Salesforce Products

Using Salesforce to design best-in-class processes and experiences

Many factors can limit the growth of organizations: strategy, culture, talent, offer portfolio, go-to-market channels. Make sure that the enterprise tools you are using are not one of them.

Salesforce products (i.e.: Clouds) have long been recognized as premium CRM solutions for high performance companies. Some of the main reasons behind their vast popularity is customer centricity, powerful features, flexibility, and scalability.

This cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) platform transcends being a mere sales, customer service, and marketing tool. Successful companies use Salesforce as their core enterprise software, including a wide-variety of CRM tools and extensive integration capabilities to other critical systems, such as accounting software and ERPs.

According to Salesforce, more than 150,000 businesses worldwide rely on their scalable cloud-based platform. So, how can Salesforce influence your business growth?

If you run a company that utilizes Salesforce solutions, you are constantly seeking ways to leverage this powerful tool. A thorough examination of this CRM platform reveals features that enable you to build and strengthen customer relationships, enhance interdepartmental collaboration, and deliver exceptional customer experiences.

If you’re curious about harnessing Salesforce to optimize your business processes, continue reading!

Many companies gather data about their interactions with customers, but they have no underlying algorithm to utilize and process that data to reveal deep customer insights. 

Salesforce, as a “super CRM”, not only allows for robust integration and analytics insights into your company’s data across all formats, but also facilitates your organization’s ability to leverage it for business growth.

For example, the sales department is one of the biggest benefactors of Salesforce.

Sales have evolved far beyond making a large volume of cold calls to prospects. Today, despite industry-specific similarities, you’ll be hard-pressed to find two companies with exactly the same sales process. Accordingly, the level of personalization and customization of sales practices is equal if not greater than what you’d expect from other business functions like customer service, marketing, product development, etc.

Smart organizations leverage Salesforce to create a well-structured sales process that considers every customer touchpoint. 

Salesforce takes businesses to the next level by placing the customer at their fingertips and making it easy for an organization to direct its focus on building a mutually beneficial relationship with the customer – which is the main purpose of Salesforce.

Your business needs a system and Salesforce happens to be a popular choice for many companies who want to link functional areas like sales, customer service, marketing, and overall business management – creating the 360-degree customer view.

Here’s how Salesforce products can help you improve your business processes…

1. Effective Sales Strategy and Customer Retention

Many companies focus on using Salesforce solutions to acquire and close new leads. Great! But if you don’t find ways to connect with them and retain them, it’ll cost you a lot of money in the long run.

Aside from helping you fill up your lead pipeline, various Salesforce products make it possible to retain your customers and increase their Customer Lifetime Value.

Here’s how Salesforce supports customer retention:

• Employees in different departments get a 360-degree view of each customer which helps them make better decisions and provide better service based on their purchase and interaction history with the company.
• The comprehensive view of the customer makes it possible to create meaningful strategies and tactics to interact with the customer and create contents that propel them to move forward in the buyers’ journey – new or returning.
• If your company expects return business from customers, various automations, tasks and reminders can be put in place to trigger when customers haven’t purchased in a while. This allows your sales, channel management and marketing teams to take action directly, or automate a nurturing campaign to encourage additional purchases.
• With the ability to aggregate data points from any of the Salesforce modules and third party systems, a flexible architecture that allows the use of custom objects, as well as a wide-variety of tools to automate processes, you can customize the platform to meet your sales and retention needs.
• Over time, with all the data accrued, you get deeper insights into customer behavior and the efficiency of your sales initiatives and processes. This enables you to optimize your best practices every quarter, to improve results of the next one.

