After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
You might think that Salesforce is just a CRM. It stores your customer data, gives you processes to nurture prospective customers, and provides ways to collaborate with people you work with. And it does all those things. But saying that Salesforce is “just a CRM” is like saying a house is just a kitchen. There’s a lot more to it than that.
Salesforce comes with a lot of standard functionality, or out-of-the-box products and features that you can use to run your business. Here are some common things businesses want to do with Salesforce and the features we give you that support those activities. You learn about many more Salesforce products and features in the Platform Development Basics module.
You need to: | So we give you: |
---|---|
Sell to prospects and customers |
Leads and Opportunities to manage sales |
Help customers after the sale |
Cases and Communities for customer engagement |
Work on the go |
The customizable Salesforce mobile app |
Collaborate with coworkers, partners, and customers |
Slack, Chatter, and Communities to connect your company |
Market to your audience |
Marketing Cloud to manage your customer journeys |
Depending on what your company purchases, you can get these features and more without lifting a finger. But you can almost think of these features as a model house that a real estate agent shows off. You could certainly live there, but it wouldn’t be your home. It wouldn’t have your art on the wall or that unusual coat rack your Aunt Tilda gave you as a housewarming gift.
That’s where the Salesforce platform comes in. With the platform, you can customize and build whatever it is that makes your company unique. And when you have a business application that’s unique to you, everyone is more successful.
Throughout Trailhead, you are introduced to a lot of companies and characters that are using Salesforce in different ways. Let’s meet some of the players.
We’re digging this house theme, so let’s kick off our first module by looking at DreamHouse Realty. We’ll use DreamHouse’s Salesforce implementation to explain some of the fundamental terms, concepts, and capabilities of the Salesforce platform.
Let’s learn a bit more about DreamHouse.
Michelle is the lead real estate broker at DreamHouse. She finds many potential home buyers through DreamHouse’s web and mobile apps. With the apps, customers can browse available homes and make a favorites list of properties that they’re interested in. They can also reach out to Michelle or other brokers directly to set up showings.
D’Angelo is DreamHouse’s Salesforce administrator. Using the Salesforce platform, he’s building a suite of custom functionality to support Michelle and her team. Michelle can use this custom functionality to edit and view information about the properties she’s selling, as well as keep track of her potential buyers.
Remember, Salesforce comes with standard functionality for tracking common sales objects like accounts, contacts, and leads. But DreamHouse is a realty firm, so it has needs specific to its industry and business model. Throughout this module, we work with D’Angelo to see how the Salesforce platform can meet those needs.
Perhaps you noticed a strange word in that last paragraph: objects. Object is one of many important terms you’ll learn as you get to know Salesforce.
First, it’s important to understand what a database is in the context of Salesforce. When we talk about the database, think of a giant spreadsheet. When you put information into Salesforce, it gets stored in the database so you can access it again later. It’s stored in a very specific way so you’re always accessing the information you need.
Let’s take a look at a page from the DreamHouse app to define some of its important elements and how they relate to the database.
Another important term that’s hard to capture in a picture is org. Org is short for organization, and it refers to a specific instance of Salesforce. The image here is taken from DreamHouse’s org. Your company can have one or multiple orgs.
That’s a lot of new stuff to tackle. If you don’t get it all right away, don’t worry. As you continue to learn about Salesforce, the terminology will start to come naturally.
A Trailhead Playground (TP) org is a safe environment where you can practice the skills you’re learning before you take them to your real work. TPs come with all the standard app building and customization tools required to test your app development chops. If you’ve ever heard of a Developer Edition (DE) org, a TP is a special type of DE.
When you sign up for Trailhead, we automatically create a TP for you. So if you haven’t signed up yet, now is a great time to do so. If you’re already signed in, return to this unit’s page on Trailhead. Scroll to the bottom of the page past the Your Challenge heading and press ENTER on the Launch element located just above the Check Challenge button to open your Trailhead Playground.
TP orgs are free and you can have up to 10 of them at a time. To create one, go to any hands-on challenge heading, press ENTER on the menu above Launch, and select Create a Trailhead Playground from the menu. If you hit your max or want to manage your TPs, you can view and delete them from your Trailhead profile. If you ever need your TP’s username and password, you can access them using the instructions
here.
Go ahead and launch your TP so we can start getting our hands dirty.
To follow along and practice the steps in this module, you need to install the DreamHouse package in your Trailhead Playground. Follow the instructions here to launch a playground and install the package. You also use this package and playground when it’s time to complete the hands-on challenge.
this package installation link
and check out
Install a Package or App to Complete a Trailhead Challenge
on Trailhead Help. Skip the remaining steps.
We go through some of the pieces of this app through the module, but feel free to take a look around before you move on.
You already know that you can use the Salesforce platform to develop custom objects and functionality specific to your business. What you might not know is that you can do most of this development without ever writing a line of code.
Developing without code is known as declarative development. With declarative development, you use forms and drag-and-drop tools to perform powerful customization tasks. The platform also offers programmatic development, which uses things like Lightning components. But if you’re not a programmer, you can still build some amazing things on the platform.
Let’s start small. Michelle wants a way to quickly indicate whether a potential home buyer is prequalified for a home loan. To make this change, D’Angelo wants to create a prequalified checkbox on the contact object. In Salesforce-speak, we’re adding a custom field to a standard object. Let’s see how he does it.
You just customized your first object. Great job!
Let’s take a look at what we did.
Now it’s easier for Michelle and the other brokers to log and retrieve this important piece of client information.
We added that field pretty quickly. But it turns out that we did more than just add a field. At the same time, the platform did a lot of work under the hood. Obviously the new field was added to the user interface. You can also run reports and create dashboards that reference your new field. The field is even ready to go in the Salesforce mobile app. And you didn’t have to do anything except click Next!
That’s the power of the Salesforce platform. In the next unit, we talk about some of the ways you can harness the platform for your business.
Click to return to the unit on Trailhead to access your challenge and proceed to the next step.