Salesforce Lead Management: Tips And Best Practices

Customer relationship is a very important business segment. We will tell you about such a quality tool as Salesforce.

Make Your Feedback Perfect - Salesforce Tips and Practices

Every complex company tries to organize the workflow as efficiently as possible. It doesn't matter what complex tasks she tries to fulfill - assembling and manufacturing cars, supplying goods all over the world, or searching for the top foreign brides. Modern companies have become complex organisms where every organ must work perfectly. CRM systems help organize this process. In simple terms, CRM is a technology that helps manage a company's interactions with existing and potential customers to improve business connections. CRM tools help you manage contacts and sales, increase productivity, increase profitability, and more.

Leader among CRM platforms

Salesforce is a platform that is entirely hosted on Salesforce's servers in the cloud. Salesforce was founded in 1999 by former Oracle CEO Mark Benioff. The main idea of creation is to build affordable software and implement it completely online as a service.

Let me clarify that Salesforce has long gone beyond just CRM. Salesforce is a cloud platform based on which, in addition to the CRM part, there are many interesting things. Salesforce allows you to create and deploy customized solutions, automate business processes, integrate with external applications.

Most of the world's companies are customers of Salesforce and use this platform as a solution for their business needs. Among them: Adidas, AWS, Canon, Philips, Toyota, American Express, Western Union, Cisco, KLM, and many others. It was a revelation to me that the US Visa Application Center uses Salesforce to collect, process, and issue visa applications.

Salesforce, as a company, is a partner of various representatives of the IT world and, accordingly, they offer ready-made integration solutions, advanced services to meet the requirements of end customers, and many other opportunities. Among them - Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon.

As of 2019, Salesforce offers a range of products: Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, e-Commerce Cloud, Heroku, Integration, Community Cloud, Einstein Analytics, and others.

And now a few facts:

Salesforce - the first number in the list of "100 best companies to work for 2018" according to Fortune.
Salesforce leads the list of the most innovative companies according to Forbes in 2017 and № 3 in 2018.
Salesforce - the best CRM version of G2 Crowd Grid.
Salesforce ranks highest in the list of CRM systems according to Software Advice.
More than 150,000 companies use Salesforce CRM to grow their business.

Don't forget to check out: Lead Conversion In Salesforce | Best Practices

Benefits of working with Salesforce for developers

Easy to get started

And that, in my opinion, is one of the biggest benefits of Salesforce. No need to install any programs, no hardware requirements. Placement in the cloud provides access to real-time information, ie you can use the platform anywhere and anytime.

All you need to work with Salesforce is Internet access. All you need to do is go to the site in a browser, enter your login and password, and ... voila. You can create your functionality or use standard, already created Salesforce.

Multi-Platform

All Salesforce users have a common infrastructure and a copy of the software. This allows automatic and simultaneous updates for all users on the platform. You get the latest and greatest features with automatic updates three times a year.

Organization

Everyone has the opportunity to create a free organization for training, practice, or testing. It's a full-featured development environment that you can also use to create your products - packages that can be released as applications in AppExchange.

AppExchange

AppExchange in Salesforce allows you to develop and sell your products or access thousands of useful, secure, and proven products or integrations created by other users. For example, apex-lang is an open library of auxiliary classes written in Apex, which aims to eliminate shortcomings in the main classes of the platform. The Rollup Helper package allows you to aggregate data for a specific set of criteria in Salesforce without using Apex code.

Ability to Integrate with other Systems

Salesforce provides an opportunity for any integration. Besides, many built-in integrations are offered - for example, with Heroku, Outlook, Gmail. One of my recent projects is a two-way integration between Salesforce and a .NET application for managing and synchronizing customer requests. The apex REST web service is used for incoming calls. Apex callout - HTTP request from Apex code is used for outgoing calls.

The Platform is Easy to Use and Configure

Intuitive and clear navigation bar. All tabs are divided by category. Use the Setup menu to access settings or custom developments. The menu is divided into different sections depending on the purpose of use. For example, objects and fields are configured through Object Manager. You can create, view, or edit an Apex class via Platform Tools -> Custom Code.

Career Opportunities

Salesforce-specialist has opportunities for growth and development both in the technical direction and in project management and consulting. There are few good Salesforce professionals today, and they are all literally "worth their weight in gold" (I'm sure any recruiter who has had an open Salesforce vacancy will attest). Statistics show that the level of salary of a Salesforce developer is higher than, for example, a Java or .NET specialist, if we talk about the same experience.

Ready-made Solutions

One of the biggest benefits of Salesforce is that much of the functionality required for most products has already been implemented and tested. For example, the built-in Email-to-Case functionality allows you to automatically create Case records in the system from e-mail. Or Web-to-Lead, which creates an HTML form that you can paste into your website and create lead records directly from the site (Lead is a potential client in the sense of SF).

Much of the functionality can be easily configured without a single line of code in a short period. And this raises Salesforce to a level higher than traditional development from scratch. Development from scratch carries much greater risks for the client and takes much more time. Several times I have encountered a situation where a client has invested in custom development for six months, and sometimes a year, and the expected result was not. And then the client switched to the Salesforce platform and got the expected result in a few months.

Innovation

Salesforce is a platform that is constantly changing and evolving, giving you new opportunities to learn and improve. The company takes an active position with startups. In 2010, one of the first Heroku cloud platforms was acquired, which allows you to deploy, run and manage applications written in various open languages and frameworks.

In recent years, Salesforce has been actively integrating elements of artificial intelligence (AI) into its platform. The technology uses all data within the system: customer data, information from correspondence, e-mail, calendar, and e-commerce, data streams from social networks, such as tweets and photos, to create machine learning models. One example of AI in Salesforce is the Einstein Bots for Service Cloud functionality, which uses machine learning for better and faster customer service. This allows you to pass customer requests to bots that use a combination of machine learning and customer history processing to make decisions.

Check out another amazing blog by Frank Hamilton here: 5 Reasons For Students To Become A Salesforce Developer

An Interesting Way to Learn

Salesforce Trailhead is an online platform for learning Salesforce, which allows you to follow ready-made learning methods or choose your path - and all at your own pace. Practice what you have already learned and test yourself in real-time. Earn badges and points that mark your learning achievements. And it's all free!

Conclusion

With the right software solution, you can focus on relationships with customers, partners, service users, suppliers, and colleagues throughout their lifecycle. At the same time, it helps you identify and attract new leads, convert them into real customers, and provide support and services.