Salesforce explained using Harry Potter

OKAY - let's combine two of my favourite things. It's not peanut butter and banana. Not a chai tea and blankets. It's not even pay-day and a 20% discount at Fix and Foggs (GASP). Today we are combining Salesforce and Harry Potter. Booyah.

To understand Salesforce, you really need to think of it as a massive database. Let's look at this database below:

   

   

Taking what we know from basic databases, like the one above, we can translate it almost directly into Salesforce language:

    

  

  

  

  

   

Enter into the scene Hogwarts. Say you're a Salesforce Admin at Hogwarts (yes really) and it's your job to organise the entire schools' records because, honestly, magic only goes so far. We all know who the real wizard is here. It's you. The Salesforce Admin. To get things started, you make an app in Salesforce for the entire Hogwarts system. Fan-bloody-tastic.

  

Then you decide you need to record who is in each house. Pretty important stuff. To do this, you need to create an object or table. Unfortunately, Salesforce doesn't come with a pre-made Hogwarts House object. This means you need to make a custom object instead. Specifically for your Hogwarty needs. It could look something like this:

  

  

  

  

  

Once you've done that, you set up another object for recording students. So far so good. Then you get a call from the kitchens. Ah. Turns out there's a big feast tonight and Hogwarts needs a few thousand bottles of butterbeer. Luckily, Hogwarts has a tight business relationship with the Three Broomsticks, a pub down the road. Being the switched on Admin you are, you realise that this should be recorded in Salesforce. What to do?

  

  

To store information about the Three Broomsticks, you create an account. An account in Salesforce represents a company you do business with. Setting it up might look something like this:

  

 

  

  

  

  

  

Now a business is only as good as the people who run it. So to really cement the relationship in the cloud, you need to store the information of your main point of contact at the Three Broomsticks. Which would be, as we all know, Madam Rosmerta. To store her information, you create a contact. If accounts are companies that you do business with, contacts are the people who work for them. Your contact could end up looking like this:

  

  

  

This means that when we visit the account page for the Three Broomsticks, it will look like this:

  

  

  

  

  

Ta-da! All nice and tidy. Now, say you have a load of potential students. These are kids who may or may not be muggles, and may or may not be attending Hogwarts in the near future. They are, in other words, potential customers (there's no way Hogwarts is free for students. Definitely some high priced education going on here). In Salesforce, these are known as leads. If you'd arrived before all the drama started, it's very likely you'd have to create a lead for Harry Potter. Creating a lead has heaps of different fields to fill out and looks like this:

  

  

  

Once you've created a lead, you can view it in Salesforce (see below). This is a super handy way to see a lead, because you can also see the different stages that lead has to go through. In Harry Potter's case, he is currently in the stage of 'Open-Not Contacted'. However, we can see that there's also a task assigned to Harry Potter called 'Letters'...it might be interesting to note that there's no limit on the number of letters sent (not pointing any fingers, but it might be your fault Harry was literally bombarded with letters and owl droppings). Details are important!

So, there you have it! A basic Salesforce App with objects and leads and accounts and contacts, all set up for Hogwarts. Now go forth and continue your Salesforce journey! Sirius-ly. Get going.