Service member here possibly getting out next year. Bunch of options on the table and one of them is the possibility to earn free certifications from Salesforce. I grew up in the SF Bay Area, so I am familiar with the company, but I honestly have no idea what they actually do or what these certifications would be, or why they would even be useful. I realize this is probably a very vague question, but I guess just looking for an overall scope of what they do.
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Solution Architect here. The short answer is their bread and butter is their sales cloud, which is used by sales teams to – you guessed it – sell. But there is also a service cloud (for customer issues) so you can have an entire CRM solution, including a community so you can engage with your customers. They keep acquiring and adding new things so they now have health and financial clouds.
It’s a great time to work with Salesforce as there are a lot of open positions within the community.
Edited to add: I completely forgot, there’s also an entire non-profit solution that I know very little about.
It’s software.
Companies pay monthly subscriptions for it, sometimes several million per year, to track their sales, invoicing, support, etc.
This software is also good at plugging into other software.
The problem is that the bigger and more completer the software isz the harder it is to use, so companies need help setting it up, maintaining it and changing things. This is why they need certified people to help them and there are many vacancies.
As an example, setting up the customer chatbots for a sales website is a pain, so hiring someone to come in, listen to what you meed, set it up and then come in a few times a month to tweak it would be worth a lot.
They built a database with an tables/objects relevant for sales.
So whereas a reddit database would have objects for users, subreddits, posts, comments, etc, the salesforce database has objects for leads, customers, opportunities, strip clubs visits, etc
They somehow cornered the market (my theory is sales people are easy to sell to & unlike the rest of the company always get what they ask for because it means more sales (at least in theory)).
Let’s say I own a company that sells airplanes (and have lots of money to spend on software). I would use Salesforce –
Sales Cloud to track people who have bought planes, or who asked me about buying planes
Service Cloud to keep track of customer service issues when they call in to our support center
Marketing Cloud to email current and potential customers about plane features, new plane models that are coming out, etc
Commerce Cloud so people can buy planes from my online store
There are other pieces to Salesforce, I don’t know all of them. But getting certified could mean learning how to maintain customer databases and how to wrangle that data, or managing how the data flows between different branches (there’s probably a more technical term than that) of SF, or how to set up and maintain an online store.
Just going to add this here:
It is really a terrible CRM / Sales management tool. We have it at our company and it is an absolute nightmare.
We’d like to send emails to our leads: sure.
We’d like to see how these emails perform: lol. Nope, impossible.
We’d like to see leads: Sure, for today, yesterday, this week, this month, last month, this quarter, last quarter, this year, last year, or all time?
Errrr, last year December please. Lol. Nope. Impossible.
I absolutely despise Salesforce. And it is ridiculously expensive to subscribe to and maintain (we need to pay an agency to manage the data and connections between our website) and we’ve employed two people to help keep the data clean. We’ve also been unable to pin down the exact number of active customers we have for 3 months.
Salesforce is marketed as a sales tool to track almost anything, set up calls/meetings, reminders etc… (its actually surprisingly flexible) There is some functionality that I believe would be useful in certain applications, but I personally DESPISE this tool. In my industry the pace is far too fast for Salesforce to really work. It’s too hands on, I don’t have the band width to log every call/text/email or in person meeting.
Corporate likes it because the potential to track virtually everything is appealing, but you need the sales team to get on board entering the data. That’s not an easy ask when time is literally money, and we don’t have time for that.
I can’t speak to the certification side of things. I’m sure if a company was going all in with Salesforce, they would want an “expert” on staff but we don’t have that so I can’t even comment if it helps or not.
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