The problem with CRMs is that there are just too many of them. One of the biggest challenges faced by the marketing and sales leadership is the choice of the right CRM that facilitates synergy between marketing and sales. A CRM is a business expansion enablement and a marketing and sales process optimiser. It helps connect marketing, sales, content, service, and operations to ensure all these critical arms of the business work in a unified fashion to acquire and retain customers. You therefore cannot afford to go wrong with it.
The Salesforce CRM emerges as one of the more commonly used CRMs available on the market and for good reason. It is one of the most comprehensive CRMs. It offers many capabilities through a cloud-based platform, meaning all the Salesforce data is stored in the Cloud. Any update or modification rolled out by the vendor (responsibility of the vendor) happens in the background without disrupting the business process. The subscription-based pricing model means the TCO is immediately reduced, and you can scale its use up or down per your business needs.
Considering Salesforce's extensive features and capabilities, you might get the wrong impression that this CRM can only be used by enterprise organisations with massive business footprints. But that is not the case. Businesses of all shapes and sizes, irrespective of their scale or scope, can use Salesforce, because you can pick and choose the kind of capabilities your business needs and get the flexibility to pick the subscription that makes the most sense for your business.
If you think your business only needs the Sales Cloud, you can limit Salesforce to the sales side of your business, or you can choose the Sales and Marketing Cloud to achieve your CRM goals. There is something for businesses of every size with Salesforce, and our Salesforce consulting services are primed to understand your needs and point you to the right Salesforce solution.
Salesforce offers a range of features and functionalities that can help you unlock the potential of customer data. Through this CRM, you can leverage all the available data to grow your business by implementing the right strategies at different stages of the customer lifecycle and benefit from automating those critical activities that are repetitive but consume a lot of time.
This tool aims to take a hammer at all the silos between various departments and ensure you can unite your company under an all-in-one platform. If you choose its ‘Customer 360’ offering, you can align your sales, marketing, service, commerce, and IT Teams. This platform gives all teams a single pane of glass into complete real-time actionable customer information. This makes it easy to configure proper customer outreach and nurturing strategies to ensure you deliver the right products to the customer at the right time.
More importantly, you can move from a manual approach to keeping track of data and data management to a more automated process, facilitating data accuracy, relevance, and availability. Your platform can be easily integrated into the various tools that are a part of your tech stack, and you can even create customer apps and tools that can address your specific concerns. The whole objective of using Salesforce is that you can deliver personalized messaging that helps build stronger customer-brand relationships, which drives sustainable business growth.
Considering Salesforce's extensive features and capabilities, you might get the wrong impression that this CRM can only be used by enterprise organisations with massive business footprints. But that is not the case. Businesses of all shapes and sizes, irrespective of their scale or scope, can use Salesforce, because you can pick and choose the kind of capabilities your business needs and get the flexibility to pick the subscription that makes the most sense for your business.
If you think your business only needs the Sales Cloud, you can limit Salesforce to the sales side of your business, or you can choose the Sales and Marketing Cloud to achieve your CRM goals. There is something for businesses of every size with Salesforce, and our Salesforce consulting services are primed to understand your needs and point you to the right Salesforce solution.
Your business might already be using specific critical systems or apps, and the deployment of Salesforce can ensure you can maximise their potential further. Their data can be brought into Salesforce to help you enrich available data and also make Salesforce your single source of truth for company-wide data.
Leverage Salesforce Lightning to develop a Salesforce app that has been purpose-built to satisfy specific business needs. The benefit of Lightning is that it is a no-code platform that helps even business users with little or no technical experience build the apps they need. Also, you can enhance your customer-facing mobile applications that can use the Salesforce data and pass data to this platform. There are drag-and-drop tools to create the apps you want and launch them at speed and scale.
Considering the extensive nature of the Salesforce CRM, covering all the features in this article will be near impossible (this is why we have kept a ‘not everything’ in the title), but let’s take a look at some key elements that can make a difference to your organisation:
Email Studio: For building personalised email campaigns and creating automated email workflows to target customers at different points in their business interaction.
