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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 2019, when Salesforce.com reported $13.3 billion in total revenue in FY 2018 and is now constantly expanding the platform and acquiring new companies. This led to the Salesforce economy, which Salesforce projects to have created 3.3 million jobs by 2022. How did Salesforce get to this point? It started as a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool; then, over the years, it morphed into a powerful business platform with various clouds, including Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Analytics Cloud, Community Cloud, and many more.

In this book, we will focus on Sales Cloud and Service Cloud. These two clouds contain all of the core CRM functionality, which is the foundation of all the other clouds and sets up the path for you as the end user or aspiring admin to continue learning.

Salesforce is a platform to build your entire business on. Don't let the word sales mislead you. The platform supports the ability to manage all aspects of a business, including sales, customer service, marketing, finance, and much more, through out-of-the-box functionality and customization.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

Understanding the core concepts of CRM
Understanding the difference between Salesforce Lightning and Salesforce Classic
Learning how to navigate Salesforce
Learning about the different search options
Learning how to use list views across all objects
Learning what Salesforce Chatter is and how to use it in your organization
Learning the personal settings options available to end users