You know when you go to a doctor’s office and they ask you questions and the nurse enters your health details into some mysterious computer screen? Salesforce could be powering that system.

Or, when you sign up for Spotify and then get automated emails when your favorite artist releases a new album?  Salesforce could be powering that.

Or, how about when you have a problem with an online order and you fill out their support form and immediately receive an email response saying “we are on it”? Salesforce might have sent that email.

Ok got it?  That’s what Salesforce is.

Not quite?  Alright let’s back up a little.  I’ll start with a comparison.

Even as a little kid, I was always fascinated by the Forbes 500 list.  I can remember as young as 11 or 12, grabbing the Forbes magazine of the rack at a grocery store and reading through how these people made their fortunes.  An incredibly diverse set of businesses are represented in the list, from technology, banking, mining, textiles, to retail, just about any industry you can think of.

What I always found so interesting about the list though was how many of the people and businesses I had never even heard of.  Larry Ellison (founder of technology powerhouse Oracle, Forbes #10 with $56B), what’s Oracle? Like the Oracle from ‘The Matrix?’  It’s not a software or website I’d ever heard of. Michael Bloomberg (founder of Bloomberg LP, Forbes #11 with $50B), OK I’ve seen the Bloomberg TV channel, but what’s Bloomberg LP and how does it make so much money?

Granted, I was 12 and living in small town in upstate New York, but still, if you are reading this today and not deeply involved in the business or technology world, I bet you still don’t know how these two made their billions, and that’s just a sampling from the Forbes top 20!

So, what does this have to do with Salesforce?

Well, Salesforce (and it’s billionaire founder, Mark Benioff) is like the two companies I just mentioned.  It’s a tool used by businesses, a lot of businesses, it makes billions of dollars every year, and it’s not generally understood by the public.  

Hopefully I can help clear that up.

The first problem in trying to understand what Salesforce is, is that it’s a lot of things.  It’s actually a suite of products with various use cases, so it can be hard to pin down. But alas, we will try.

The best known product of Salesforce (and where its namesake came from) is its Sales Cloud platform. It’s a website you sign into and you can store all of your company’s sales deals, notes, and contacts. It allows a company with very little effort to completely move off of Excel spreadsheets and allow them to track their open sales deals in a centralized place. As a user, you login and begin entering details: “OK, I talked with Bob from XYZ Company yesterday and we talked about him buying $10,000 in Product A, and we expect the deal to be finalized by the end of the month.” Very useful for salespeople to keep track of who they talked to, when, and about what deal. It also allows them to see what they have in their pipeline, in total, and how close they are to hitting their sales goals for the quarter.

Combine this over multiple deals, and all salespeople using the system, a company begins to get a complete picture of their revenue pipeline. Let’s bring Finance into the system, now they can begin budgeting based off of these sales numbers and not chase down spreadsheets or hold countless meetings. Let’s bring Production into the system, now we can start to estimate how many of a given product we’ll need to produce and they won’t be caught off guard when a big order comes through.

Now, let’s take it a step further using the power of Salesforce Sales Cloud.

Let’s automatically send an email (with a summary of the sales deal) to the CEO everytime a deal is over $100K.  Also, any deal that involves a quantity over 100 of Product A, needs to be approved by a production manager. Lastly, let’s go ahead and take the full pipeline (all sales deals), combine it into a Powerpoint presentation, and email it to all the Sales Managers of the company an hour before their monthly sales meetings, without anyone lifting a finger.  That was a lot of time saved!

Now, let’s take it a step further using the power of Salesforce Sales Cloud.

Let’s automatically send an email (with a summary of the sales deal) to the CEO everytime a deal is over $100K.  Also, any deal that involves a quantity over 100 of Product A, needs to be approved by a production manager. Lastly, let’s go ahead and take the full pipeline (all sales deals), combine it into a Powerpoint presentation, and email it to all the Sales Managers of the company an hour before their monthly sales meetings, without anyone lifting a finger.  That was a lot of time saved!

As you can see from this example, Salesforce can get very powerful (and very complex) in a hurry. It consolidates information in one place and saves a ton of time.

Let’s take a look at another Salesforce product, Service Cloud.

Imagine you are running a business selling fresh oranges, grapefruits, and limes (a delicious citrus drink if I do say so myself). Your customers put their order in on your website and you deliver the fruits the next day. But, sometimes you are in a rush and get the order wrong.  Better put a “Support” page up on your website with a little form that users fill out to tell you what went wrong with their order. You set it up and begin getting emails explaining the orders that went wrong, just a few come in each week to begin with.  

