How Organizations Can Leverage The Power Of Salesforce – Even Beyond Sales!
The sales team today looks nothing like what classic movies like Glengarry Glen Ross have portrayed to us. Large teams of people making large volumes of cold calls to large lists of prospects are now replaced by socially-savvy communicators building curated relationships. Sales has become a cross-functional discipline needing the attention of functions like marketing, product management and development, customer service, and logistics. And these empowered and extended sales team carry their entire business in the palm of their hands.
Of course, that’s only normal. We are all now more connected through mobile devices, than at any other time in history, connected to our peers, our co-workers, and our business. Smart organizations are exploiting this connectivity to make efficient and effective sales strategies that draw upon the resources of functions across the enterprise.
If you manage a sales team that uses Salesforce, you’re always looking for ways to get the full benefit of this powerful tool. When you dig deeper into the functionality of Salesforce, you’ll discover features that help you achieve a critical balance between the features of the tool and the inherent capabilities of your organization.
Let’s look at how Salesforce makes every department a sales contributor and aids in bringing in more revenue.
Salesforce- some key capabilities for the modern enterprise
Salesforce is a cloud-based CRM platform, with standalone applications for sales, customer service, and marketing included in Salesforce’s comprehensive product suite. These applications manage customer accounts, track sales leads, conduct & run marketing campaigns, and provide service post-sale. In effect, they help the organization build a relationship taking into consideration the impact points across the entire customer lifecycle. These capabilities are tightly integrated, cohesive, and comprehensive.
In some ways, the true power of the Salesforce solution is that it allows businesses to automate a well-structured sales process. It allows the creation of intelligent business workflows including setup approval and automation, custom applications, API integrations with business tools like Outlook, etc. It provides functional strength to the workflow by providing ample customer details and allows easy maintenance of efficient customer communications across multiple channels.
Users across the relevant departments can get a 360-degree view of each customer and make informed decisions based on contact and purchase history, notes on previous interactions, public information, and insights gained from social media. This comprehensive view of the customer can drive meaningful strategies for all the interactions with the customer including creating specific product bundles, pricing, service levels, and objection-handling content that helps drive the customer forward in the buyer journey.
An exciting addition to this toolkit is Salesforce’s artificial intelligence, Einstein. Einstein can automate manual tasks like data entry and bring cutting-edge intelligence into the sales process. For instance, it can track where the lead came from, score it, and use that to inform which products and services may be most appropriate to offer to increase the potential for closure. It also helps optimize the efforts by predicting when to approach a lead so teams don’t waste time chasing leads when they are cold.
The customization possibilities contribute to amping up the power of Salesforce. For instance, Custom objects enable you to create a database that is specific to your organization. You can use custom objects to link multiple records into one overarching record. These custom objects help your team save time as they look for specific bits of information related to the same account. As an added benefit, aggregating this information also enables the capability to divine deeper insights about the cost of sales and even supply and demand trends.
How does Salesforce help businesses grow?
Salesforce is ultimately a conversion-centric platform that helps businesses grow by increasing sales. It helps the marketing team generate a higher volume of sales-ready leads through better-informed and more intelligent marketing. It helps the sales team manage and nurture those leads until the right time to approach the customer. It tells the product management and development team what shape the possible product bundles or offers could take to improve the chances of closure. When the deal is closed, Salesforce can use that information to direct future marketing and sales efforts to improve succeeding efforts.
Salesforce supports customer retention by giving the customer service team the information they need to offer extremely relevant and appropriate customer service solutions. The priority is always to identify the most effective solution for each customer. That means knowing what SLAs to aim for. A positive customer service experience is, of course, extremely important to drive repeat business, create customer loyalty, and build references.
Salesforce helps increase sales productivity by streamlining all the allied business processes. This allows the staff across these functions to focus more energy on their role in making the sale happen and enrich the business.
Conclusion:
Salesforce promises to take businesses to the next level. The sales team will find their daily functions easier to perform with greater efficiency. Eliminating all barriers allows the modern sales team to understand everything the customer needs. Placing the customer at their fingertips, in a manner of speaking, makes it easy for them to direct the organization’s efforts in building a mutually fulfilling customer relationship by utilizing the most important features of a CRM++ solution like Salesforce.
