Salesforce, a strategic partner in the revolution of your business

If you've come across this article, it isn’t by chance. It's probably because your company works with Salesforce, because you're interested in the technologies that Salesforce offers, or because you're looking for training in the different clouds that Salesforce brings to the market.

The most important thing to bear in mind from the beginning is that Salesforce, beyond being marketed as a business solution, is actually a set of platforms, which were created with distinct objectives and whose stakeholders are usually quite different. One of the things I think Salesforce has achieved with its sales strategy is the ability to talk to all the C-levels through its different solutions. Once Salesforce comes up with a solution, it is usually relatively easy to generate different solutions that address distinct challenges, and therefore various solutions are needed.

But what's not so easy is actually being prepared to handle Salesforce implementations and master the tool at a sufficient level. To do this, the best thing to do is to get trained and certified. A programme like the Executive Programme in CRM & Marketing Automation in Salesforce offers you what you need to prepare for the certifications and manage them with ease.

Within the clouds that Salesforce markets, its flagship product has historically been its CRM. Anyone can purchase a Salesforce CRM license (SFDC), although many of its customers have chosen to introduce the Sales Cloud layer focused primarily on tracking the sales pipeline, as well as a Service Cloud that adds customer service capabilities, with case resolution or case management as its primary theme.

Although Salesforce is an American company founded in 2001, one main aspect that differentiates it from its competitors, like Microsoft and Oracle, among others, has been that from the start its product has been 100% Cloud. Logically, during the first few years it was very difficult for some companies to transfer all their data to the cloud, since there has always been mistrust regarding this. I would say that in Spain this fear has been gradually mitigated. If we were to go back to 2012/2013, many banks would probably be working with on premise solutions, storing all their information on their own or third party servers, to which only they could have access. Today, these barriers have been completely overcome. Practically no one doubts the scalability offered by the cloud, its performance and its capacity to transform companies' businesses in the current climate. It is often sad to think that we have had to wait for covid-19 before many organisations could make their operating model more flexible or evolve the way they work.

Once these fears were overcome, it was time for the golden age of Digital Marketing. From my point of view this era began in 2010, but it didn't reach its boiling point until 2013/2014. At that time, if I remember correctly, Salesforce acquired Exacttarget, a solution that was renamed Salesforce Marketing Cloud, with BBVA probably being one of its main customers in this cloud. Although this solution was not originally created by Salesforce, they gradually integrated it into their CRM clouds (SFDC, Sales Cloud & Service Cloud), enabling the execution of Customer Journeys for customers and potential customers with clear business objectives. Today, the Marketing Cloud is probably the prodigal son of Salesforce, and like its CRM solutions, it is present in practically all the companies on the IBEX35 save for a few exceptions.

And if this weren't enough... a short time ago Salesforce acquired Tableau and Datorama. Two solutions that can be combined to provide a 360º view of the data and take advantage of the rest of the clouds to better tackle all the challenges that companies in the modern economy face.

Salesforce has always been recognised as the leading company in innovation, leading the world rankings, even beating out, on many occasions, the tech giant Tesla. It's no coincidence that they have been able to achieve this. Salesforce has been a true believer in the Digital Economy, in the benefits of cloud technology to revolutionize business. That is why I would like to ask you one last question, dear reader: Is your company ready for the new challenges of the Digital Economy?

If the answer is no, follow my advice and get trained.

You can find more training information here.