OrgReady

Salesforce Skills & Readiness

← Start Your Salesforce Career

Lesson 1 of 18 · 8–12 min

What CRM and Salesforce Do

A Salesforce developer must understand the business process before choosing an object, automation, or line of code.

Learning sequence · data model first, security layers next
  1. What CRM and Salesforce Do
  2. The Salesforce Ecosystem and Major Clouds
  3. Org, App, Object, Field, and Record
  4. Standard and Custom Objects
  5. Common Standard Objects
  6. Field Types and Data Quality
  7. Objects, Fields & Records
  8. Lookup vs Master-Detail
  9. Many-to-Many Relationships and Junction Objects
  10. Profiles, Permission Sets & Object Access
  11. Field-Level Security
  12. OWD and Least-Privilege Record Access
  13. Opening Access: Role Hierarchy, Sharing Rules, Public Groups & Apex Sharing
  14. Apex First Steps
  15. Variables and Collections
  16. SOQL and DML Basics
  17. Why Asynchronous Apex Exists
  18. REST Callout Introduction

Your focus

Start Your Salesforce Career

FULL · Learn • Apply

  • Connect CRM terms to a complete customer journey.

Learning objective

Explain CRM in business terms and place Salesforce inside a customer lifecycle.

The concept

Customer relationship management (CRM) is the operating system for customer-facing work: it keeps shared customer data, records interactions, and supports processes from prospecting through service. Salesforce is a cloud platform that provides CRM applications plus tools for configuration, automation, analytics, integration, and custom development.

Worked example

A prospect becomes a qualified deal, a customer, and later a support case. Sales, service, and management need one reliable history instead of separate spreadsheets.

Start with the business outcome. Identify who does the work, what information they need, and which step changes the state of the relationship. Only then map the process to Salesforce records and automation.

One customer lifecycle

  1. 1.Prospect

  2. 2.Sales opportunity

  3. 3.Customer

  4. 4.Service

  • Prospect connects to Sales opportunity
  • Sales opportunity connects to Customer
  • Customer connects to Service

Common mistake

Describing Salesforce as only a database or beginning with code before defining the business process.

Interview angle

Give a plain-language CRM definition, then explain how shared data and process automation improve a concrete sales or service journey.

Pause and apply

What customer handoff in a familiar business would fail if every team kept a separate spreadsheet?

Official references

Reviewed 2026-09-23. Examples are illustrative; no code is executed here.

Key takeaways

  • CRM starts with customer processes.
  • Salesforce combines applications, data, automation, analytics, and code.

Practice next

No linked assessment is available for this lesson. Use the pause-and-apply question to check your reasoning.

Reading these lessons does not yet save completion. Challenge results continue to provide assessment evidence.