Salesforce for Beginners: A step-by-step guide to optimize sales and marketing and automate business processes with the Salesforce platform, 2nd Edition

As I continue to grow in the salesforce ecosystem, this is fast becoming a go to guide to navigate these trails. I bought the first edition maybe 7 months ago and of course jumped on these as soon as the second edition came out! I have had the pleasure of meeting both authors and they are absolute geniuses in their craft! It's an honor to learn from their wealth of knowledge and experience! Get this book. You won't regret it!

Salesforce for Beginners is a fantastic introduction to the functionality and administrative foundation of the Salesforce Platform. The updated version has a fantastic new chapter on Flow, which is the best reference material I have seen on the subject. I HIGHLY recommend this book for new and experienced Salesforce enthusiasts! Well done!

This book is very useful for Salesforce Beginners that seeks to get practical knowledge with Salesforce through pictures and descriptions. Especially the flow section covers the basics in a super simple and easy understandable format.

“Notes for Salesforce for Beginners, 2nd Edition” (Packt) by Sharif Shaalan and Timothy Royer is an excellent user manual for Salesforce. It completely demonstrates all the basic functions and properties associated with Salesforce. It starts with a basic understanding of the Salesforce cycle, movies through some technical options, and finishes with customization using advanced data types. I do have to mention that I dislike where a product publishes a paid book as a user manual rather than simply providing as part of the delivered product. That said, this would be useful reference for anyone using Salesforce. The first section describes why Salesforce was created and the basics for creating actions within the program as tasks, events, and calendars. Each of these forms the basic structure to make processes within the program progress. These then drive into creating your leads for the program and turning those leads into business opportunities. The second section integrates basic functions into the business flow, working through the development and tracking of leads, setting up a campaign, and basic business analysis. These functions demonstrate how Salesforce can work across multiple spreadsheets to analyze data from two and three-dimensional perspectives. The ability to cross-cut data provides valuable insight to increasing ROI. A third section goes back to some of the administrative processes for SaleForce, working in custom apps, expanding with the SalesForce marketplace, and securing various profiles. The security section mainly focuses on an RBAC approach to assigning permissions to groups or users to access and modify datasets. The marketplace app provides the opportunity to use pre-approved plug-ins to expand the number of things one can do with the product. I wish the marketplace descriptions were a little more detailed, but at least the concept was covered The last section moves to work with the flow, advancing data with formulas, and testing or debugging new products. Each of these is valuable to advanced users, but the implementation was a little lacking in this manual. A number of exercises here would have been useful to move forward as would a discussion of best practices or case studies where others have used SalesForce to a positive effect. Overall, the manual adequately covers all the basics of SalesForce. If you are a regular user, I recommend having a copy on your desk. While inline manuals can be helpful, sometimes it helps to look at additional references while completing the actions, especially if you lack multiple screens. Overall, I recommend the book to anyone using SalesForce.

Salesforce for Beginners, 2nd Ed, was an interesting read. While looking for a book that could be used to train new Salesforce consultants, I found this book.I like the structure of the chapters, they make this book a great reference book and a training guide.I appreciated that it included references to the Classic UI since a new user or admin might inherit an old org that hasn’t migrated yet (but should!!).Personally, I would probably have laid the chapters out differently, in an order that follows the typical business flow like such:LeadsAccountsContactsOpportunitiesActivities (Tasks and Events)But that is as much a matter of preference as a requirement.As an end user, an overview of how to configure the email integrations, Gmail, Outlook, Inbox, and Einstein Activity Capture would have been a great addition, as new users frequently struggle with these, and they are great productivity boosters.The book starts out focused more on the new end user, then advances to some of the admin functions, such as object configuration, and especially an interesting overview of automation via Flow. I would have loved to see something on the mapping of Lead fields during Lead conversion (perhaps in the 3rd edition).I did like that lots of screenshots are included, and that the screenshots are annotated with where on the screen elements being described are located, as learning to navigate around the salesforce UI can take some time to get used to.As a training guide, I think the assessment summaries with the responses included at the end of the book were a great feature, and provide the reader an opportunity to “check their answers".In summary, I felt the book sufficiently covered the basics of Salesforce. As a regular user, especially a new one, I recommend having a copy on your desk as a great way to supplement the online help.As a new Admin, this is a great addition to the library and used as a reference while getting used to your specific implementation.