Water damage is a clock, not an event. Almost everything in a flooded basement can be saved in the first few hours and almost nothing can be saved after a couple of days. What you do first matters more than what you do well.
Start with safety and the source. If water is anywhere near outlets, the panel, or a furnace, cut the power to that area before you step in, and if you cannot do that safely from outside the water, call an electrician or the utility. Then stop the water: shut off the main if it is a supply line, and stay out of it entirely if it came from a sewer backup, which is a contamination problem rather than a cleaning one.
Next, get standing water out and start moving air. A shop vac and box fans are better than nothing, but there is a limit to what they do. Truck-mounted extraction removes water at a completely different rate, and rate is the whole game here. Meanwhile, get anything that can be lifted up off the floor and out of the room, because furniture legs stain carpet and cardboard wicks water upward into whatever is stacked on top of it.
Two things people do that make it worse: leaving wet carpet down because it looks salvageable, and running the air conditioning to dry the room. Pad under carpet holds water against the subfloor for days and is cheap to replace. Air conditioning cools the air, which lowers its capacity to hold moisture, which is the opposite of drying. Move air and dehumidify instead.
The honest line on salvage: carpet can often be saved if the water was clean and it is extracted and dried fast. Pad almost never is. Drywall that wicked water up more than a few inches has to come out. Anything porous that sat in contaminated water goes, full stop. A good cleaner tells you which category each item is in rather than drying everything and hoping.
This is why our emergency line runs after 7 PM and on Sundays. Pipes do not fail during business hours, and a call at eleven at night is the difference between replacing pad and replacing a finished basement.