When you’re looking for a CRM, it’s impossible to miss Salesforce. You’ve likely heard of the magic it’s done for sales teams everywhere. It makes sense to consider it, but is Salesforce the right fit? What are the key benefits of Salesforce you should keep in mind, and how much would it cost to implement the platform in your day-to-day ops?
This article will show you everything you need to know to make an informed decision.
Who Should Use Salesforce?
Before we look at some of the benefits of using Salesforce, we should first consider if Salesforce is right for you. When it comes to products, Salesforce has something available for almost every type of business. It, for instance, offers:
- Sales Cloud. Sales Cloud allows you to streamline your sales processes and make your sales teams more efficient. It includes features like workflow automation, opportunity management, detailed sales forecasting, and more.
- Service Cloud. With Service Cloud, your support team has more context about every customer and can solve customer issues faster. You’ll get features such as automation, web-to-case creation, Slack notifications, case management, omnichannel routing, and more.
- Marketing Cloud. Marketing Cloud allows you to create and optimize effective, personalized marketing campaigns effortlessly. When you do, you’ll ensure that your marketing content reaches the right people at the right time and get more MQLs. And with Einstein AI, you’ll even be able to visualize customer journeys (and more).
- Commerce Cloud. Commerce Cloud provides a range of tools that help you engage your customers more and sell more products, whether in a B2B or B2C setting. Some of the tailored features include AI-powered personalization, omnichannel integration, order management, and more.
- Small Business Solutions. Salesforce also provides solutions for small businesses that allow them to get the benefits of the platform at a price they can afford. The features are starter-type, so you’ll get light marketing automation, contact management, etc., with Salesforce best practices integrated into the platform from the get-go.
- Success Plans. In addition to its range of products, Salesforce offers several success plans that businesses can choose from. This allows you to choose the right level of support for your business.
These are only a small sampling of what Salesforce offers, and it has various other products suited to businesses across various industries. And speaking of industries, Salesforce serves:
- Retail
- Automotive
- Manufacturing
- Communications
- Healthcare
- Financial services
- Hospitality
- Technology
And many others!
Considering the above, it’s clear that Salesforce offers solutions for any businesses that want to manage their customer relationships better, sell more products, and generate more revenue.
Why Should You Use Salesforce?
We’ve now seen that no matter your business’s size or industry, you’ll likely need to use Salesforce when you’d like to manage your customer relations better and streamline your sales, support, or marketing processes.
You Can Use Salesforce Anywhere
Because Salesforce is cloud-based, you and your team can use it anywhere. You’ll also have access to your data no matter where you are. The only requirement is that you have a reliable internet connection.
This is especially relevant in a business environment where remote working is becoming increasingly popular or for those businesses that rely on extensive travel to engage with their customers. Being cloud-based also offers another benefit – because all your data resides on Salesforce’s infrastructure, you can rely on its robust security measures to keep your data safe.
One of the Key Benefits of Salesforce: Get More Done in Less Time
One of the significant advantages of using Salesforce is that it allows your team to get more done in less time. In other words, the platform allows you to make your processes and teams more efficient.
Firstly, it provides you with a complete view of your customer. This allows you to plan better, optimize your marketing processes, and prioritize your team’s work. Apart from this, the Salesforce platform also implements automation extensively. These allow you to record customer interactions and engage with them based on certain triggers automatically.
Learn More about Your Business
These days, data is the fuel that drives business growth. However, when using data in your business, it should be in a form that’s easy to understand and extract insights from. Also, you should eliminate silos and gather data from across your entire business and the tools and platforms you use to get the most value from it.
When it comes to data, Salesforce really shines. It provides you with a wealth of actionable data dashboards that you can use to get insights into your business processes and learn where you’re performing well (and where these processes might need some work). And, if there aren’t any dashboards that align with your data, you can customize existing ones or create your own.
Know More about Your Customers
Apart from giving you insights into your sales, marketing, customer support, and other processes, Salesforce also allows you to learn more about your leads, customers, and accounts. It provides information about your customers’ engagements with your business, their purchases, the issues they’ve had, and how your team helped them.
As such, it provides more context about every customer and helps you understand who they are, what matters to them, and what challenges they face. With this understanding, you’ll be better able to align your offering with what your customers want and expect.
Work Better Together
We’ve mentioned earlier how Salesforce contains a complete record of every customer’s interactions with your business. It also typically provides every customer’s contact details and any other information that might be relevant. What’s more, this information will always be up-to-date.
This means that any team member who engages with a customer will always have the correct information. As a result, they’ll engage more effectively and be able to serve customers better. Also, through Salesforce’s Chatter feature, team members can easily communicate with each other if necessary. Combined, these features improve collaboration in your team.
Similarly, Salesforce Engage allows marketing and sales teams to collaborate intuitively, so you no longer have to worry about data silos.
Happier Customers
Think about it, if you’re able to serve your customers more effectively, offer them the products, services, and customer experience they expect, and solve their problems quicker, they’ll be more satisfied.
Apart from this, Salesforce provides you with the tools and capability to implement truly omnichannel approaches. You’ll implement a unified approach in dealing with your customers, so you can engage and serve them no matter the platform they choose.
These features, ultimately, mean that you can steer your customers toward the right decisions, including increasing their lifetime value. It goes further than this, though. When your customers are happy, they’ll also turn into your business’ staunchest supporters. As such, they’ll market your business for you.
Generate More Revenue
Finally, with all the benefits discussed above, you’ll end up with more efficient and effective sales, marketing, and customer support processes. You’ll also have a happier customer base. This directly translates into generating more revenue and ensuring consistent growth.
How Much Will Salesforce Cost You?
The platform has several different licensing models, with varying functionality, that you can choose from depending on your unique requirements. These licensing models, in turn, all have different monthly subscriptions.
To illustrate Salesforce’s pricing, let’s consider a few examples. If you’re interested in using Sales Cloud, you’ll pay:
- $25 per user per month on Salesforce Essentials.
- $75 per user per month on Salesforce Professional.
- $150 per user per month on Salesforce Enterprise.
- $300 per user per month on Salesforce Unlimited.
When it comes to Service Cloud, you’ll pay exactly the same. However, you also have the option to combine Sales and Service Clouds. Here, you’ll pay:
- $25 per user per month on Salesforce Essentials.
- $100 per user per month on Salesforce Professional.
- $175 per user per month on Salesforce Enterprise.
- $325 per user per month on Salesforce Unlimited.
Now, when it comes to marketing, Salesforce offers several marketing products that cater to different marketing aspects. These products’ pricing also differs. For example, for Marketing Cloud Account Engagement, you’ll pay:
- $1,250 per month for up to 10,000 contacts on the Growth plan.
- $75 per month for up to 10,000 contacts on the Plus plan.
- $150 per month for up to 10,000 contacts on the Advanced plan.
- $300 per month for up to 75,000 contacts on the Premium plan.
Nurture Valuable Relationships with Salesforce!
Let’s face it: it’s a tough market out there. There are tons of businesses and thousands of products your customers can choose from. To stand out in a competitive market, you’ll depend on your customer experience and the relationships you build.
This is where Salesforce comes in, allowing you to juggle relationships with hundreds (or thousands) of customers at once without missing a beat. At the same time, you’ll get powerful analytics that will show you what you need to do next in order to grow.
Hopefully, this post helped illustrate some of the platform’s benefits and an idea of how much it will cost to implement. The only thing left to do now is to try it for yourself!
