Salesforce is a Cloud SaaS platform (Software-as-a-Service), which means you access it through your web browser, as opposed to a desktop application. You’re also able to access it through a mobile application on both major platforms (Android and iOS). Cloud systems have major benefits over legacy computer systems that require huge amounts of server power to run.
Some of the biggest benefits of cloud computing solutions include:
Sales and Service Cloud both act as the core CRM platforms for Salesforce and will be used by the majority of organizations. While both share some similarities, they are distinctly different products that contain different sets of features for their specific function.
Over the years, Salesforce has built up a huge portfolio of other products to help serve its customers. One of the most attractive selling points is the fact that they can seamlessly integrate with each other, creating a full 360-degree view of their customers.
Some of Salesforce’s other products include Marketing Cloud, Commerce Cloud, Experience Cloud, MuleSoft, and Slack. More recently, Salesforce has introduced a whole suite of AI and Big Data tools that are designed to help businesses make use of the immense amount of data that they capture – Agentforce and Data Cloud are two examples of this.
One of Salesforce’s biggest selling points is the Salesforce platform (previously called Force.com). This enables you to create powerful customizations to extend the base functionality of Salesforce’s products, which allow you to completely tailor the applications to your organization’s exact needs. This is made even more attractive by the fact that you can create customizations with clicks, not code, using tools such as Flow Builder and Lightning App Builder.
At a basic level, this allows you to create custom fields and objects to store unique information related to your organization. One of the most popular customization possibilities is automation. You can create automation to do pretty much anything in Salesforce – update a field, create a record, send an email, etc. These types of customizations can end up saving users a lot of time. Salesforce continues to invest in its declarative customization tools with each new release packing a multitude of enhancements to tools like Flow Builder.
Taking customizations one level further, Salesforce enables you to build custom applications on the platform. Think about how the Sales and Service Clouds are set up with their various features designed for a certain purpose – this can be recreated for any team function.
Examples of custom applications include:
When it comes to Salesforce customizations, there are two main types: declarative and programmatic.
Declarative customizations are point-and-click – also known as ‘clicks, not code’. These allow non-developers to build powerful customizations by using a wizard to create custom fields, automation, and tables of data. To assist when connecting systems using clicks instead of code, Salesforce has brought out its MuleSoft Composer, which allows integrations into other systems to take place using only clicks.
Programmatic customizations, on the other hand, are built with code. Whilst you can do almost anything with declarative customization, there is a limit to more complex solutions. Apex is Salesforce’s coding language and may be needed if the requirement is particularly complex. Lightning development (commonly referred to as Lightning Web Components) is Salesforce’s UI coding language, which can be used to create completely custom screen layouts. In addition, it’s common that in most integrations, some level of coding experience using APIs will be needed.
As a SaaS platform, Salesforce delivers updates to your system automatically. The major releases happen three times a year, with some other, much smaller updates delivered in between.
The major releases are labeled Spring, Summer, and Winter, with the fiscal Salesforce year following the name, e.g., “Salesforce Winter ’26 Release”. Each release will have a huge amount of features and updates included across all of the major Salesforce products.
It’s important to stay alert around release time. Whilst Salesforce rarely breaks anything whilst updating your org, it’s important to test everything and ensure that it works as expected.
Salesforce Lightning was primarily a new UI that was released in 2015 – it took Salesforce’s UI and brought it into the 21st century. Salesforce centered the design around a modular experience that allowed Salesforce Admins to easily control the layout of all pages.
This resulted in a rise in user productivity with the help of new features, as well as an easy-to-navigate UI. Pretty much every single page of Salesforce Lightning Experience is fully customizable. You can customize the homepage and record layouts, and you can create dashboards to suit your specific needs. The addition of the SLDS 2 (Salesforce Lightning Design System 2) offers a more modern interface with rounder corners.
When someone refers to a sales process, they are referring to the process that a salesperson will follow in order to sell a product or service to a potential customer. This is then translated into the “Lead Status” and “Opportunity Stage” fields.
At an extremely basic level, that process looks like:
Qualify > Discover > Analysis > Proposal > Negotiation > Closed Won (or Lost)
The full sales process tracks the journey from entering the organization at the Lead stage all the way through to its closing as an Opportunity.
A service process outlines how a customer support organization works and the different stages they go through to solve a case. Unlike a sales process that is split across the Lead and Opportunity objects, service processes are contained on the Case object.
An example of a Service process is:
New > Working > Waiting on Customer > Escalated > Closed
In normal database terms, an object in Salesforce is simply a table of data containing various fields that store information like email addresses, phone numbers, or company names.
There are two primary types of objects in Salesforce:
It is called the AppExchange. It functions similarly to the App Store on an iPhone, allowing you to install pre-built apps directly into your Salesforce org to easily add additional functionality. Some of the most popular apps include e-Signature, Document Generation, and Form tools.
Changes are tested using Sandboxes. Sandboxes replicate your Production configuration (and potentially a subset of data), giving you a safe environment to test changes without breaking Production or disrupting user processes.
Sandboxes come in different types, ranging from a Developer sandbox (which contains only custom configuration) up to a Full Copy Sandbox (which contains all configuration and data).
Salesforce offers different editions including Essentials, Professional, Enterprise, and Unlimited. Key differences include:
Once changes are tested in a sandbox, they are moved to production using deployment tools. The most common native way is using Change Sets, which package components to move between connected environments. Other modern options include Salesforce DevOps tools.
A Queue is a holding area in Salesforce where records wait until a user picks them up, assigns ownership, and processes them.
While many objects require individual user ownership (e.g., Accounts, Opportunities), objects like Leads, Cases, and Custom Objects can be owned by a Queue. This is commonly used when new Leads or Cases are submitted from forms or emails and need a central staging location before being assigned to individual representatives.