For modern-day businesses, the key to success is the reliable connections established between the customers and the Sales officers. When it comes to small Business Administration, this can be done much effectively at a one-on-one level with a limited number of customers. However, as the business grows and the customer base expands, it becomes difficult to keep track of all customer info and provide them a Personalized experience. In such a situation, the most powerful driver for the salespeople to increase the effectiveness of Customer Interaction and loyalty is a good Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system.

Gartner has named Salesforce as the leader in CRM for twelve consecutive years now, and Salesforce automation is providing businesses a new pathway to effective Customer Relationship Management lately. The magic quadrant of Force automation is also dominating the market in many categories as the CRM-based Customer Engagement Center as well as Enterprise Application PaaS (Platform as a Service) etc.

What Makes Salesforce the Leader?

As we know, Salesforce was the company pioneered in launching a featured CRM on the cloud. After constant evolvement for many years now, Salesforce no remains as the world’s No.1 developer CRM systems based on the cloud. It offers a variety of tools now, which are not only limited to Customer Relationship Management, but also for Business Application Development using the source-driven approach of Salesforce DX. It targets both small-scale businesses and large corporations alike. With the Salesforce suite, one can now discover a better Customer Insight with a fair understanding of their needs and treat each customer with a personal acquaintance.

The comprehensive range of Salesforce tools include:

• Sales Cloud, which helps the sales team to find more prospective customers, boost sales productivity, and close the sales deals faster.
• Service Cloud, which helps to make customer support more effective by ensuring seamless conversations and instant connectivity.
• Marketing Cloud with tools to unite the marketing and sales processes into a single platform. It also puts forth provisions to engage more effectively with clients through various channels.
• Commerce Cloud to create a personalized sales experience.
• Community Cloud, which helps build various communities for partners, employees, vendors, etc. to boost close engagement.
• Quip is a collaboration platform, which helps organize the teamwork.
• Salesforce DX as an app development platform, offering a unique and innovative source-driven development approach to save time and effort of the developers.
• Salesforce Platform as a unified platform that lets the users customize the solutions, build apps, and ensure security levels, etc.

The Salesforce application suite is now used by thousands of enterprise users from across the globe all sizes ranging from startups to biggest corporate. Salesforce offers support to all types of industries and any geographic location. Some of the key industries covered by the Salesforce toolkit are Financial Services, Banking, Healthcare, Manufacturing, Retail, fast-moving Consumer Goods, Media, and Communications, Logistics, and Automotive, etc. Some of the world-renowned clients using Salesforce CRM include American Express, Aston Martin, Puma, Canon, L’Oréal to name a few.

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The Uses of Salesforce CRM

Any businesses can develop their Operational efficiency with the use of Salesforce CRM. Below mentioned are some of the major benefits of the functional CRMs built on Salesforce as offered by Flosum.com.

• Ease of Use – The users of Salesforce CRM need not have to be IT experts to set up the apps and manage them. You can simply log in to the Salesforce platform through a web interface to manage it. Salesforce offers a better view of the Clients and Analytics to make your decision making easier. An intuitive interface, easy navigation, and effective collaboration options make the Salesforce work process seamless and smoother.

• Great functionality – Salesforce platform has many default features and templates, which can be instantly used for various types of business and organizational tasks.

• Customizability – One major feature of Salesforce service is that it can be custom configured based on an organization’s needs. You can instantly integrate Salesforce with any existing apps and make necessary alterations to add or delete functions or extend the functionality of existing features. However, unlike operating it, performing customization requires a bit of technical expertise.

• Scalability – Salesforce can grow and shrink based on your changing business requirements. This scalability makes Salesforce a much cost-effective solution for small businesses too as it can grow as the business expands and adapt to the changing specifications by providing unlimited storage space.

• Analytics – The salespeople can track their Customer Activities and also analyze them in real-time to anticipate the actual customer needs and act accordingly. Salesforce can create intuitive reports, graphical representations, and dashboards.

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Salesforce DX Version Control Strategy

As we discussed above, Salesforce DX is revolutionizing the Business App Development scenario lately. Salesforce DX practices an innovative approach to version control, which the developers need to know at the first point to follow best practices in DX-based development. The Salesforce community, however, is struggling a bit to get it understood rightly.

When considering the fact that such a basic procedure of version control is not followed, the common answer for it is that the smaller development teams actually don’t require any version control strategy or Sandbox in the source of truth. Salesforce is now trying to address this issue in Salesforce DX which gives results pockets.

The Salesforce DX approach of source-code driven development brings more transparency to the development by:

• Making the change history visible to all developers and other team members.
• Providing instant alerts to all if there is any code conflict.
• Achieve an environment consistent with the help of repeatable and dynamic deployments.
• Enforcing the test classes to run at Sandboxes to discover any test class issues at early stages and tackle them more effectively.
• Allow weekly or daily deployments as needed through the continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) capabilities.
• Allows the release management team to manage deployments.

In order to enable success in version control on Salesforce DX, the project teams need to follow some specific rules and disciplines, in which the source files are treated as the sole “source of truth.” The pieces of codes which are not checked in here are not taken into consideration. To conclude, Salesforce DX’s more effective approach to version control will help to ensure repeatable success and error-free management of codes in any typical development environment.

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