What Does Salesforce Do?

You may recognize our CEO, our friendly characters, or our cloud logo, but you’re probably here because you want to know, what does Salesforce do? In short: We offer technology and services to help you build strong, lasting customer relationships.

What does Salesforce do?

Salesforce is known for customer relationship management (CRM) software, but we offer so much more. Traditional CRM helps you store, track, and manage customer information. The Salesforce CRM connects all of your departments on one platform, pulling in data from across the company to give a complete view of the customer and the business. It layers in AI to connect the dots in ways that no other company has been able to do.

Our CRM works for every industry and every size of business at any stage of growth. And it lives in the cloud, which means your teams can work together seamlessly — no matter where they are.

Why is a CRM so important? Many companies struggle to fully understand their customer data because the information is siloed. Sales doesn’t share opportunities with marketing. Marketing doesn’t know when a customer has an open service ticket. Commerce doesn’t have transparency on marketing campaigns. It’s all too common. This is where a CRM like Salesforce unites your company — your sales, service, marketing, commerce, and IT teams — around a single, holistic view of your customers. And when you add the capabilities of AI, you connect your CRM and data with actions that transform your customer relationships.

AI is changing the way this work gets done across every role and industry. Autonomous agents are the new stars of your team, enhancing customer experiences and helping businesses make decisions, take action, and slash costs. We see a world where humans and AI agents are driving customer success, together.

How does Salesforce work?

Salesforce CRM lives in the cloud, which means all of your teams can connect online no matter where they’re located. By using the cloud, you lower maintenance costs, make remote work easier, and open up new pay-as-you-go business opportunities. Our SaaS platform helps you to scale rapidly and run Salesforce apps from anywhere in the world in a single, comprehensive system.

Data is the fuel of modern business, but managing it can be challenging. The average enterprise scatters customer data across nearly 900 applications, and tries to connect them with a mish-mash of quick fixes that drags down productivity. But with Data Cloud, you can access and harmonize any data — historical, web, mobile, API, CRM and even real-time — so all your teams have a complete picture of customers and their histories on one trusted, secure platform. When you unify and automate millions of data points, you create a seamless experience for customers. With that more personalized experience, customers are more likely to build trust with your company — and your clean data clears a runway for AI. 

Agentforce, the first conversational AI assistant for CRM, helps you generate sales tasks, create personalized customer content, or even write code. It increases productivity with built-in automation as well as predictive and generative AI, and it drives growth by helping your employees exceed customer expectations. Every piece of generated content — like an email or product description — is optimized for performance because Einstein is always learning what content performs best for your business, and results just keep improving. 

And with Slack, Salesforce simplifies communication and information sharing between customers, teams, and partners to power digital workflows and supercharge productivity. 

What is the ROI of Salesforce?

We have an entire support ecosystem to help you reach your goals fast. In fact, 92% of Salesforce customers achieve a positive return on investment (ROI) in nine months*. The Salesforce Success Ecosystem gives you unrestricted access to resources, best practices, and product experts. Collaborate with industry experts and our professional services team. Access any of our thousands of apps in the AppExchange.  Train your workforce on in-demand skills for free with Trailhead. The Salesforce Success Ecosystem helps ensure you get the most out of your Salesforce investment.

With Salesforce, you can lower costs and boost productivity across your entire organization using one trusted platform. It increases productivity with built-in automation as well as predictive and generative AI, and it drives efficient growth by helping your employees exceed customer expectations.

Learn how Salesforce helps you increase efficiency, improve results, and lower costs.

Salesforce for sales

Salesforce was originally built to help sales teams. With generative AI and autonomous agents, Sales Cloud provides sellers with unified insights and recommendations to help them spend less time on busywork and more time closing deals. And better still, by connecting sales with marketing, service, and more, your opportunities increase, and your customer experiences feel more seamless and engaged. On average, our customers have realized up to 32% cost savings**, 30% increase in sales productivity, and 30% increase in win rates after implementing Sales Cloud.*

How does this happen? Our platform simplifies and manages the entire sales cycle — from prospecting to deal close to upsell and cross-sell. With Sales Cloud, you’ve got the full sales tech stack ready to automate and scale all your manual sales processes, inspect your pipelines and forecasts with precision accuracy, and connect all customer touchpoints for the best buying experience. And now, our AI can automatically generate such sales tasks as composing emails, scheduling meetings, and preparing for the next interaction.

Salesforce for customer service

With Service Cloud, Salesforce customers decrease their support costs by 20% on average.* Our leading customer service tools help you scale service that customers love while maximizing ROI and driving efficiencies from the contact center to the field — all on a single cloud platform. Autonomous agents, powered by AI, can go through knowledge articles and previous cases to personally respond to customers and generate chat replies to solve their problems.

Today, customers expect to interact with your business through their preferred channels. We can help you manage those critical touchpoints to provide seamless customer experiences including customer service, self-service channels, field service, and digital channels like chat, SMS, and social messaging apps. With automation and intelligence, your agents can resolve cases faster, provide instant support, and have a complete and informed view of your customers at every interaction.  When your teams are working together, there are endless opportunities for time and cost savings.

Salesforce for marketing

Marketing Cloud helps you save time, increase efficiency, and meet customers on their preferred channels — email, web, social, mobile, ads, or any combination. And with the help of unified analytics and AI insights, rest assured you’re getting the most out of every dollar and optimizing campaign performance. Marketing teams that use Salesforce estimate a 33% average increase in customer engagement and 22% average decrease in costs to acquire new customers.* 

With Marketing Cloud Customer Data Platform, you can better understand your customers through unified data and engage them with relevant messaging, delivering hyper-personalized interactions everywhere. With the addition of AI Agents for Marketing, you can generate dynamic personalized content to engage customers and prospects on their preferred channel.

