What is Salesforce? Key features and benefits

You can bring together all your data into one place with Salesforce, which helps maximize cross-team efforts and glean better insights. In this way, you can improve services and win over more customers.

Salesforce is extremely flexible, letting you customize its robust features according to your unique KPIs. Though you may need a Salesforce partner to make the most of the technical set-up, it has top personalization potential.

As your business evolves, so does Salesforce. It has excellent expandability so you face no limitations as you grow and need to handle new business functions on Salesforce.

Salesforce has a sterling reputation for ready-to-go integrations. Beside the 4,000+ pre-integrated apps on its marketplace, Salesforce boasts of a service called MuleSoft that enables easy integrations across your most popular tools, such as G Suite, Slack, QuickBooks and more.

Salesforce is continually rolling out new features that meet the moment. Take its latest AI-powered feature Einstein, which includes sales content generation, personalized outreach, chatbots, customer self-service, data analysis, products recommendations and more.

Salesforce is ideal for getting ahead of the competition. You can pursue innovative set-ups by starting with built-in tools. For example, drive transformation through features such as predictive analytics, data unification, embedded video/chat and more.

The Salesforce platform is specifically designed for anywhere access, so your teams have endless possibilities to collaborate in real-time. As a cloud-based solution, you can log in from anywhere, including the mobile app which cites a 40% boost in productivity for users.

With all your data in one spot, Salesforce has a wealth of analytics and reports available. In addition to dashboard-style real-time data, you can schedule ongoing reports for fluid monitoring and analysis.

Salesforce is cloud-based, giving it strong security advantages for businesses. What’s more, it incorporates built-in cybersecurity practices for trusted data and privacy.

Although Salesforce is a veteran of the industry, it has kept up with fresh designs and user-friendly interfaces. You won’t need a degree in computer science to find your way around Salesforce features.

Salesforce had one of the largest followings, with 2.3 million users. This strong back-up is great for jumping off ideas and leveraging pre-built features.

As the name suggests, Salesforce software has deep roots in delivering solutions for sales teams. It has top functions for your entire sales cycle, so you can build a winning pipeline and automate workflows for greater productivity. In turn, this will strengthen relationships with customers and result in more revenue. 

• Prospecting automation
• Lead management
• Opportunity tracking
• Pipeline management
• Sales forecasting 
• Upselling/cross-selling
• Just-in-time sales notifications
• Agentforce SDR
• Agentforce Sales Coach

Customer service is at the core of successful business in any industry. Salesforce empowers your teams to better understand your customers and deliver the resolutions that they need. At the same time, you’ll make workflows more efficient and cut resource costs.

The Service Cloud supports full case management across all channels by automating key interactions, setting up self-service portals and making personalized recommendations for tough customer cases. In this way, you can provide five-star service, reduce churn and earn a loyal base.

• Support ticketing
• Case management
• Knowledge bases
• Self-service portals
• Agentforce Service Agents
• Real-time recommendations
• Proactive customer outreach
• Onboarding journeys
• Billing dispute management
• Customer data and feedback

Salesforce is an impressive solution for crafting marketing campaigns that activate your leads and current customers. You can implement marketing automation, including drip emails, product recommendations and personalized content. Using Salesforce data, you can also build customer profiles and target audiences across your channels. Overall, sales service marketing tools can raise your customer lifetime value by 31%.

• Target customer profiles
• Dynamic personalization
• Customer journey tracking
• User-friendly segmentation
• Product offer and recommendations
• Campaign performance
• Cross-channel outreach (web, social, email, etc.)
• Content generation
• Real-time analytics

Boosting the online shopping experience is essential in our digital-first world. The Salesforce platform simplifies this process with tools aimed at creating robust storefronts and meaningful shopping interactions.

In addition, you can unlock merchant efficiency by streamlining inventory, order, payment and pricing management for all your touchpoints. Salesforce also enables AI-powered insights for customer behaviors, so you can tailor your store to capture more sales – and grow your revenue by 29%!

• Storefront management
• Payment and transactions
• Shopping experiences
• Inventory management
• Order management
• Customer behavior insights
• Pricing management
• Commerce alerts

Salesforce has a suite of analytics features that drive business outcomes. Tableau is a dashboard-style interface that helps visualize and analyze your data for smarter customer experiences. It harnesses insights automatically, so you can set up workflows, forecasts and visualizations that are actionable. With Tableau, it’s easy to take the pulse on your business metrics and market trends.

• Scheduled reports
• Forecast insights
• Data mapping
• Data visualization
• Workflow automation
• Revenue intelligence
• Rep performance
• Tableau Prep Builder
• Tableau Prep Conductor
• Tableau Desktop
• Tableau Online
• Tableau Server

Although there’s not a specific IT cloud, Salesforce is well-equipped to assist IT teams. No matter which Salesforce cloud services your business is leveraging, you can develop leading apps, processes and more.  

Salesforce can be combined with your favorite development platform to streamline tasks and maximize latest trends. For example, the Heroku development tool connects directly with Salesforce and allows for ease of coding. At the same time, Salesforce for IT is focused on:

• Top system integrations
• Workflow automation
• Data security and compliance
• Integrating AI, IoT and voice

Salesforce is at the frontlines of integrating with your full business ecosystem. It easily links with in-demand third-party tools and systems through its MuleSoft platform. As a result, this generates business efficiency and added value.

With MuleSoft, you don’t have to worry about technology silos. MuleSoft seamlessly integrates with your tech stack and data streams, so you can bring together your systems. It’s known for unifying integrations, automation and API management. In fact, it achieves a 49% reuse rate for integrations and API.

Beyond MuleSoft, Salesforce also connects with key apps such as G Suite, Slack, QuickBooks, MailChimp and more. It boasts of an AppExchange market with thousands of pre-built apps. You can easily extend function with this diverse array of ready-to-go features.