What is Salesforce?

The simplest, broadest definition can be found in the name: CRM (Customer Relationship Management) is a comprehensive way to manage the relationship with your customers — including potential customers — for long-lasting and mutual benefit. Effective CRM systems capture information about customer interactions and present that information to customer-facing users to service those customers more effectively and efficiently.

Customer relationship management combines business processes, people, and technology to achieve one goal: acquiring and retaining satisfied customers. It's an overall strategy to help you learn more about your customers and their behavior so you can develop stronger, lasting relationships that will benefit both you and your customers.

Salesforce.com is an on-demand CRM tool. Today, hosted CRM—also known as online CRM or web-based CRM—is offered as a subscription: You pay to use this software as a service (SaaS) and access your CRM applications online, making it cost-effective, easy to use, and quick to deploy.

What can Salesforce.com do beyond CRM?

Salesforce.com provides an on-demand platform for application development and can be used even when the solution does not require sales and marketing functionality.  The real power of Salesforce emerges when customers add custom objects and relate those to the objects built into Salesforce like leads and contacts.  For customers comfortable with running line of business applications hosted in the Internet “cloud” it is possible to create comprehensive solutions inside Salesforce.  Salesforce also exposes a rich interface for integration allowing for secure data transmission between other systems.

Click on the following links to find out more about Salesforce:

Salesforce screenshot

Salesforce demonstration

Salesforce customer case studies

Click here to register for a free trial of Salesforce Professional Edition Plus