Salesforce serves businesses, large and small, today. But even if the company is growing and its customers are doing it, it has not lost sight of companies like yours.
Here is a list of 10 things that every small business should know about Salesforce to have a better understanding of the company and what it offers.
Salesforce started small too – 18 years ago in a small apartment.
The early history of Salesforce is probably the one that many small business owners can relate to. In 1999, Marc Benioff and three co-founders founded Salesforce in San Francisco. To start Salesforce, Benioff gave up a successful career and had trouble finding investors.
Today, the company is a titan of technology. During the last quarter, the Salesforce business turnover reached $ 2.56 billion. This is an increase of 26% over the previous year. And he has been recognized as the best CRM company in a competitive industry.
Salesforce has more than 150,000 customers, many of whom are small businesses.
Once a small business itself, Salesforce started by meeting the needs of small businesses. Today, some of the largest companies in the world rely on Salesforce, but many of its customers are startups and small businesses. The company does not lose sight of the customers who brought them to where they are today.
DUFL is a great example of a company that has grown tremendously with Salesforce. Acting as a personal valet for business trips, DUFL cleans and stores the clothes that customers need for their travels and ships them directly to their destination. DUFL uses Salesforce to keep a complete record of each individual's unique needs so they can deliver 1-to-1 personalized experiences to their customers. With Salesforce supporting its sales and customer service, the team of less than 50 DUFL employees has experienced monthly growth of 10% while maintaining a retention rate of over 99%.
Today, Salesforce is much more than CRM.
Of course, Salesforce is almost synonymous with CRM, especially for small businesses. But the company is in the process of building a reputation for the other services that it provides to companies like yours.
For example, a few years ago, Salesforce acquired Demandware, which it now calls Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Commerce Cloud enables small businesses to create unique shopping experiences for all their customers, including new ways to engage customers on mobile devices at any time.
Salesforce also offers Quip, content collaboration tools for businesses.
Salesforce hosts one of the largest user conferences in the United States.
You will never walk alone to Dreamforce. This is the annual user conference set up by Salesforce. And it's a big problem. It is the largest software conference in the world.
Dreamforce offers the opportunity to learn first-hand how Salesforce – and one of its offers – can help your small business. And if one of the many experts available is not enough, you will have the opportunity to meet the some 175,000 participants at this year's event. That's right – 175 THOUSAND!
"It's bigger than a lot of cities," says Brent Leary, co-founder of CRM Essentials, a regular at Dreamforce.
Many of Dreamforce's customers are small business customers. This year, there will be more than 300 sessions dedicated to small businesses.
Salesforce has invested a lot in artificial intelligence.
Salesforce integrates artificial intelligence into its CRM platform. The company calls its AI Einstein and promises to make sure that everyone in your small business uses it more intelligently.
In an interview with Small Business Trends, Tony Rodoni of Salesforce highlighted the role and impact of AI for a small business.
"No small business should have a data science department," Rodoni said. "But we want to put features in the product that help them see trends, recommend actions, and move on to the next steps, and our SMB customers will see this very quickly in our products."
Your small business can access capital, find an investor, or get help for growth with Salesforce.
Salesforce owns its own venture capital and investment group called Salesforce Ventures.
The company also created the AI Innovation Fund and invests $ 50 million in startups that use artificial intelligence to integrate their company's products with Salesforce.
Salesforce for Startups provides startups with access to the Salesforce technology, resources, and expertise needed to become client and community-driven businesses. Salesforce helps startups create, grow and deliver through the AppExchange Partner Program, Salesforce Ventures, Pledge 1%, customer-focused products and more.
Salesforce has a 1-1-1 philanthropy program.
Having an impact on your community, apart from being a successful business, adds value to any small business. Salesforce.org is based on the company's 1-1-1 social philanthropy model.
And the 1-1-1 model is ideal for small businesses to give from the start without stunting
their own growth. 1-1-1-1 represents a percentage of time, resources and products that go to the common good of the community surrounding each company that is committed to contributing.
Salesforce.org says that to date, it has donated $ 168 million in grants, 2.3 million hours of community service and gifts to over 32,000 organizations without profit and higher education institutions.
AppExchange offers other apps for your business that automatically integrate with Salesforce.
Salesforce was the first to offer an application store for third-party integrations and extensions. This is called Salesforce AppExchange. AppExchange is where you will find other business applications that integrate with Salesforce.
The AppExchange recently reached its milestone of five million installations, which shows the acceleration thrust of AppExchange. Salesforce has reached a million facilities after six years, but in the last 12 months it has grown from four to five million. This illustrates the exponential growth and strength of the Salesforce Partner Ecosystem, which enables small businesses to use pre-integrated business applications to help them manage their business effectively.
The Salesforce workout is gamified.
Salesforce has a learning system called Trailhead. The company calls it the fun way to learn how to use Salesforce.
Trailhead is free and offers learning modules and guided trails for each skill level. Read this article to learn more about how small businesses can use Trailhead. There is even a special "Trail Mix" designed especially for small businesses.
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