There are numerous benefits to implementing a CRM solution. In this blog, we want to pick and define five we find are of vital importance around CRM. In particular, we will focus on sharing not only what those benefits are, but how leveraging Salesforce™ enhances them even further.
1. Better Sales Performance
Arguably, the main reason that organizations implement a CRM solution is to drive their sales team to sell more. With CRM sales team can follow up on quality leads and reduce time-wasting activities on leads or prospects that are unlikely to result in new business. Sales cycles are built in to ensure you’re following the proper steps to close as many deals as possible. When the proper sales cycle is followed, it leads to a shorter sales cycle and a dramatically improved number of deals.
With Salesforce, you have pre-built tools that will help you drive to close leads and invest your time in the right places. Lead scoring will allow you to focus on the right leads instead of spinning your wheels on leads that will go nowhere. The sales path is a visual tool that helps you track exactly where you are in the sales cycle and what you need to do to make sure you can take an opportunity to the next step towards closure as it provides you hints along the way.
With the Kanban view, you and sales management have a quick visual snapshot of how many deals are in the pipeline and where exactly each is in the process. By having access to all your customer histories inside of Salesforce, a quick look at a customer can even help drive new upsell opportunities as you can get a quick glance on buying patterns and buying history across your customer base.
2. Cross-Company Collaboration
Collaboration is key to the success of any growing organization. By having your data all in one place, your teams can properly work together to close more deals, solve more issues, and improve customer satisfaction. The team can ensure there is no duplicate entry and that no one is stepping on each other’s toes.
Salesforce does this better than anyone through various methods. Build out Account and Opportunity teams to ensure the right people are involved in the right capacity with any major Account or Opportunity. Track all activity history so colleagues can see who has been speaking with whom about what in every customer interaction.
Leverage Chatter to collaborate between colleagues. Need to reach out to others to see if they can assist? Ask them on Chatter. Need to post a poll to get feedback? Ask them on Chatter. Need access to a document from someone that can help you close a deal? Ask them on Chatter.
3. Improved Efficiencies and Automation
Something that bogs down organizations is manual effort. Be it filling out documents, follow up activities, waiting for approvals, etc. Many people are under the assumption that by putting in a CRM solution, this will just add more manual effort and hinder their team from getting their job done. When done right, CRM actually has the opposite effect on an organization. Leveraging automated follow-ups and processes can actually make your organization and team much more efficient. Salesforce offers many tools that assist in automating your work and making your organization more efficient.
Does your organization have many manual processes that take days when they should take hours? Salesforce’s Process Builder allows you to automate any type of process. Be it routing to users, notifications, time-based or criteria built triggers, Salesforce can handle it for you.
Does it take awhile for your team to get approval from management? By utilizing the Approval Engine, you can build out all different types of criteria for Approval routing and even allow the approvers to get notifications right on their phone to help speed up the process.
Maybe your team struggles with following up in a timely manner with their clients and prospects. You can build in automated follow-up tasks to ensure your sales/account management team are doing their due diligence with the right activity to drive new business, stay efficient, and ensure their clients are continuously happy.
4. Enhanced Customer Service and Satisfaction
With a unified central client database, your team will have the ability to drive a better relationship with their clients. CRMs have the ability to enhance your customer service team and solve issues more quickly. No matter if you sell a service or a product, customer service is needed in any line of business. When the customer has a problem that needs solving, they expect you to resolve it quickly. At the very least, ensure your following proper communication protocols with them to keep them updated on what’s going on. When you’re able to do this, the customer is happy!
Salesforce offers many tools to enhance your customer service teams with issue tracking and ensuring requests are getting investigated and solved in a timely manner.
Case management allows you to track all different types of issues and even designate a priority. Do you have a large customer service team specializing in different areas? No worries, Salesforce allows you to build out case queues and even automatically route cases to the proper resource based on any criteria to ensure they’re getting resolved for your client in a timely manner.
Want to give your clients the tools to do things themselves without picking up the phone? Leverage the Salesforce Community and build out your own site for your clients to login and access whatever information they may find formative. Allow them to open their own cases, check their case history and status, and offer them a KnowledgeBase stock full of information. Who knows, maybe they’ll find what they need right there and won’t even need to open a case!
Utilizing these tools from Salesforce will improve your customer service team and ensure your customer satisfaction only increases.
5. Reporting and Analytics
Every organization has data. Data that is valuable. Now, what do you do with that data? How do you analyze that data? Can you spot trends that can help you grow your business or improve your customer service? CRM solutions typically have reporting and dashboarding capabilities for you to leverage and gain valuable insight.
Salesforce offers some of the most powerful, flexible, and easy-to-use reporting solutions in the marketplace today. By having your information all stored within Salesforce, you can easily build any report you desire on any data point you track within the database. Have data pulled in from your backend system? No problem, you can report on it. Do you get annoyed having to build out weekly or monthly reports? No problem, you can build the report one time and have it automatically emailed to you on an ongoing basis with the data automatically updated.
Dashboards are another big component of any CRM, Salesforce especially. Personalize your dashboards so they show you what is important to you and what’s going on within the organization from a sales, service, marketing perspective, etc.
AI (Artificial Intelligence) is a hot button topic in the industry today and Salesforce has gotten out ahead of it. Leverage their AI capabilities to start driving trends and get ahead of the curve. This information can be vital to growing your business.
What’s really nice about all of this? Anyone can go build a report. It doesn’t matter if you have any technical expertise at all: it’s extremely straightforward to go out and build your own reports, no matter who you are!
Reach Out
For more information on how you can leverage Salesforce to streamline your CRM initiatives, engage with us by commenting on this blog or reach out to us here. At remoteCRM, powered by XTIVIA, our team of certified Salesforce administrators can help you with all of your Salesforce and CRM needs.
This post was originally published here.