2. Employee Productivity

Adopting the right technology is crucial to your success. Aside from helping you strengthen your customers’ relationship with your brand, here’s how Salesforce solutions make your business move forward:

• Cloud computing means digital freedom. Manual tasks like data entry using spreadsheets, looking for contact information are replaced with a convenient in-browser and in-app platform with a modern user interface and a robust cloud-based data storage system.
• Are all your leads and opportunities being followed up? Instead of managers having to verify and remind their teams at every weekly status meeting, why not automate a few reminders and tasks about calls and emails based on the stage of leads and opportunities in your funnel?
• Automating mundane and manual tasks frees up time for your employees to talk to prospective customers and close more deals. Generating quotes, sending/receiving contracts, getting the appropriate approvals, and reporting on recent results, are all tasks that can be automated.
• Your team can access all information and share ideas seamlessly. All the information that relates to contacts, accounts, opportunities and purchases are in one place, available for the employees that have the right privileges. If they need to collaborate or work together, they can all access and feed up-to-date information to avoid misunderstanding and provide the best customer experience.
• Overall, Salesforce products give your company a better way to work, with data, with automated workflows, to better serve your customers.

The biggest roadblocks companies face is the inability to unify productivity across departments that use different systems.

A Cloud-based platform like Salesforce allows departments – from sales and customer service to marketing – to work together to leverage their common data to track and improve performance based on big data analytics.

This strongly reinforces economies of scale, reduces costs, breaks silos between departments, and gives high-growth companies an edge in competing with other businesses in their field.

When companies leverage Salesforce to its highest potential, streamlining the user experience and delivering personalized customer service becomes relatively easy.

With customizable reports that enable you to track simple and advanced KPIs, you can gather information about trends with leads, customers, employees and partners, and analyze them in real-time to make smart decisions and stay ahead of the game.

Our team of Salesforce business analysts at SOLJIT helps you adopt an integrated approach in which Salesforce optimization is fully aligned with your business strategy and objectives to help you achieve the efficiency, growth, and scalability that you are looking for.

Here are some of the top Salesforce solutions we provide for our clients:

1. Salesforce Sales Cloud

Sales Cloud is designed to help your sales team sell faster and smarter by automating manual tasks and optimizing the sales cycle.

By leveraging Sales Cloud, they’ll spend less time on mundane tasks and focus their energy on closing more deals.

It gives you real-time visibility into your sales activities, leads, post-sale services and these empower your team to explore optimized strategies to bring in more revenue.

This Salesforce product helps you:

• Increase your productivity and business revenue by putting all your sales activity on one platform. You’ll always have the most up-to-date information and see relevant customer information to move forward.
• Your team can work virtually, stay connected with each other and manage daily sales.
• Equips you with the tools and system to scale your sales and business growth.
• Gives a real-time overview of sales at a glance. These reports help you optimize marketing campaigns and make smart decisions.

Salesforce Sales Cloud Features:

• Account and Contact Management
• Lead Management
• Opportunity Management
• Social feeds and communication channels to foster collaboration between users
• Real-time reports on sales activities
• Process Automation
• And lot’s more!

2. Salesforce Service Cloud

Salesforce Service Cloud is designed to make the customer experience seamless. It is built on customer 360, giving you a 360-degree view of your customers enabling your organization to deliver faster and smarter.

When your customer service is seamless, people are more likely to become loyal customers. Service Cloud supports your service agents with the tools to deliver the best and most efficient customer experience, enabling them to work faster, and reducing costs.

Here are a few benefits of this product:

• With tools such as emails, live chat, milestone tracking, and skill-based routing, Salesforce gives agents the tools to respond to customers efficiently.
• Enjoy a 360-degree view of your customer and access to experts in your organization.
• Engage with every customer and give them an unforgettable experience. Listen to customers and connect them with the right agent at the right time.

Salesforce Service Cloud Features:

• Case management
• Automated Workflows
• Live Agent and Virtual Assistant
• Customer Service Management
• Omni-Channel Routing
• Reporting & Analytics
• Knowledge Management
• And lots more!

3. Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Account Engagement

Salesforce Marketing Cloud has the capabilities to support extensive marketing automation including multi-channel marketing campaigns, audience building and presentation, pre and post-marketing reports and analytics, and lots more!

This Salesforce product has many rich features that help your company convert visitors into leads and opportunities, and provide them with a 1:1 personalized experience.

