Overview
Salesforce CRM (Customer Relationship Management) is a customer success platform, designed to help businesses sell, service, market, analyze, and connect with clients. Using their standard products and features allows you to manage relationships with prospects and clients, collaborate and engage with other employees, and store data securely in the cloud.
Rather than having employee, client, and prospect information in a variety of places, Salesforce is the one place for all your employee, client, and prospect data, accessible via the cloud from any device. Powerful security and sharing features protect sensitive data and ensure only the right folks see the right data.
This means that only the data a user can create, view, edit, and delete is determined by settings maintained by an admin. Like Absorb LMS, access can be simple or multi-layered, depending on business needs. Collaboration is also possible between users in Salesforce, allowing creation of groups, polls, shared files and links, the ability to follow topics and people.
Salesforce organizes data into objects and records. You can think of objects like a tab on a spreadsheet, and record like a single row of data.
Salesforce CRM allows businesses to manage and access data in sophisticated ways that could never be done with a simple spreadsheet. Records can be linked together to show how data is related, providing businesses the larger picture.
Salesforce Terminology
Salesforce uses a variety of terminology, like objects and records. Below you will find definitions for a few of the terms you may want to know as you work with the Salesforce App.
| Term | Definition |
| Record | An item you are tracking in your database; if your data is like a spreadsheet, then a record is a row on the spreadsheet. |
| Field | Field A place where you store a value, like a name or address; using our spreadsheet example, a field would be a column on the spreadsheet. |
| Object | A table in the database; in that spreadsheet example, an object is a tab on the spreadsheet. |
| Org | Short for "organization," the place where all your data, configuration, and customization lives. You log in to access it. You might also hear this called "your instance of Salesforce". |
| App | A set of fields, objects, permissions, and functionality to support a business process. |
| Accounts | Accounts are the companies you're doing business with. You can also do business with individual people (like solo contractors) using something called Person Accounts. |
| Contacts | Contacts are the people who work at an Account. They do not have access to log into Salesforce. |
| Leads | Leads are potential prospects. You haven't yet qualified that they are ready to buy or what product they need. You don't have to use Leads, but they can be helpful if you have team selling, or if you have different sales processes for prospects and qualified buyers. |
| Opportunities | Opportunities are qualified leads that you've converted. When you convert the Lead, you create an Account and Contact along with the Opportunity. |
| Users | People internal to your organization who log into Salesforce, ex. salespeople. |
Example
This video is an introduction to the Absorb LMS Salesforce App. Watch the video below for an overview of the features available, and how it works with your organization's Absorb LMS portal.