CRM headache? Why Salesforce is the best medicine
It can be incredibly troubling to choose a CRM.
These are the times when we wish we had the magic powers to foresee the future, and simply know with certainty what your business needs.
The essence of every business (whatever yours might be) is always the same.
We need speed, efficiency, data clarity, minimisation of mistakes, scalability, satisfied clients, and a healthy pipeline.
It doesn’t matter where your business is at this point. What matters is where you want to go and the best way to get there.
And this is what we are going to address here.
About Salesforce
I’m sure you have read lots of statistics, reviews or testimonials about the cloud software powerhouse called Salesforce.
If you haven’t, here is a good place to start.
Salesforce market is becoming bigger every day, and it’s for a reason.
Today, it’s the number one company to work for in the world.
A gigantic number of professionals are part of this community in one way or the other.
The future looks bright for this CRM.
Salesforce deals with key functional areas of your business. For marketing administration, you can use Marketing Cloud. For Sales automation, there is Sales Cloud. For customer support, we have Service Cloud. For collaboration and knowledge base there are Communities.
As Paul Goodney neatly explained in his Salesforce Admin Handbook, Salesforce’s life cycle covers your customers’ complete journey, starting from initial marketing campaigns all the way to customer support.
Take a look at the visual explanation below:
You might be thinking: So what, other CRM’s do the same thing, why is Salesforce so special?
Well, let’s lay out the key aspects on why Salesforce deserves a chance.
Mobile Friendly
The Salesforce Mobile App is of great importance.
Lots of CRMs nowadays will have mobile-friendly interfaces, and a lot of those will be accessed through your phone’s internet browser. It’s good, but it’s not excellent.
As shown in the image below, Salesforce has come up with an intuitive interface which will allow your employees to access it from everywhere.
Imagine entering a lead on a corporate event straight into the system.
The system will automatically show if the lead has a record with your company, what the email history is, and will possibly give you the ideas on how to approach it.
It saves time and gives you the know-how straight away.
Einstein
Meet Salesforce’s Brain Child. Artificial Intelligence conveniently called Einstein.
Einstein is created to help organisations handle data in a more knowledgeable and intuitive way.
Whether you are a specialised Data Scientist or a Sales Rep, this tool will do the hard work before you even ask for it.
When using Einstein, you can expect to encounter advanced machine learning, predictive analytics, natural language processing and smart data discovery.
Salesforce’s Platinum Partner, Accenture, is a great believer in this AI tool.
Among other things, they discovered that Einstein can predict patterns of data and make intelligent suggestions and recommendations. It will answer questions such as, “What can be done better?” or “How can I improve my ROI?”
Unity of the Workforce
Chatter is an enterprise social network built into Salesforce.
It allows you to communicate with your colleagues, keep track of ongoing projects and share valuable information – all in one handy outlet.
You can find relevant files, search for a topic and engage with employees who work on the other side of the world.
Chatter was built to promote collaboration and to unite the workforce. With it, you can seamlessly connect different teams on key issues, allowing fast feedback and innovation.
To top it off, you can create groups for discussions, get email notifications about the latest progress, and run polls among your employees.
Pretty neat, eh?
Data Clarity
Data is like water for a business. If it’s murky or even non-existent, the life of your company is at risk.
With Salesforce, you can use the 360-degree view of your customer journey to your advantage.
Your sales or customer service reps can use the collected data to personalise their approach or even see which deals might slip away.
Salesforce offers tools like Einstein Captivity (link) and Inbox Feature (link) to automate the data capture process for you.
This allows your reps to speed along while the aforementioned features note the information and assign it to the right opportunity or customer.
Let’s not leave out the dashboards feature. Building useful dashboards is a heavenly tool which allows you to understand the health of your business at a glance – all of which wouldn’t be possible without the carefully collected data.
Trailhead
When talking about the Salesforce platform, there is one ‘flaw’ that comes up over and over again: Salesforce is complicated and you need experts to run it.
Not true at all.
Trailhead is a free learning platform designed to improve your knowledge of Salesforce.
Today, many Salesforce beginners and enthusiasts begin their journey on Trailhead.
It has even become a show-reel – a place where you earn your badges by going through the modules, which means you can show them off to your prospective employer.
Or just learn something new.
No matter what your understanding of the platform is, you can grow it from Trailhead.
The best part is that you can create a developer account and implement your knowledge then and there.
It’s simple. Open. Collaborative. Free.
Scalability
Speaking of the future of your business, what happens 10 years down the line when the economy changes? When the old ways of doing business are just a faded memory?
As an easy, integrable platform, Salesforce has already thought about the future for you.
On AppExchange store (Salesforce’s equivalent to the Google Play store or the App Store), there are thousands of apps available to add to your Salesforce CRM. Many new apps are added daily, and the listed apps are regularly maintained and upgraded. Also, there are plenty of customer reviews to help you decide on the right solution for your business.
The apps are designed to easily extend the functionality of your business system when you need it.
And now comes the best part. Using prebuilt components, you can create your own apps!
Brilliant, isn’t it?
To conclude, Salesforce Ecosystem is a giant.
The arguments listed above only cover a small number of the tools. We have only scratched the surface. There are new features and benefits being developed every day.
The community grows as we speak.
New members are constantly entering the ‘Salesforce Ohana’.
Let’s welcome them.