Journey Builder: Deliver seamless customer experience by connecting customer journeys across diverse touchpoints.
Marketing Cloud Customer Data Platform: Make the most of your customer data by unifying, segmenting, activating, and analysing all data.
Marketing Cloud Intelligence Get automated real-time insights based on your campaign data, KPIs, and decision-making. And much more...
The beauty of Salesforce is that you can pick integrated products that you think are crucial for the business. From the sales perspective, some of the products you can choose from include:
Sales Force Automation: This tool delivers features such as lead management, account & opportunity management, pipeline management, reporting and dashboard, and many more. It helps you manage sales pipelines in an end-to-end manner.
Sales Engagement: It offers all the features that will help you push customers through the sales pipeline faster, including sales playbooks and workflows, engagement intelligence, automated data syncing, booking meetings, and much more.
Other products you can choose to make a part of this CRM include sales enablement, Sales AI, and Sales Analytics.
You can mix and match the various Salesforce clouds and products within each Cloud to benefit from their specific functionalities. As a premier Salesforce consulting services provider, we will work with you to identify the various functionalities that can improve your business processes and help achieve your KPIs.
Salesforce offers a powerful product suite that enables you to unlock the power of data by bringing the power of AI and automation to track data in real-time, connect various data sources across multiple systems, and deliver meaningful insights. You can choose from reporting and dashboard templates or create custom reports accessible to all teams to get a unified view of the customer, their journey, and the business's health and operations.
This CRM is all about maximising the potential of your business’s data and, therefore, puts a lot of focus on data security. It works on the shared responsibility model for cybersecurity, focuses on building a secure platform, and offers all the tools and resources needed to protect data. Our experts will also go deep into your Salesforce framework, evaluate your security practices, and suggest security controls that you must implement to make your Salesforce instance even more secure.
Salesforce bakes automation into the CRM to help you automate workflows underpinned by accurate and relevant data to ensure you can deliver delightful customer experiences. Automating workflows means you don’t have to constantly stay on top of campaign execution and devote more time to strategic activities. The benefit this CRM offers is that you can choose from existing workflow templates cutting across different functions such as marketing, sales, etc., or create your own.
Every business has different needs, and the same Salesforce instance doesn’t work for everyone. This is one of the most customisable CRMs available on the market, and you can configure and customise it to meet your specific business requirements. The Salesforce App Cloud drives this customisation and acts as an all-in-one ecosystem that facilitates creating and running all Salesforce applications.
Irrespective of your CRM skillsets, you will require Salesforce training and support for any challenge you might face while using this CRM. As can be imagined, this CRM is backed by comprehensive training, and there are also tons of free resources you can go through beyond the online/in-person training to address your doubts. We also offer tailor-made Salesforce training and support services that are tightly integrated with your needs and requirements and the Salesforce maturity stage of your business.
Discussing Salesforce pricing is a little difficult, as there are diverse product offerings with different pricing structures. However, the most interesting part of Salesforce's pricing strategy is that it offers pricing information based on your specific needs, e.g., if you are a small business, you can choose from the plans it has configured explicitly for small businesses. It also has Cloud-based pricing in that you can select from Sales, Service, Sales & Service, Marketing, Commerce, Tableau, Experience Cloud, and much more. With these Cloud categories, the pricing is based on various editions. The editions are priced based on the kind of features offered, the number of contacts, and the number of unique users that can use the Cloud simultaneously.
As a leading Salesforce consulting services provider, we will help you get the best pricing for Salesforce and ensure you can pick a solution with the features you want for your business, the most.
If you are in the market for a CRM and are thinking about choosing Salesforce, we hope this article has gone some way in helping you make the right decision. Why don’t you contact our Salesforce consulting experts to know how to go about maximising the ROI of your Salesforce purchase?