Salesforce for B2C and B2B shopping and commerce

If you want to build seamless business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) commerce experiences that help grow revenue, engage customers, and connect commerce to the rest of the business, Salesforce has tools for that, too.

Easy to implement and adapt, Commerce Cloud can help you maximize revenue by creating personalized shopping experiences across channels and removing friction from the buying experience, even if a customer starts their shopping journey on one channel and completes it on another.

In fact, Commerce Cloud customers see a 27% decrease in costs to place orders and a 28% increase in online revenue.* That is why our commerce tools are trusted by industry-leading brands.

Salesforce for IT

Whether your team is tech-minded or not, our integrated Information Technology (IT) tools can help your entire organization automate processes, build more intelligent apps, and secure data across Salesforce. We’ll put you on the path to increase productivity by automating processes that help teams across your organization improve scale, transparency, and security as you need it. With Salesforce, organizations see a 19% decrease in IT costs.* 

See an example of Salesforce in action in this global customer story

We have many customer stories to share, but let’s look at just one example of how Salesforce helps deliver success. 

L’Oréal, the world’s #1 beauty company, has always combined the best of beauty and technology. And with the help of Salesforce, it’s forging deeper customer relationships with unique beauty journeys tailor-made to each consumer’s taste, budget, and shopping habits.

With Marketing Cloud Personalization, L’Oréal builds individual consumer journeys from unified and historical data, delivered through the channels each consumer prefers, such as email or social media. ‘‘Messaging based on shopping habits and use of Salesforce services powers our quest to bring greater personalization, relevance, and satisfaction to our consumers in this ever-evolving and complex beauty consumer journey,” said Asmita Dubey, chief digital and marketing officer.

Throughout L’Oréal’s 200-plus websites, the beauty giant has integrated Commerce Cloud with AI product recommendations based on a consumer’s browsing or purchase history. So if a customer adds a lightweight sunscreen to their cart, for example, Einstein may recommend SPF lip balms or moisturizers at checkout. This powerful AI capability has enabled L’Oréal to generate double-digit increases in average order value (AOV) from its websites.

L’Oréal also uses Service Cloud to consolidate data across brands and channels, such as SMS, chat, and email, into a single view of each consumer. From a single dashboard, agents can pull up consumers’ service and purchase history, view the status of their orders, and even see activity updates in real time. Not only does this provide more seamless experiences for customers looking for help, the employee experience is also better.

“Service Cloud reduces case processing time because agents don’t have to struggle with so many different systems,” said Dubey. “This allows us to better care for our consumers, and therefore drive better consumer satisfaction.” As a result, agent satisfaction scores are up by 70%.

By unifying its customer data, utilizing the power of AI, and uniting its teams with Salesforce, L’Oréal can deliver ultra-personalized consumer experiences on a global scale for its millions of customers.

What is Salesforce best known for?

Salesforce is best known as the first company to put business software in the cloud. No longer would companies need to install expensive and custom-built computer infrastructures. And we’ve been building on that ever since to become the world’s #1 AI CRM.

Today, we continue to innovate what a CRM is capable of with generative AI, unified data, and best-in-class CRM to help companies connect with their customers in new and better ways.

As a company, we do much more than build great products. We believe that our greatest resource is our values, and that businesses big and small can use their platforms for change to build a better future.

We’re doing what we can to tackle the current climate crisis, trust crisis, and the crisis of inequality. Since we began in 1999, we’ve placed a major emphasis on supporting the global environment. We launched Net Zero Cloud, and we’re behind the 1 trillion trees effort to unleash a global reforestation movement.

Companies can create welcoming environments for all employees by seeking diversity and teaching inclusivity. We have an equality at work module on our Trailhead online learning platform with more information. We also have training anyone can access on how to build ethical and inclusive products. It’s part of a movement to build technology with intention.

Additionally, our 1-1-1 philanthropic model means we’ve donated more than $240 million in grants, contributed 3.5 million hours of community service, and provided product donations for more than 39,000 nonprofits and educational institutions since we started. You can learn more about our philanthropic efforts here.

Why is Salesforce obsessed with customers?

Salesforce has always been customer-obsessed, which is why customer success is one of our core values. With customer expectations higher than ever, businesses can’t be successful without putting their customer at the center of their business. Every company must be a customer company.

A whopping 80% of customers say the experience a company provides is as important as its products and services, according to Salesforce’s State of the Connected Customer report. This means it’s not only about what you offer customers, but when, where, why, and how you reach them.

Today’s customers want to trust they’re getting what they need from you, when and where they need it. They want experiences to be effortless, and they’re loyal to brands they can count on. Salesforce’s connected customer experiences help you build that trust and loyalty.

Humans and agents driving customer success

Now you know that Salesforce creates CRM-based tools for companies of all shapes and sizes. As the #1 AI CRM, Salesforce gives your teams a centralized location to store, track, and manage customer information. We bring the benefits of AI into your organization with autonomous agents that do real work so that you can build strong, lasting relationships with your customers. We bring the power of CRM, AI, and data together on one trusted platform.

Learn more about how your company can connect CRM, AI, data, and trust to drive success and growth. Find out which Salesforce solutions are right for your business with our Solution Finder, and continue your learning journey with these resources: 

The Power of CRM + AI + Data — Discover how to connect with your customers in a whole new way.

Build Your AI Skills — Learn the fundamentals of AI and how it can help your business.

*Source: 2024 Salesforce Success Metrics Global Highlights. Data is aggregated from 2,165 customers across 9 countries.

** Based on average costs of comparable solutions. Information purposes only.