Deliver personalized messages to your leads based on their current stage in your funnel, and trigger automated messages based on real-time changes in the customers’ behavior.

All these help increase customer engagement with your organization and ideally build a strong relationship by delivering the right content, at the right moment, with the right media.

With Salesforce Marketing Cloud, you can:

• Create personalized messages based on individual attributes.
• Segment based on pre-purchase and post-purchase information.
• Humanize every touchpoint for the customer and increase brand awareness and loyalty.
• Get detailed reports on every marketing campaign.
• Use all your data to optimize campaigns and explore more marketing opportunities.

Marketing Cloud Products:

• Journey Builder
• Email Studio
• Mobile Studio
• Account Engagement (Pardot)
• CRM Analytics (Tableau CRM, B2B Marketing Analytics)
• Marketing Cloud Advertising
• Marketing Cloud Personalization
• Marketing Cloud Intelligence
• Customer Data Platform
• And many more!

Key Advantages of Using Salesforce for Different Industries

Manufacturing

Times are changing. Businesses are evolving. It has become necessary for manufacturing companies to embrace technology to survive in a competitive market and keep up with customers’ demands.

By embracing robust CRM platforms and automated systems, companies have become more customer-centric as they easily capitalize on trends to improve customer acquisition and retention.

A traditionally operated manufacturing business usually faces:

• Data all over the place, hard to find, sometimes lost forever.
• Siloed operations between departments, including gaps between sales and supply chain management.
• Lack of an integrated and scalable system.
• Inability to make predictive analysis.

By integrating the Salesforce CRM to their ERP, manufacturers can deliver personalized customer experiences that leverage the strength of both platforms to streamline business processes, and create strategies to satisfy evolving demand.

Salesforce helps manufacturing companies to:

• Direct access to a 360-degree view of customers (with sales, customer service, channel partner, marketing and other data points). Salesforce allows businesses to track, listen, and respond to customers’ queries from one platform.
• Improve order pipeline, close more deals, create customized product catalogs, manage and report on quotas, explore potential growth opportunities, and lots more!
• When integrated with an ERP, Salesforce provides actionable insights to the sales team about relevant operations data, including: inventory, distribution, order processing, shipping, product management, etc. This real-time supply chain visibility for your sales team reduces errors and enables better production planning and automation.

Watch: How manufacturers should approach their CRM

High Tech Industry & SaaS

The high-tech industry is characterized by constant changes and technological advancement. Whether they are active in solution/system selling, a mix of hardware and software, or a pure SaaS offering, companies need to focus on delivering a great customer experience to be able to stay at the top of their game.

Salesforce, with modules for every department and leveraging its ever-evolving Einstein AI, helps companies break boundaries, drive robust business growth and gain a competitive advantage in the marketplace.

High-tech companies can utilize Salesforce solutions to deliver fully integrated experiences throughout the buyer’s lifecycle. Salesforce does this by:

• Creating a tailored and automated, pre-sale, purchasing and post-sale customer experience to support the complexity of high-tech businesses.
• Optimizing sales predictability and velocity by automating lead management, forecasting, quoting, contract generation, invoicing and more.
• Companies that sell complex systems, or various software bundles, need quoting and ordering systems that can support that complexity, while simplifying it for their users and customers. Salesforce can do just that with modules like CPQ (Configure-Price-Quote).
• Are you using distribution channels for your go-to-market? Create personalized portals for your partners or customers with the Experience Cloud and B2B Commerce modules to strengthen and take your business relationships to the next level.
• Using Salesforce analytics and reports, businesses can view real-time data to track KPIs and identify opportunities for improvement.
• Design, launch and report on highly personalized campaigns that deliver helpful content to your customers using the Marketing Cloud module.
• Salesforce’s open API enables you to integrate your customer’s usage data (if your product/software collects it) to your CRM, which in turn empowers your sales, customer service and marketing teams to deliver a much more personalized experience.

Financial Services

Salesforce Financial Services Cloud is a CRM that is tailor-made for financial services firms operating in: banking, business services, capital markets, insurance, loans (financing, mortgages, etc.), real estate and wealth management.

