Sales are the lifeline of any business, which is the reason that businesses make their best efforts to boost them. Measuring sales activities, thus, becomes one of the key strategies for better sales management. However, you need much more than data o the activity of the sales staff to get better results. Rather, you need to know what to do with these data for taking the sales to the next level.
A CRM application can serve as a game changer for enabling the sales team to maximize their productivity and giving the stakeholders a complete overview of the team’s performance by comprehensive reporting. When it comes to choosing the right CRM solution for enterprises, Salesforce implementation emerges as the best option. In fact, it is the best thing that you can do for your business to make it ready for 2020 and beyond. Before you embrace this powerful solution, here is a complete guide to help.
What is Salesforce?
Salesforce is a leading cloud-based CRM software which helps enterprises grow into more effective, efficient, and streamlined organization on all fronts of sales and customer relationships. The CRM was launched in the late nineties and has come a long way since then, being recognized as the most comprehensive and innovative solution that addresses the entire business needs. From tracking customer activity to marketing to customer acquisition, and customer retention, there is much that Salesforce can handle for an enterprise. For this reason, embracing this application does not remain a choice for business enterprises in 2020 and ahead.
Why choose Salesforce over other CRM solutions?
With the choice of CRM applications that are available in the market, you need to have good reasons for choosing Salesforce over the others. Here are some reasons why it makes a great choice:
Ease of use: The best thing about Salesforce is the ease of use it offers. Users can log in just from anywhere, collaborate with the team members, and view and update the customer data whenever they want.
Customizable: A platform that is easy to customize, Salesforce becomes a good option for enterprises of all sizes. Whether it is about adding fields or modules, changing workflows, or creating sales processes, Salesforce customization can handle them all.
Cloud-based: Being a cloud-based platform, Salesforce takes flexibility a notch higher. It offers a sophisticated and secure cloud infrastructure and solutions for marketing, sales, support, and analytics.
Efficient Reporting: With this CRM, you get a powerful suite of reporting tools which enable you to save in money and time, while you get real-time reports and analytics as well.
Integration Options: As the platform comes with a well-documented and robust API, Salesforce Integration of any type is easily achievable. Mapping your business processes on to the application is easier than you think.
Mobile CRM: Another amazing reason that makes Salesforce the choicest platform for enterprises is that it is a mobile CRM. This is something that every enterprise looks for in the era of mobility.
Customer Success Platform: Salesforce enables the enterprise to unify different key functions of the business effectively to achieve customer success. It facilitates selling, providing service, knowing the customers, marketing, collaborating, and building apps on a single platform.
What is Salesforce used for?
Essentially, enterprises use Salesforce to understand customers, connect with them at all levels, and expand their customer base. With this cloud-based software, companies can track analytics for customer success, customer support, and customer complaints all in real time. Because of the diverse range of clouds and applications it offers, Salesforce assists enterprises with tracking sales and spending, marketing, and analyzing performance.
Further, the users can leverage the solution analyze data from various sources, implement sales strategies, maintain communication with the customers, and more. Simply speaking, Salesforce serves as the one-stop solution for enterprises to maintain, manage, communicate with and extend their customer base, and grow their revenue streams.
What are the benefits that a business can avail from Salesforce investment?
There is much that you can gain for your enterprise by investing in Salesforce implementation. Let us explain these benefits in detail:
Customer information
Salesforce is capable of retrieving useful information for the users, both in terms of quality and quantity. It offers a complete overview of every individual account, along with key profile details such as contact, event, task, and opportunity tied to a lead. The entire information is found at one convenient location for the whole team to see. With such useful information at hand, the team has much that they need even before approaching the potential customers. Moreover, shared customer information lets the sales representatives to step in for the others in their absence. This also helps them eliminate gaps in the customer support model and reduce the cumbersome paperwork and spreadsheets to manage information with greater ease.
Account planning
With the customer information being at the team’s fingertips, they can manage and plan for accounts independently and drive better results as well. Salesforce even has an option to create to-do items, which enables the team to stay organized throughout the day. Additionally, they can create reminders on calendars to follow up with the customers, account managers, and managers about important duties. It also becomes possible to see the time spent on each specific account. With the account planning options that Salesforce offers, managing clients becomes simpler than ever.
Time management
As Salesforce provided comprehensive customer information and planning resources, the benefit of outstanding time management comes as a part of the deal. You get all the information you require for prioritizing work for the clients, which means that you can simply organize the tasks for different accounts on the basis of priorities. Furthermore, you have access to built-in calendar tools which can be used for visualizing your schedule and managing your calendar across days, weeks, months, or years.
Team collaboration
Salesforce serves as a bridge that facilitates communication between the entire team. You can use the ‘Chatter’ feature to discuss work-related information, such as clients, territories, and other essential details with individuals or groups. Members can even convey to the team that a special account requires extra nurturing. The team can secure the advantage of collaboration for prioritizing and scheduling tasks to pursue more leads and close more sales.
Accessibility
Being a cloud product, Salesforce is accessible wherever you have Internet access, on desktops and mobile devices. This empowers the business to stay in touch with the team at all hours. Additionally, the enterprise need not maintain a centralized location for its data as it is stored securely in the cloud and can be accessed whenever there is a need for it. Besides the security advantages, the team can use the cloud data to stay up-to-date on clients, regardless of their location.
Why would you need a Salesforce consulting partner?
Although Salesforce is a highly powerful, customizable and extendable application, you cannot expect to avail its full benefits unless you know how to implement it and integrate it in the existing ecosystem. To properly utilize its potential, you need to have a proper strategy in place. A properly planned and implemented solution, in fact, can save time and resources, while delivering the desired benefits as well. The best way to do this is by collaborating with a seasoned Salesforce consulting partner that knows the platform and has extensive experience in implementing it for enterprise-level businesses.
How can you choose the best Salesforce consulting partner?
Salesforce implementation is a complicated task and you cannot imagine doing it without a consulting partner to handle the process from start to end. Choosing a provider is easier said than done as you need to collaborate only with the right one. Here are some things that you can bear in mind while handing over the responsibility to a consulting partner.
- Look for holistic experience that spans areas such as sales, technologies, and project management so that they can implement the platform seamlessly and ensure that it delivers the desired performance and benefits.
- Ensure that the prospective partner has an agile and result-oriented implementation approach that is based on best practices. Someone who assures a seamless collaboration between your team and theirs will make an ideal choice.
- Budget is another factor that you cannot ignore because you need someone whose services you can afford. Having a proper discussion upfront right in your first meeting is a good idea because you have to be sure to carry the project through within an optimal spending.
- Do check their pricing structure, whether they work on project basis or also have an hourly payment model. Obviously, you must be comfortable with the payment method if you want to work with them in the long run.
- Ongoing support is something that you should absolutely expect from your Salesforce implementation partner because you will need an expert to handle issues and challenges post-implementation as well.
Conclusion
Now that you understand everything that goes into Salesforce implementation for your business, you are ready to take the next step. This is the time when you will need the right partner to guide you and assist you through the transformative journey. OrangeMantra is a trusted Salesforce partner you can trust for achieving your vision and empowering your business with this amazing platform. Our services are comprehensive, ranging from architectural definition, to agile implementation, integration in the existing ecosystem, global roll outs, legacy application modernization, and support services. If you are looking to accelerate business growth with Salesforce implementation, we can help.
