If you want to streamline your contact management, you need an effective CRM system. Not only will it help you effectively manage your contact and customer information as you move every customer through your pipeline, but you’ll also generate more revenue. But is Salesforce the best CRM?
And if you’ve done some research, you’ve heard of Salesforce. It comes highly recommended for many reasons (mainly, it’s robust and customizable). However, there are other compelling reasons you should add Salesforce to your sales team toolkit.
Let’s take a look!
Salesforce Is a Robust, Fully-Featured CRM
Salesforce is a fully-featured, versatile, and customizable CRM. As such, it has various features and functionalities that can make your team more efficient, no matter your requirements.
To make getting the features you need easier, Salesforce created specific product features tailored to specific commercial requirements. These include:
Salesforce Sales Cloud
Aimed explicitly at sales operations, Sales Cloud gives salespeople all the information and data they need to streamline sales activities, close more deals, and convert more leads.
The Salesforce Sales Cloud features include sales forecasting, performance management, reporting, and contact management.
Marketing Cloud
Marketing Cloud aims to help you make your marketing more effective and efficient. The Marketing Cloud offers tools for communication, lead management, automation, analytics, and other areas that keep your Sales & Marketing teams working together productively.
Salesforce Service Cloud
Once you close a sale, you’ll need to build long-lasting, lucrative relationships with your customers. Service Cloud supports you with extensive customer support features.
Analytics Cloud
You need access to not only data but strategic insights. With Salesforce Analytics Cloud, you’ll identify trends a
Commerce Cloud
Commerce Cloud is aimed at helping you provide better eCommerce shopping experiences, whether you’re B2B or B2C.
And all of these are just the tip of the Salesforce iceberg. It’s a robust system that scales as you do. Even if you lack some functionality, you can use or create custom apps to meet your needs.
Salesforce CRM Is Your Contact Data HQ
Salesforce is a centralized hub for all your contact information. When your contacts’ information is available across your entire business, everyone on your team can access the data. In other words, it eliminates data silos, so your data stays accurate and consistent across teams and processes.
Your sales, marketing, customer service, and other teams can make their processes more efficient, improving your service standards and increasing your revenue.
Save Time with Salesforce CRM Automation
Automate away all your repetitive, manual tasks, so your teams can focus on where they truly add value: winning over customers. For example, Salesforce CRM allows you to automate:
- Contact management
- Marketing campaigns
- Analytics and reporting
- Invoicing
- Document management
And more! When you automate everything that doesn’t require your team’s full attention, you’ll reduce unproductive tasks (hello, data entry) and keep them focused on engaging with prospects and closing profitable deals.
Personalize Your Marketing with Salesforce CRM
Since no two prospects are alike, you can use the Salesforce CRM automation to get the right marketing content to the right people at the right time. Personalization converts, making your campaigns more effective and your ROI higher.
(And if you automate the data flow between your sales and marketing teams, you’ll also improve their collaboration.)
With Service Cloud’s chatbots, email automation, and other automated self-service options, your customers will get help faster – without engaging your staff. Your customer service agents can focus on the genuinely complex issues that require their expertise.
Data Integration
We’ve already mentioned that Salesforce keeps your contact information and data consistent, accurate, and available across your entire business. However, it also integrates with other tools and platforms, including MailChimp, Quickbooks, Slack, G Suite, Dropbox, and others.
Integrate the other tools into the Salesforce CRM and reduce app-switching, so your team stays efficient and productive.
(Additional benefit? Salesforce CRM integrations give you a more centralized view of your data, providing more insights.)
Strategic Insights with Salesforce CRM
More data – more business insights. The Salesforce CRM presents these insights in real-time dashboards and reports, making it easier for you to visualize and make sense of the data. And with a vast range of reports, you can also create customized reports based on your requirements.
From a business perspective, you’ll learn where you’re performing well and where your business processes might need some work. Once you can see it, you can improve it.
From a customer perspective, these insights will show you who your customers are, what they need and expect, and how you can serve them best.
Ultimately, these insights help you understand your business and customers better, which sets you up for consistent growth.
Personalization
Salesforce CRM also allows you to segment your customers based on their specific needs. This way, you can inject more personalization into your marketing, sales, and customer service processes.
For example, when you use personalization in marketing, you’ll be able to offer your customers marketing content relevant and valuable to their current buyer’s journey stage. Likewise, from a customer service perspective, personalization allows you to serve your customers in the most appropriate way, categorize their needs, and present the right offers to increase their lifetime value.
More importantly, customers now expect to be treated as individuals through personalization. So if you’re not personalizing, you could be losing out.
Salesforce CRM’s Omnichannel Features
Omnichannel approaches to customer support are becoming increasingly popular. And it’s easy to see why; omnichannel allows your customers to engage with your business on several channels, including email, social media, chat, and more.
The difference, however, is that omnichannel allows customers to engage with your business in a seamless, consistent approach where any new interaction feels like a continuation of the previous one. For example, your customers could communicate with their AE via email, switch easily to live chat for support issues and receive personalized remarketing offers through ads – all with the full historical context of their accounts, needs, and challenges.
This helps you sort out customers’ issues faster, serve your customers better, and improves the customer experience significantly.
Salesforce CRM and Multitenancy
Salesforce is a multi-tenant platform, so everyone across your entire business uses the same infrastructure and software instance.
All your users will receive automatic and simultaneous updates while your data stays secure. When you need the latest Salesforce features, you get them quickly without the effort required to update the software manually.
Salesforce Provides a Rich App Ecosystem
In addition to the features mentioned earlier, Salesforce offers a rich app ecosystem through its AppExchange platform. You’ll find thousands of apps to extend the platform’s functionality.
A significant benefit of AppExchange is that all the listed apps go through an extensive vetting process that ensures they meet the security and functionality criteria set by Salesforce. And all these apps integrate fully with the Salesforce platform, which provides a seamless experience where all your business data stays in one place.
For example, suppose you want to sync your Outlook, Gmail, and other email contacts and communication with your Salesforce dashboard. In that case, you can easily do it with a highly-rated Salesforce app, Match My Email. There’s no need to multitask when you can get all the functionality within your central Salesforce HQ.
Salesforce Custom Apps
Another benefit of Salesforce is that if it lacks a feature or there aren’t any apps available on AppExchange to supplement it, you can create custom apps based on your business’s unique requirements. This gives you the flexibility and versatility to customize the platform to your needs.
If you’re particularly entrepreneurial, you might even distribute your app on the AppExchange to help other businesses with the same problem.
Is Salesforce the Best CRM?
An effective CRM system makes your business processes more efficient, improves the customer experience, attracts and retains more customers, and increases sales and revenue. The proviso, of course, is that you need a CRM that offers all the features you need and the flexibility and versatility to customize it based on your business’s unique requirements.
Salesforce fits the bill perfectly.
First, map out your CRM needs if you’re ready to strengthen your customer communications and get better data insights. Then, consider Salesforce CRM’s native features and apps that give you even more power under the central Salesforce umbrella.
Soon enough, you’ll be a Salesforce pro!
