The global leader in CRM software, Salesforce is also one of the largest software companies and a major player in the Cloud Computing industry. Discover everything you need to know about this software giant.
Founded in 1999, Salesforce specializes in Customer Relationship Management (CRM). The company offers its solutions in the form of Software as a Service (SaaS).
Salesforce continues to dominate the global CRM market with a 23% market share in 2024, solidifying its leading position. Its main competitors, though significantly behind, are Microsoft at 5.9%, Oracle at 4.4%, and SAP at 3.5%. This dominance is supported by a continuous increase in its user base and the adoption of its solutions by companies of all sizes.
In 2024, Salesforce serves over 150,000 businesses worldwide, including top multinationals like Amazon, Spotify, American Express, Walmart, and L’Oréal.
The History of Salesforce
Before Salesforce, CRM solutions were hosted on company servers, which was costly and time-consuming. Setting up these solutions could take several months or even years. Thus, their costs could reach millions of dollars. Moreover, these solutions were often quite difficult to use.
This is why Salesforce embarked on developing an affordable CRM software, delivered as a Cloud service.
Soon after, Salesforce became the fifth-largest software company in the world. The cloud computing technology ensured the immediate success of Salesforce. Its software appears more powerful, incredibly cheaper, requires no installation, and is accessible via the Internet.
Salesforce: What Is It and What Does It Do?
Salesforce is a CRM software that enables businesses to better connect with their customers, partners, or prospects. This solution focuses on acquiring, satisfying, and retaining customers.
With this cloud solution, businesses can track and analyze data about their customers in real time. This way, it becomes possible to understand successes and, conversely, address complaints.
By 2025, Salesforce continues to demonstrate the significant impact of its CRM solutions on the performance of businesses. Recent statistics reveal that 91% of sales teams using artificial intelligence (AI) have seen an increase in their revenue, compared to 66% for those not using it. Additionally, 87% of marketing leaders report that AI helps them develop their operations, and 86% observe an improvement in their profit margins.
Moreover, cloud storage offers a valuable advantage. In fact, it allows users to access their data from anywhere.
Main Features of Salesforce
From Quotation to Payment Management
With Salesforce CRM automates three important components: configuration, pricing, and quotations. This approach allows sales representatives to select the right quotes for clients with the latest discounts. Users can create accurate quotations and submit proposals much more quickly with Salesforce CRM. Salesforce Lightning streamlines the payment and invoice sending process.
Contact Management
Salesforce CRM ensures problem-free contact management. It provides access to essential customer data and interaction history. It also offers a complete picture of the customer, including engagement improvement strategies and insights.
Einstein Analytics
Einstein Analytics allows to unlock information on complex services and sales through Business Intelligence. It connects users to community, service, and sales clouds with integrated dashboards. Einstein Analytics is known for consistently displaying actionable data and insights to partners and employees.
Trailhead
Trailhead is part of Salesforce’s offering. It targets startups and small businesses in development. This application incorporates intelligence and provides customers with top-tier services.
Trailhead can automatically capture data from support channels, emails, and calendars. This provides a 360-degree view of the customer.
Lead Management
The lead management of Salesforce CRM features a rich activity timeline. It provides access to up-to-date contacts on the timeline with industry best practices.
Mobility
The Salesforce mobile app allows users to access CRM data from anywhere and at any time. They can check events, meetings, and account updates at their fingertips.
Sales Forecasting
With Salesforce CRM, it is possible to gain a comprehensive view of the sales pipelines and understand how the company is performing in the market. It tracks the journey of leads in the pipeline to check if they reach their destination.
Salesforce Applications
Discover the applications that have propelled Salesforce’s popularity.
Customer Service: Salesforce provides excellent customer service worldwide. It allows for quicker issue resolution and improves response times for support agents. Salesforce facilitates coordination among support services via email, phone, and chat, managing all channels from a single view.
Data Customization: Salesforce allows for managing and customizing various types of data. It helps to track real-time analytics and improve the customer experience.
Flexible Reporting and Data Analysis: Salesforce simplifies reporting and data analysis. Sales representatives can create their own reports to check accounts they haven’t worked on in a while.
Understanding Customer Data. In fact, the Salesforce tool enables you to understand customer data, identify their interests and perceptions. You can locate and re-engage inactive customers and boost sales by tracking interactions with clients.
Different Salesforce Products
Salesforce solutions are offered in a SaaS format (Software as a Service Cloud). This means that applications are hosted on Salesforce’s Cloud servers and users access them via the internet.
The company was one of the first to venture into SaaS and has enjoyed great success from this bet. Initially, it specialized exclusively in CRM.
Today, it has expanded its activities and offers various software solutions in distinct Cloud platforms. Each of these platforms allows for managing different aspects of customer relationship management.
Sales Cloud. This CRM platform enables you to manage sales, marketing, and customer service for your B2B or B2C business. It is tailored for sales forces.
Service Cloud
This space offers businesses the opportunity to connect with their customers and provide high-quality customer service. It also ensures, among other things, tracking customer activity and solving their problems.
Marketing Cloud. This platform enables tracking the customer experience while creating multichannel marketing campaigns. It is one of the most powerful digital marketing platforms.
Community Cloud. This social platform facilitates communication between employees, partners, and customers. It allows real-time data and image sharing.
Commerce Cloud
It enables a company to provide service and customer experience regardless of the customer’s geographic location. This platform also integrates customer data to deliver a better customer experience.
Analytics Cloud
This business intelligence platform allows working with large data files, creating diagrams, graphs, and other data visualizations. The platform has been optimized for mobile access.
Additionally, Salesforce also offers other platforms that allow users and third-party developers to create and distribute custom software. On the Salesforce AppExchange platform, there are over 2,700 applications with a total of 3 million installations.
Many companies are developing their applications on Salesforce or migrating to the platform. Salesforce developers, administrators, and architects are in high demand.
Big Objects: Salesforce’s Big Data Solution
With Big Objects, Salesforce provides a big data solution. This meets the needs for storing large volumes of data, numbering in the billions of records, on the Salesforce Cloud.
All users of the Enterprise, Performance, Unlimited, and Developer editions can take advantage of Big Objects. However, to store larger volumes of data and use Async SOQL, an additional license is required.
The basic version allows you to store up to 1 million records and perform SOQL queries. The license will enable you to store up to a billion records and perform Async SOQL queries.
Types of Salesforce Big Objects
There are two types of Big Objects:
Standard Big Object: These are defined by Salesforce. They include FieldHistoryArchive and are part of the Field Audit Trail product. They are suitable for organizations that have a use case for audit regulations and data retention.
Custom Big Objects. These are defined by the user based on their needs. You can implement a custom big object using the Metadata API.
Use Cases for Salesforce Big Objects
360° Customer View: To store a vast amount of customer information from an external system, a Big Object is required to obtain a complete view of the customer. For example, data from a customer loyalty program is an excellent use case for a Big Object.
Historical Archives: A Big Object is an ideal choice for historical information that isn’t critical but can be consulted for various reasons such as compliance or historical transaction history of a customer.
