What’s Salesforce?

Welcome to what’s series. We are gonna talk – what’s salesforce is all about.

Before moving on to the actual discussion – we need to know about CRM (Customer Relation Management).

What is CRM?

Let us understand – why do we need it before knowing what it is about. Assume you run a toy store and got a ton of customers. How do you manage them? Maintaining their data in a google sheet or excel? If you are born in 1940’s you might be having a physical records 😉

Now, how do you send your thanksgiving sale offers to customer by email/phone? Or assume you became super rich and have a marketing team. How do they get your customer info you stored somewhere? What if you want to follow up with play schools for the upcoming year order? If you have 10 customers you can manage with excel sheets – if you have 10,000 customers you need CRM (for better customer management and satisfaction). But CRM is not limited to just above use cases – it has many uses like Reporting and Analysis, Marketing Automation, Centralized Information Hub and many more.

Now, let us go to the formal definition of what CRM is? – is a technology for managing all your company’s relationships and interactions with customers and potential customers. The goal is simple: Improve business relationships to grow your business. A CRM system helps companies stay connected to customers, streamline processes, and improve profitability. (source: What is CRM? – Salesforce.com)

Annnd, Salesforce is one the leading CRM software providers!

According to wikipedia, Salesforce.com, Inc. is an American cloud-based software company headquartered in San Francisco, California. It provides customer relationship management service and also provides a complementary suite of enterprise applications focused on customer service, marketing automation, analytics, and application development. (source: Salesforce – Wikipedia)

Glance at Salesforce

• Salesforce implemented their CRM as cloud-based software. Previously, they hosted on Amazon (AWS). Recently moved marketing cloud to Microsoft Azure.
• Salesforce biggest offerings Tableau and Mulesoft were acquired. Tableau is an intelligent data visualization software and Mulesoft is data integration platform used for connecting many data sources.
• Salesforce created 1-1-1 model of Philanthropy – where 1% equity – 1% employee hours – 1% of their product is donated. Companies like DocuSign, SuveyMonkey took pledge using this model (Refer salesforce.org)
• Recently, Salesforce made one of the biggest acquisitions of the history by buying slack for 27 billion.

Now our favorite part: Company Financials and Stock Info

As you know by now that stock is traded as CRM – under NYSE. I have build a tiny tool that can fetch you all the company details in here – https://github.com/ManidharVutla/Stock-Info

Please check out my project – it will create you (once you run) a not so cool html report – about the company financial information and culture FOR FREE 😉 . I have explained about installation in the readme section. It would be a little bit hassle to get it done, once you do – you would love it.

“Wait, I don’t want to install. Are you out of your mind to ask me do this?” – Ok fine, I will post a link of the report here if you want to check it real quick, Enjoy!

References:

• What is CRM? | A Guide to Customer Relationship Management – Zoho CRM
• (2) What is CRM? | A guide to CRM software by Zoho CRM – YouTube
• What is Salesforce and What Does It Do in 2020? – TheStreet
• Salesforce announces it’s moving Marketing Cloud to Microsoft Azure | TechCrunch
• The 12 biggest tech acquisitions of all time | IT World Canada Slideshow