Salesforce Vs. The Competition: A CRM Primer

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(Image: Salesforce.com)

Salesforce CRM

Salesforce.com's customer-relationship management (CRM) systems enable its customers to track, manage, analyze, and share information about sales opportunities, leads, and ongoing processing, and even make forecasts about sales.

Although at age 16 Salesforce.com is younger than SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, and some other major players offering CRM solutions, it's sitting on top of the sector. The latest report from Gartner indicates that Salesforce.com leads worldwide CRM software vendors with 18.4% marketshare in 2014, compared to No. 2 SAP, with 12.1% marketshare. Salesforce.com also had the highest revenue growth (28.2%) from 2013 to 2014, versus No. 2 Microsoft with 21.7% growth.

Salesforce categorizes its products under various cloud-based offerings, including Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Community Cloud, and Analytics Cloud. Its solutions are customizable and can be tailored to meet a business' particular requirements.

Salesforce also offers Force.com and Heroku, platform-as-a-service (PaaS) application development frameworks enabling cloud-based application development, as well as the AppExchange marketplace, which offers more than 300 mobile-ready apps based on the Salesforce1 platform. Overall, the Salesforce.com platform helps improve productivity by managing and organizing contacts, opportunities, leads, and partners.

Take a look through this slideshow for a quick breakdown of this popular CRM platform and data on how it stacks up against its competitors.

[Cover image: NorthernStock/iStockphoto]

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