Salesforce as an App Platform

Many organizations are aware of Salesforce as a cloud software powerhouse and one of the leading cloud software vendors in the world. The Salesforce brand is often associated with the company’s Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution, which has been the company’s flagship product and a leading sales force automation platform for the last nine years according to Gartner rankings.

While Salesforce is certainly the leader in Cloud CRM solutions today, the company also provides quite a few other industry leading applications that meet some common software needs.

Salesforce has done an extraordinary job of designing solutions that meet the needs of organizations of all sizes and industries including very small organizations of a few users to large enterprises with thousands of users.

In this article, we share with  you a few examples of Salesforce’s product offering that may help serve your business software needs.

Sales Cloud

Probably Salesforce’s best-known solution and flagship product. Sales Cloud encompasses Salesforce’s core CRM solution which includes their Enterprise CRM solution for managing small to large sales organizations through tracking of Accounts, Contacts, Leads, Opportunities, Products, Contracts, and Orders.

Sales Cloud solutions also include a lightweight CRM/Contact database for businesses just starting to capture CRM data but do not require sophisticated rules or workflow.

Service Cloud

Service Cloud is a powerful solution for businesses that need to provide customer service including call centers and tracking of every action taken within an organization to close out support or work tickets.

App Cloud

App Cloud uses the foundational Force.com platform that powers Salesforce’s CRM and Service Cloud products and is a great solution for building small customized applications to gather, track or report on important business data.

App Cloud comes out of the box with security and a core database for account and contact information and can then be further customized to collect data about anything you can imagine. Once data mappings are created, the App Cloud offers a powerful solution for building custom applications that can be used within the organization for anything you can imagine.

Marketing Cloud

Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud provides powerful marketing solutions to help you automate content marketing and lead acquisition for your business. Marketing Cloud has separate packages you can select, based on whether your marketing is associated with business-to-consumer (B2C) or business-to-business (B2B). Rest assured that your marketing data is tied directly to your Salesforce CRM data for managing sales from lead through to a closed deal.

Community Cloud

Unlike most of Salesforce’s products, which enable internal teams to operate more effectively, Community Cloud is an external facing solution that allows you to share information with clients and business partners.

Once you’ve automated your business with a Sales Cloud, Service Cloud or App Cloud solution, Community Cloud is a great addition for easily share internal data with external users through extranet portals.

Wave Analytics

Wave Analytics is a more recent addition to the Salesforce product landscape focused on providing a portal for reporting, dashboards and data analysis within the organization. In addition to providing powerful analytics based on the data within Salesforce, Wave analytics can also import data from external data sources so you can map sales and other business data together for a singular view of important business measures

.. And the List Goes On!

Salesforce has a number of other products and the platform continues to grow as new products are released. If you are not sure if any of these products could be useful in your business or if you want to look at extending and integrating the Salesforce products, let us know.

We help businesses every day to identify, evaluate and implement relevant products that can accelerate  business growth.

The Checklist For Sharing Your Software Vision

Before you get started in developing your software app, your thoughts and ideas should be clarified and written down so they can be consistently and easily shared and understood. To help you get started on the right foot, we have created a checklist.

You can grab a copy of that checklist below and share it with your team!