De-Mystifying Salesforce

Salesforce, Customer 360, Einstein, Commerce Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing, CRM, CDP, CMS, OMS…. Starting to feel a bit lost? Getting the terminology right is the first step in designing effective solutions that leverage the Salesforce ecosystem. That means knowing the difference between products built on the Salesforce Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform, like Sales Cloud and Service Cloud, and products built on separate technology platforms, like B2C Commerce and most of Marketing Cloud.

In this chapter, we’ll be untangling the key terms you’ll encounter in marketing materials, sales cycles, and throughout the Salesforce product documentation so you can have meaningful conversations with clients or internal stakeholders. We’ll then cover some things you need to know about the Lightning Platform, before moving on to a few other critical technologies that have been added to the Salesforce family of products. The goal here isn’t to go too deep into any of these technologies – we’ll be covering several in more depth in the following chapters – but to refine our language and establish a firm foundational understanding that the rest of the book will build upon.

In this chapter, we’re going to cover the following main topics:

• Learning the language: Salesforce and Customer 360
• Introducing the Lightning Platform (Force.com)
• Additional technology stacks
• Acquisitions and legacy terminology

Throughout this journey, we’ll be following along with Packt Gear, a fictional company that manufactures, markets, and sells outdoor supplies direct to consumers. Packt Gear has been successful in recent years, but their home-grown technology stack is starting to hurt their ability to grow the business quickly. They’ve decided to transform the business by moving to Salesforce…they just need to figure out what that means. Fortunately, they have you to help!