It enables financial institutions and businesses to create and manage the entire lifecycle of their customers, contracts, delivery of services, and regulatory compliance, from one powerful and customizable cloud platform.

Manage customer journeys from marketing, to sales, and customer service, while tracking and reporting on the KPIs of your teams. Design and deploy new digital experiences for customers and partners to meet their changing expectations, and to foster loyalty and retention.

It also helps to craft a comprehensive profile, or 360-degree view, for every client, based on information like loans, service or policy subscriptions, and past communications and interactions with your staff and company as a whole. Because of this, agents don’t waste time asking for information over and over again – which helps to iron out wrinkles in the customer experience.

In addition to its standard security and compliance features, you can add an extra layer of protection to your platform with the Salesforce Shield module, which provides Field Audit Trail, Platform Encryption at Rest, and Event Monitoring.

Non-Profit Organizations

Salesforce solutions for non-profit organizations have a proven track record of helping thousands of charities and educational institutions raise funds and help their constituencies all over the world.

Salesforce can be a powerful tool in your arsenal for donor management and fundraising campaigns, including integrating all your donations in one platform to have a clear view of the results of all initiatives.

Many nonprofits have reached a stage where trying to gather a hodge-podge of donor and campaign data spread over different software, Excel, paper notes and other media is no longer viable.

The Nonprofit Cloud / Nonprofit Success Pack helps you collect, organize and manage your data, activities, donors, campaigns, volunteers, partners and constituencies, all from one platform. With your house in order, it then becomes much easier to report on financial and people outcomes, and deliver on your mission more effectively.

As an example, a common use of Salesforce with nonprofits is donor management. With their entire donation and activity history in one place, your teams can reward returning donors, donors who’ve been contributing for many years with special touchpoints and messaging just for them. Similarly, donors who’ve come and gone can be automatically added to campaigns emphasizing re-engagement with different types of messaging and activities.

Salesforce can be personalized for any type of nonprofit organization. Tell us what your mission is, how you work with your constituents, partners, and donors, and we’ll customize your new CRM to take your organization to the next level.

• Salesforce-certified consultants can recommend and implement the best solutions so you can leverage your CRM to seize business opportunities, resolve lagging operational issues, and generate positive ROI for your organization.
• Our team of experts provides ongoing support during and after projects, to ensure that your employees are properly trained and autonomous in using the platform for day-to-day operations.
• Our architects ensure that the selected object and data model of your CRM will scale with your company’s present and future. As well, they validate that the various automations that streamline your processes are not in conflict and can be maintained over time.
• Working with a Salesforce partner will save your employees the time and effort it takes to learn how to use and customize such a powerful platform.

We also have deep expertise in integrating 3rd party applications to Salesforce, whether it is via connectors, AppExchange plugins, or custom API integrations.

We constantly strive to be the best Salesforce partner any company can work with. We use agile methodology and can also manage company-wide digital acceleration programs across multiple departments, divisions or business units. We pride ourselves in quality, adoption and satisfaction.

Conclusion

Salesforce is the #1 CRM in the world for a reason. It is one of the few platforms that can aspire to a real customizable 360-degree customer view and experience that breaks the silos between departments and enables collaboration, automation and optimization of customer, partner and employee journeys.

From the pre-sale (marketing and lead management), to purchase, to post-sale and beyond, Salesforce has a module for every step of the customer’s lifecycle with your organization.

To adapt the platform to fit your business model, business practices and company culture, it is critical that you call upon a qualified partner that will take you from “business need” to “adoption”.

Our teams have years of experience on Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Experience Cloud, Marketing Cloud, CPQ, B2B Commerce, Nonprofit Cloud / NPSP, and more. We are also experts in 3rd party integration to Salesforce, including creating our very owns connectors for multiple applications.

We’ve completed hundreds of projects and strive to build long term and fruitful relationships with our customers. That is the best way to help scale and grow organizations.

Contact us today to discover the results SOLJIT can offer your business.