If You Think Salesforce Is Just for CRM, You’re Missing out on the Best Part
What if we told you that as advanced as business has become in 2018 … that as much as customer relationship management (CRM), software as a service (SaaS) and business intelligence (BI) have helped us work smarter and more efficiently … you can take it even farther still! And you can actually do it with Salesforce!
These different tech solutions, all based on gathering and analyzing data, can give you deeper insights into your customer base and revenue. So, imagine if you could go one step further. Imagine that you can create your own applications for customers and employees to streamline workflows and to enhance the user experience. Now, imagine that you can do it with Salesforce – a tool you may already use.
While Salesforce is best known for its powerful CRM capabilities, this amazing tool has way more to offer. Salesforce is what’s known as PaaS – platform as a service. Beyond SaaS, which is what most CRM software is, PaaS provides a platform upon which you can build applications. That’s right! You can build applications with it!
What is PaaS?
Just as SaaS uses the cloud to provide software capabilities without the need to host or maintain software, PaaS provides development ability without the need for managing hardware and software. That’s a big win for businesses of all sizes.
Building custom applications requires software, hardware, operating systems, databases, middleware, and managed services. It can be a complex, expensive, slow process and often requires a lot of people power, too. But those needs aren’t as big with PaaS! PaaS services, such as Salesforce, remove the need for so much infrastructure by providing it to you over the internet. With Salesforce, you also get workflow and design tools to help speed up the development process.
How businesses can use Salesforce as a PaaS
As a platform as a service, Salesforce gives businesses the tools they need to develop enterprise apps without the need to invest in infrastructure and development operations. Businesses can roll out enterprise-grade apps to solve problems and bring old legacy processes (think spreadsheets or pen and paper) to the Cloud faster and at less cost than doing custom development on a different stack.
Salesforce is essentially a giant platform of services on which you can build your business processes. Sounds amazing, right? Before you start developing and customizing Salesforce, you’ll need to determine whether you actually need customization (and what kind of customization) and whether the development can be handled in house.
To get a better sense of how to determine your own Salesforce customization needs, download our whitepaper that lays out the strategy and requirements you’ll want to consider.
How to tell when DIY Salesforce customization might actually cost you more
Will doing a DIY job on your Salesforce customization really save you money?
Maybe.
Read this whitepaper to find out.
