the lead is handed off to sales to close a deal. After the sale, the customer interacts with customer support for service, questions, or feedback about the product sold.

When you step back and look at the big picture, this entire life cycle centers around the customer. As you can see, we’re trying to sufficiently hammer home the fact that Salesforce.com and its products are all about enhancing the relationship between your business and your customer. Although it’s important to see this big picture, Salesforce.com also recognizes that the devil is in the details, especially from your customers’ ...