More about Navigate the Salesforce Advantage : A TRAILHEAD TRAIL

This trail on trailhead is intended for audience who want to adopt or start learning Salesforce.com. Salesforce is very dominant player in Cloud ecosystem and it is very critical for Customers, Admins, Developers and Business Users to understand what Salesforce can do for them. Why Salesforce is mentioned as "Customer Success Platform"? How powerful it is as platform and CRM? And ways Salesforce can help businesses to perform better. This trail can answer all those questions!!

This trail has 4 primary modules:
1. Salesforce Success Model: This module gives high level zest of What is Salesforce? Salesforce is multi-tenant cloud platform and CRM. Salesforce supports both B2B and B2C business models. Salesforce helps you build more meaningful relationships with your customers; to better understand their wants and needs, identify new opportunities to help, and address their problems faster. The key to this success is having one connected platform to manage all of this. It is critical to understand the capabilities of Salesforce as CRM and platform so that to take right decision for selecting right cloud platform for your needs. So, in high level this module teaches who Salesforce is and their vision for driving customer success. Finally, Salesforce as company is totally focused on Innovation and Customer Success all the time by leveraging great leadership and giving back attitude i.e. Corporate Social Responsibility.

2. Salesforce Cloud Benefits: This module explains about what you get from Salesforce when you choose to go with it? Salesforce is multi-tenant high performance cloud platform and Salesforce is trying reach all possibilities in cloud to have everything at one place. Adopting Salesforce is very easy game as customers can achieve lot of their business processes just by using Out of the Box (OOTB) features and AppExchange products. For doing custom developments; Force.com is the BEST platform in whole cloud ecosystem. This module also helps to understand how to propel your business with the adoption of Cloud. So, in high level this module teaches the flexibility of a "complete" CRM that evolves with customer business needs. Salesforce is very "Agile" platform. Finally here is very good distinction about on-premise and cloud so that you understand why to go with Cloud.

3. Salesforce Technology Basics: This module talks about why Salesforce is trusted cloud platform? and The beauty of Multi-tenancy in Salesforce core technical stack. That means every customer shares same baseline infrastructure and code base. This module also explains the way Salesforce drives the customer customization and configurations using metadata and provides easy accessibility of the metadata layer, the cloud, and Software as a Service (SaaS). Also, customers can develop custom apps very rapidly and go to market time is very low [This is totally based on complexity of application but usually customer should start with Must Have then good to have and then fancy stuff around]. So, in high level this module gives a peek under the hood of Salesforce's core technology model based on trust and innovation.

4. Salesforce Ecosystem: This module talks more about awesomeness of Salesforce's incredible partner ecosystem and customer community. All the documentation is very precise. Customers can also use Success Community for technical questions and asking for best practices, etc. Salesforce periodically organizes lot of events around the world. I love to be part of Pune Salesforce Developer User Group. There is always lot of knowledge sharing and off course goodies :D Salesforce swags are always lovely!! Finally attending Dreamforce will also help a lot if you want to understand width and depth of Salesforce technologies.

Wait..Above all is about Salesforce!! But if you are looking for more technical comparison of multiple CRMs; here is the high level table:

There are lot other CRM players exist in the market in addition to Salesforce and MS Dynamics CRM like ZOHO, GoldMine etc.

Brief about ZOHOCRM: ZohoCRM is a relative newcomer to the CRM marketplace and good fit for small businesses. ZohoCRM is just one of a suite of business applications from Zoho that include productivity, office, project management, invoicing and recruiting. The Enterprise version of ZohoCRM runs $35/month/user but a free, stripped down version is available for less than three users. ZohoCRM is completely cloud based, integrates with many Google Apps and syncs with QuickBooks and Outlook. There is also a growing army of Zoho developers and partners with tools to further customize and integrate the product with other systems.

Brief about GoldMine: GoldMine is on-premise and more of an advanced contact manager than a full blown customer relationship management system. But the aging product has been around for many years and still maintains a large following. GoldMine is good for organizations with 5-25 users and costs about $3,000 for a five concurrent user system. It is quick to setup, easy to use, synchronizes with Outlook and QuickBooks and sold through a national network of resellers and partners.

Finally, if you want to adopt Salesforce then you MUST should use Trailhead.
Here is the link to trailhead: https://developer.salesforce.com/trailhead?state=id

Salesforce is the BEST CRM and Cloud Platform!!!

Here is my Trailhead profile: 
https://developer.salesforce.com/forums/ForumsTrailheadProfile?userId=005F000000431sYIAQ

Regards,
Sumitkumar Shingavi
Linkedin: https://in.linkedin.com/in/sumitshingavi
Email: sumi.shingavi@gmail.com