The relationship between companies and their customers has been one of the most crucial aspects in the history of business. However, it was not until the early 1970s that the management of these relationships began to be discussed. It was then that work began on what in English could be called "Customer Relationship Management", but which is normally known as CRM (Customer Relationship Management).
Good customer management today, in a globalized world where the supply of products and services can come from anywhere in the world, can be the difference between success and failure of any business. According to Nucleus Researchas recently as 2014, companies were getting a return of $8.71 for every dollar invested. Whether your goal is to manage customer and supplier information efficiently and securely, boost your business image on social networks, find new business opportunities or the many other benefits of this strategy, one of the best CRM software in recent years is Salesforce. [1]
The Salesforce platform is recognized as the industry leader, and has become the world's most important business ecosystem in the cloud. What in 1999 began as a company focused on Software as a service (SaaS), by 2020 covers about 20% [2] of the CRM market worldwide, and although there are many benefits that Salesforce provides and is constantly improving, we will focus on those that have made this industry giant become what it is today.
[1][2] Source: IDC, Worldwide Semiannual Software Tracker, October 2020. CRM market includes the following IDC-defined functional markets: Sales Force Productivity and Management, Marketing Campaign Management, Customer Service, Contact Center, Advertising, and Digital Commerce Applications.
Scalability and customization
With Salesforce you can go from using a small portion of available resources, to a large amount of data and users as required by the customer, without a significant change in performance. This can give any business the peace of mind to expand and modify their business processes as needed.
Multi-user architecture
Whether you have a small business with just a few customers or your company has hundreds of thousands of customers, the Salesforce architecture will provide you with one infrastructure and one platform no matter how much data you manage.
Security
No matter where you are in the world, the security of the data you collect will always be very important to your customers and it is something that Salesforce has taken into account from the beginning. Not only does it have best practices at the time of development to prevent security leaks, but it also allows you to define who within the organization has access to the information.
Salesforce AppExchange
It has an application store which has a large amount of app's free and paid apps, which in many cases facilitates the rapid implementation of our own solutions. Likewise, as a Salesforce Partner, you can develop applications and market them in this same Salesforce ecosystem.
However, despite being the most successful CRM on the market, Salesforce has some room for improvement.
Many customers often complain about how difficult it is to have the initial knowledge for the start-up of any project, for which they have enabled a platform called "Trailhead". There you can take different practical courses to obtain the necessary skills to work with the platform.
Another of the points against Salesforce is the cost of its services. If we take into account that a monthly and per user fee is paid, the costs do not end up being as low as sometimes projected. Typically in the United States and depending on the size of the work team, it takes between $5000 and $80,000 per year. But this depends to a greater extent on the size of the work team and the type of industry you are working in, so it is important to make a good estimate at the beginning of the project to know the real costs.
In conclusion, and knowing the importance of the relationship with our customers, Salesforce will always be a good alternative to improve our business, but we must properly analyze what we are looking for and how we intend to achieve it, in order to avoid cost overruns that do not allow us to see the true benefits of using this type of tools.
P.S. If you are a developer, Salesforce is also an excellent opportunity to give your career a boost, as there will be an estimated 4.2 million openings for developers with Salesforce skills by 2024[https://trailhead.salesforce.com/career-path/].
