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5 Ways to Improve Business Performance with Salesforce

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics research, more than 20% of start-ups shut down during the first 2 years. What is the major reason that caused the failure of these businesses? Sometimes there is no one-and-only factor but a bunch of the reasons that might affect the situation: under-resourcing, bad location, rigidness of a business plan, and so on. However, the core of the problem is a failure in business performance. 

In the eCommerce world, if you want to keep the lights on and prosper, you need to pay as much attention to business performance as possible. No matter what your small victories are if your organization is not on the client’s side and not performing to satisfy their hopes and intentions. 

After all, doing business is like a running machine; if you don’t shove yourself forward, you will be thrown out to obscurity and deprivation. Not promising, right?

As a cloud-based customer relationship management solution, Salesforce is created to help businesses regardless of their sizes and types stay connected to the clients, streamline processes, facilitate deeper customer retention boosting the revenue. 

What can Salesforce do to improve your business performance?

Salesforce with its set of powerful tools is one of the most prominent companies in the SaaS market. Its major product – Salesforce CRM – is used by a variety of the world’s leading brands such as Adidas, ADP, Amazon, Lancome, American Express, and others. 

According to the Salesforce official website, the companies that implemented the software in their business processes have seen the fruits of the cooperation. Thus, they reported about an average 27% increase in revenue, 34% increase in client happiness, and 32% increase in lead conversion. Astonishing!

Salesforce is designed with customer satisfaction in mind. With the help of the cloud-based platform, your company can address clients’ concerns and find appropriate solutions taking care of your own performance progress in the process. 

Here are 5 actionable ways on how to use Salesforce to improve your business performance.

1. Sales automation

Just ask any sales rep and you are likely to be told that finding the right lead is a hugely complex task, quite apart from the fact that the lead has to be guided through the sales pipeline toward full engagement. Salesforce with its wide array of features is a perfect tool that allows you to see where a lead is in the pipeline and what your next step should be. By automating the sales process and improving sales productivity, your business will be able to minimize manual operations, as well as to find leads and close deals faster. As a result, your sales representatives will gain time which they may use to expand the reach and build long-time, loyal customer interaction. 

Thus, with files Sync and Share, you can synchronize all the files within one or several departments to work with them as a team sharing them securely and quickly, tracking content, correcting mistakes. 

One more Salesforce curious tool is Lead Management. It can help your sales representatives route and assign leads to the persons in charge to ensure that leads never fall through the cracks. 

2. Improved customer visibility and experience

The ability to get quick access to accounts, tasks, contracts, events, and personal data is a big deal when it comes to providing a customized approach. Your clients are likely to appreciate the way you treat them as if they were your one and only customers. Thus, for example, with Workflow rule email alerts which are the Salesforce tool, you will never forget about your customer’s birthdays and can send them greeting cards with discounts attached to them. This helps re-engage those who have already bought from your online store stimulating their activities. Moreover, when you understand your customers, you can better forecast their future steps. According to the Salesforce official website, the use of the CRM increases forecast accuracy by 42%. 

3. Marketing Automation

In Salesforce, there is a tool that is fully dedicated to improving the marketing processes and promoting company products via different channels. The tool, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, includes a variety of helpful features:

  1. Journey Builder that creates connections across all channels and manages the customer lifecycle. 
  2. Salesforce DMP, a data management platform that creates detailed user profiles compiling information from both external and internal sources. 
  3. Advertising Studio, a targeting solution for creating customized digital marketing campaigns. 
  4. Email Studio that assists businesses in making smart email campaigns by collecting data from all departments. One of its terrific features is Email Alerts that are able to send emails automatically via Salesforce to the specified types of person with specified email templates.
  5. Mobile Studio, innovative mobile marketing software that helps to reach clients on any device with real-time notifications, personalized and group push messages, MMS, SMS. As far as this tool is concerned, you can send geo-relevant messages to your clients’ smartphones using geolocation technology. Let’s say that your potential customer is walking around the city and is approaching the place where your store is physically located. Why don’t you send an SMS with an invitation to come in and have a look at your new arrival while he is here? Consequently, you are likely to get a new lead.  
  6. Social Studio is another Salesforce product that administers marketing strategies and engages customers through various social media channels. 
  7. Pardot, a lead generation system that enables companies to monitor and measure the effectiveness of communications and get an in-depth analysis of user behavior. Have you heard the phrase “To be in the right place and at the right time”? So, with Pardot, you can be sure that you are speaking to the right person, via the right channel, and the time is right.
4. Better Customer Service

In the business world, it is essential to remain responsive to all customers’ queries and complaints about whatever they are. The after-sales stage is no less important than the preliminary one. Customers are likely to appreciate if a company takes care of their satisfaction and gives consideration to the flair that their products leave. The “sold and forgotten” method no longer works, customers need to know that you are thinking about them long after the product/service is sold. 

You can benefit from the Salesforce Service Cloud in order to solve maintenance tasks and automate the major functions of the process, increasing the satisfaction of the clients and optimizing cooperation. Whenever a customer needs assistance, they can choose the preferred channel (online chats, social networks, and so on) to get in touch with support. Chatbots based on artificial intelligence are able to provide quick and relevant responses, without the need to wait. 

5. Advanced analytics

With a huge amount of data growing at an exponential rate, it becomes difficult to explore it manually spotting every trend and testing every hypothesis, so building effective analytics has become one of the most important challenges. Fortunately, Salesforce CRM provides an opportunity to benefit from an advanced analytics tool based on Artificial intelligence. The name of the tool is Einstein Analytics and it was designed to empower sales reps, marketers, data analysts with everything they need to create smarter customer communication, without any difficulties. The AI-powered tool goes a long way: it can collect data from different sources, create and analyze all possible combinations, make accurate forecasts based on the obtained results, and, what is more, provide recommendations which allow companies to get along with third-party consultants and make business-related decisions more thought-out.  

Summarizing

Salesforce provides tremendous opportunities for business development and improvement. A huge set of tools tailored to every aspect of a business from user experience to analytics, which allows us to consider the CRM a powerful sales driver. 

Along with more than 150,000 companies both large and small that have improved their performance with Salesforce, the cloud-based platform can help you to do your work more efficiently, quickly collect and process data, improve customer retention, and continuously improve. 

As soon as your business performance increases with the help of Salesforce, then customer satisfaction will come as a foregone conclusion. However, in order to use all the benefits from the platform, you may need the help of a company providing Salesforce development services. Rely on an expert team to make sure your processes are scalable, well-optimized, and secure. 

Alex Husar
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Alex Husar

CTO at Onilab with 8+ years of experience in Magento and Salesforce. He graduated from Czech Technical University and obtained a bachelor’s degree in Computer Software Engineering. Alex’s expertise includes both full-stack dev skills and a strong ability to provide project-critical guidance to the whole team.

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