What is CRM?

CRM includes all interactions with an organization's constituents. This includes prospecting, the sales process, retention, marketing efforts, and customer service. The core of Salesforce is the out-of-the-box CRM functionality that is provided when you sign up for the platform. There are various editions provided by Salesforce; each edition provides different features and per-user price points. The four editions of the core CRM product are as follows:

  • Salesforce Essentials: A small-business CRM for up to 10 users
  • Salesforce Professional: A complete CRM for any size of team
  • Salesforce Enterprise: A deeply customizable sales CRM for your business
  • Salesforce Unlimited: Unlimited CRM power and support

Salesforce uses the concept of different clouds to bring together specific features. For example, all of the core features of running a sales operation, such as lead and opportunity management, are included in Sales Cloud. Features such as cases and knowledge bases fall under Service Cloud. There are also other clouds, such as Marketing Cloud, Analytics Cloud, and so on. The preceding editions in the bullet list focus on Sales Cloud and/or Service Cloud. 

There is also a developer edition. The developer edition is one of the most valuable training tools when starting to learn how to use Salesforce, especially if you don't have access to a Salesforce environment of your own to practice what you are learning. Developer edition orgs are free, full-featured enterprise orgs with less storage and a limit of two licenses. These orgs are made for you to try out and develop features in an environment that is not directly tied to a paid production org. You can sign up for unlimited developer orgs. Regardless of the edition, the core objects are the same; we will cover them in detail in the following chapters of this book.

In this book, we will use the terms environment, org, and instance interchangeably. These three words mean the same thing—the configuration that you see when you log in to a unique version of Salesforce. This can be a development org, a client's production org, or a sandbox. We will cover sandboxes in Chapter 11, Using Sandboxes and Change Sets. 

Now is a good time to go to https://developer.salesforce.com/signup and sign up for your own developer edition.

As we walk you through the concepts of this book, you can follow along on your own org. As you sign up, you will be asked to enter a company name. If you don't belong to a company, don't worry—just re-enter your name for the company name since it is a required field.

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