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Part I: Salesforce Basics
✓ Easy: End user adoption is critical to any application, and Salesforce
wins the ease-of-use category hands down. You can spend more time
putting it to use and less time figuring it out.
✓ Effective: Because it’s easy to use and can be customized quickly to
meet business needs, customers have proven that it has improved their
bottom lines.
With Salesforce, you now have a full suite of services to manage the customer
lifecycle, divided into two product families: Sales Cloud and Service Cloud.
These services include tools to pursue leads, manage accounts, track oppor-
tunities, resolve cases, and more. Depending on your team’s objectives, you
might use all the Salesforce tools from Day 1, or you might focus on just the
functionality to address the priorities at hand.
When we discuss features of Salesforce specifically targeted toward your Sales
and Marketing teams, we refer to Sales Cloud. If it’s something aimed toward
the Service and Support departments, we use Service Cloud.
The more you and your team adopt Salesforce into your work, the more infor-
mation you have at your fingertips to deepen customer relationships and
improve your overall business.
In this chapter, we reveal the many great things that you can do with
Salesforce. Then we describe how you can extend Salesforce to work with
many of the common applications that you already use. Finally, we help you
decide which Salesforce edition is right for you, just in case you’re still evalu-
ating your options.
Using Salesforce to Solve Critical
Business Challenges
We could write another book telling you all the great things you can do with
Salesforce, but you can get the big picture from this chapter. We focus here
on the most common business challenges that we hear from sales, marketing,
and support executives — and how Salesforce can overcome them.
Understanding your customer
How can you sell to and retain customers if you don’t understand their
needs, key contacts, and what account activities and transactions have taken
place? With Salesforce, you can track all your important customer data in
one place so that you can develop solutions that deliver real value to your
customers.
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