Transcripted Summary
Hello, and welcome to chapter 1 of our awesome course around Salesforce test automation.
In this chapter, we will look at the basics of CRM, Salesforce and understand what a Salesforce org is.
I'm hoping you brought along some good coffee, or tea, and a pen and notebook to make some notes. So let's begin.
# What is a CRM?
First and foremost, let's understand what a CRM is.
CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management.
To understand it better, let's go back in our past and let's say we are five year olds trying to run a lemonade stand, just like this awesome team in the picture with their hairy friend on the side.
To run this lemonade stand, let's say that we have printed out some flyers.
We have posted them around in the community.
And slowly, gradually, some of our customers start trickling in.
One fine day, we get a huge order of 50 glasses of lemonade from a nearby school.
Wow, isn't that a big order?
While all of this is happening, some of our customers want extra water. Some of them want sugar sachets, or some are demanding paper tissues and napkins.
This is after sales support.
As you can see, running a simple lemonade stand or a small business can get complicated very quickly.
Now, let's zoom out a little bit and look at all of these functions.
Basically, a CRM software helps us maintain all of these functions in a streamlined fashion, whether it's customer success, revenue and integrations, sales, or service.
A CRM helps get the most out of any business efficiently.
Let's recap very quickly - CRM stands for customer relationship management, and a CRM software can help us run businesses fluidly.
# What is Salesforce?
Now that we know what CRM software is, let's understand - what is Salesforce?
Is it a software, is it a platform, or a company, or maybe all three of them?
Let's understand what Salesforce is in our next slide.
Salesforce is a CRM platform for managing all your company's relationships and interactions with customers and potential customers as well.
The goal is simple.
How can we improve business relationships?
It helps companies stay connected to customers, streamline processes, and improve profitability with its cloud technologies, such as Marketing Cloud, Sales Cloud, and Service Cloud.
Now that we know what CRM is, and what Salesforce is, and how it can help us as a CRM platform, let's understand what Salesforce Orgs are.
While working with Salesforce teams, you'll hear terms like "sandbox", "org", and "pod" a number of times.
Let's spend a few minutes on this concept.
Salesforce uses a multi-tenancy architecture, meaning that a number of customers share IT resources such as database servers, application servers, and infrastructure required to run applications, resulting in an environment that can be standardized and optimized for all efficiently and at a lower cost for each tenant as the resources are managed centrally.
To do so, Salesforce groups together around 10,000 customers or so together into what it calls a "point of deployment", or "pod", for short.
A pod is also known as an instance.
If you request to enable a feature such as person accounts, territory management, or multicurrency, Salesforce will request your Org ID, so that it can enable the feature just for your Org.
Finally, what are Salesforce environments?
An environment is a Salesforce Org that is used for a specific purchase.
Salesforce customers will have an Org that is used as their production or live environment.
They will also usually have additional orgs used for development, testing, integration, or training purposes, and these are referred to as development environments, testing environments, etc.
Non-production orgs will be housed in one of the sandbox instances.
All of this is summarized in the picture.