The business begins to really grow though and now you have 1000s of customers, 25 employees, and are getting 100 ‘problem with my order’ emails a day.  Yikes, I can’t keep up with all of these! Salesforce Service Cloud to the rescue.

Let’s have that form, instead of sending an email, create a “Case” in Salesforce.  Now, when you login to the system you see all of the Cases that have come in, they are all organized by ‘type of problem’, and you can respond back to the customer right from inside Salesforce (it keeps an organized log of the complete conversation).

Now, let’s take it a step further using the power of Salesforce Service Cloud.

Let’s automatically route any cases that have to do with grapefruits to the ‘grapefruit’ support team, since the ‘orange’ support team doesn’t need to see them.  Also, when the Case gets created, let’s check to see if it’s one of our most valuable customers, based on their order volume (we are using Sales Cloud in this scenario as well).  If it is, let’s automatically send out an email telling them we appreciate their loyalty and we have escalated their Case to a manager since they are a super duper special customer.

Lastly, it seems like a lot of these order issues are actually just people saying they didn’t get the juice recipe card in the box, which is probably there, but it’s at the very bottom under everything. Let’s make a rule for that. Now, whenever a Case comes into Salesforce with this being the problem, let’s automatically send them an article that has pictures of where the recipe cards are at the bottom of the box.  That should take care of a lot of these without anyone lifting a finger!

This is the power of Salesforce, and the two examples above really just begin to scratch the surface of what the platform is capable of.

Phew, that was so much business process thinking my brain is steaming!  Our business is running like a fine tune machine though!  Let’s have a coffee and put our feet up.

As the late Billy Mays would say though...

If you’re still with me, let’s go a little deeper.

Imagine you are the CEO of a company and your employees keep asking if they can use the corporate credit card to pay for various things around the office.  You think it makes sense to set some kind of limit, under which they don’t need your approval to use the card for, say $100. And, really, their immediate manager should be able to approve up to $1,000.  Your approval is only needed when it’s more than $1,000.

It would be great if you had some kind of “Purchase Order” system that could handle amount thresholds, approvals, and keeping track of who spent money this month.  You have Salesforce but that’s a Sales & Service tool. Or is it?

The real power of Salesforce is that it can be customized to handle nearly any business process. And it’s not a misuse to adapt it to a specific business process your company has, this is what it was designed for!

Let’s go ahead and build this Purchase Order system into Salesforce.  

Now, let’s send managers an email every time a manager needs to approve a purchase, they can just reply to the email with the words “approved” and it will update in the system.  Cool! Let’s also go ahead and send an email automatically to the employee and let them know their purchase is approved. They are free to swipe that corporate card for the limo and champagne!  Lastly, let’s summarize all of this information each month and send it to all the managers of the company showing where the money was spent. Let’s again include Finance who can put the budget numbers in, and we can get an automatic look each month into budget vs. actual spending by team.

The above example is the main reason why Salesforce is such an incredible business tool, it can be bent and configured to handle almost any scenario.

The above example is also the reason it’s so difficult to explain exactly what Salesforce is. Salesforce means different things to different people based on what that particular company chose to use Salesforce for.  For many, Salesforce is a Sales & Service tool. For others, Salesforce is a system for tracking purchases. For still others, it’s a marketing tool where they store and manage email blasts out to their customers.  For some, they are using Salesforce (setup as a piece of a company website, perhaps to log in and out of work) and are not even aware that Salesforce is the underlying tool making it work.

Before we close, it should be noted that we are still just scratching the surface of all things Salesforce is capable of.  A short list includes: automated marketing, external facing pieces of the system (similar to a patient portal at a doctors office) where customers can login, a complete App Store (like the Apple App Store but for business apps), quoting and e-signature, and industry specific products (like Health or Financial Services Cloud).

OK, ready?  One last time, what is Salesforce?

Salesforce can be whatever you want it to be!  But, most simply, Salesforce is a tool for running a business.  Exactly what pieces of a business a company decides to run on Salesforce is up to them.

So, the next time you hear about Salesforce stock (ticker: CRM) soaring or see their new enormous skyscraper in San Francisco, hopefully you’ll have a slight idea of what it is and why it’s used by so many businesses.