Any company needs to sell its products or services to customers on a regular basis in order to generate consistent revenues and to create profits.

A marketing function in any organization creates and executes various types of marketing campaigns with an objective to build brand awareness about the company's products and services. Similarly, a sales function manages the sales pipeline in order to create new business from new or existing customers for a company.

A robust Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform is pivotal for any company that wants to transform its marketing and sales processes by focusing on improving efficiency and effectiveness.

Salesforce is a CRM solution that brings companies and customers together. Salesforce is an integrated CRM platform that provides a holistic picture of every customer across various departments such as marketing, sales and service. Salesforce is the best CRM solution in the world and more than 150,000 companies use this platform to increase team collaboration, customer loyalty and sales for their organizations.

Salesforce Simplified is a simple and precise book which describes the various features and applications that are available Salesforce CRM. The intended audience of this book are those business users who want to start from scratch in order to understand the broad spectrum of capabilities offered by Salesforce.

This book is for you if:

• You have never heard of Salesforce before and you want to understand the various features or applications that are available in Salesforce.
• You want to optimize sales and marketing processes in your organization and hence you want to explore the feasibility of using Salesforce as one of the possible CRM solutions.
• You want to understand and apply the basic capabilities in Salesforce for fulfilling your business requirements.
• Gain an initial understanding about Salesforce before exploring advanced concepts and functionalities that are available in the product.

Following are some of the topics that would be covered in the book.

• Update My Settings and My Profile pages with relevant information.
• Add new users to Salesforce. Set up a role hierarchy for our organization.
• Edit current user profile or create a new one.
• Create new leads in Salesforce. Edit current leads to change lead status or lead source. Create activities that can describe interactions with leads. Send emails to leads. Transfer leads between different users. Import external lead data into Salesforce. Create custom lead fields and establish field level security. Convert a lead into accounts, contacts, opportunities and tasks.
• Create new accounts in Salesforce. Establish account hierarchy. Merge different accounts. Transfer accounts between different users. Import external accounts and contacts data into Salesforce.
• Create new products and price books. Assign list prices for products that are included in price books.
• Create new contacts and opportunities. Assign price books and products to opportunities. Create new quotes for opportunities.
• Create and edit campaigns. Establish campaign hierarchy. Add members to campaign. Assign opportunities to campaign. Use standard reports to view metrics related to a campaign.
• Create new cases and solutions. Update case status and close the case upon resolution. Assign solutions to cases.
• Use standard reports in Salesforce for obtaining insights about various Salesforce components such as leads or accounts. Create custom report as per your organization's unique reporting requirement.