Making sales groups more effective
So, how does Salesforce do it? Let’s look at a few ways Sales Cloud makes sales teams more efficient at their jobs.
Account management and contact management are the focal point of sales teams and the foundation of Salesforce.com’s products. What would a CRM tool be if you couldn’t use it to track your customers and the organizations they’re a part of? Accounts are those organizations or businesses. Contacts are the individuals that belong to those Accounts. Salesforce lets you establish and differentiate between your customers, partners, competitors, and distributors effortlessly. It also shows you valuable information about these people and organizations in one place (again, assuming someone is inputting that data).
This allows any company using Salesforce to view customer details quickly and easily. Moreover, it ensures that any department within that company is looking at the same customer details, assuming you permit it. It’s also built with the user in mind, providing a simple user interface so that inputting this crucial information isn’t too cumbersome. Of course, it can get laborious over time if you aren’t careful. But Salesforce gives administrators what they need to make entering or updating accounts and contacts easy.
Another way Salesforce boosts sales efficiency is by minimizing time spent trying to communicate across and within teams. Salesforce provides multiple tools for on-demand work collaboration, as well as quick communication. Many companies see a dramatic decline in emails after using Chatter. Tasks and events that are automatically created and synced to the digital calendars of sales teams also increase efficiency, forecasting, and opportunity management.
Improving sales productivity
Sales Cloud can be used to dramatically increase sales productivity for many organizations. Sales Cloud can increase forecasting accuracy, which has many obvious benefits. Tracking and managing leads, following up with them, and converting them with a single click of a button can help sales teams focus more on selling and less on entering data into a cumbersome Excel spreadsheet. Organizing massive amounts of data and presenting these results in a way that makes sense to users in real time is one of the most powerful weapons of Sales Cloud.
In essence, there really is no secret formula to how Salesforce boosts productivity and efficiency for sales teams. You can manage and view all customer information in one place, while updating contacts or following up with them (again, from the same single place), and track all this using powerful reporting to see trends over time and act accordingly. You can organize your tasks by priority, forecast more accurately, and respond to customers more quickly, thereby helping your business become a “customer company.”
We could write a separate book about Salesforce Marketing Cloud and do a deep dive into the various features it offers, but you can get the big picture from this section. Marketing Cloud is really a suite of multiple product offerings, but in this section we focus on email campaigns, marketing automation, and lead management, and how Marketing Cloud can improve your organization’s ability to execute on all of them.
Managing email campaigns with Marketing Cloud
How can you drive online commerce, as well as sell to and build customer relationships, without email? Email is the engine behind these forces. Marketing Cloud gives companies the tools to quickly create and automate attention-grabbing emails to customers throughout the customer life cycle. It’s essentially a user interface for managing communications and content to a wide customer base. The platform maintains mailing lists and schedules and can modify email messages based on what recipients read, click, and forward. You can easily filter your subscriber base so that you’re sending specific, targeted emails based on criteria or events of your choosing. You don’t want certain customers to be bothered by email campaigns? No problem. All of this can be set up and monitored as you desire.
Improving marketing automation
How much time have you wasted tracking down customer activity, emailing potential buyers that weren’t even interested, or trying to understand who clicked your links? Marketing automation is a general term for platforms that enable the automation of repetitive tasks, as they relate to marketing on multiple online channels. In other words, automating marketing communication. So, via multiple channels, a company that uses marketing automation is able to manage and automate the targeting, timing, and content of outbound messages. What’s more, it can do this intelligently, using cues from prospective actions and behaviors on the customer side.
Think of this like responding to body language. In today’s world, consumers do their homework and visit the websites of multiple competitors before deciding which product they want to buy. Email blasts are no longer acceptable means of capturing a large piece of the consumer pie. More personalized and sensitive communications must be sent out, based on various criteria such as the buyer’s role in his or her organization or the buyer’s purchase readiness. It’s more important than ever to send the right message at the right time.
Marketing Cloud includes a host of features that assist in automating these marketing processes. Even better, Marketing Cloud is already part of the Salesforce network, meaning that you can leverage all the information in one database, instead of worrying about complex integration of various systems feeding into one another. Now it’s easier than ever to manage these interactions and deploy online campaigns from a central platform.
Identifying qualified leads with Pardot
Leads are the lifeblood of your business. The more leads you generate and pursue, the greater the chance that your revenue will grow. We already know that with Salesforce, you can plan, manage, measure, and improve lead generation, qualification, and conversion. You can see how much business you or your team generates, the sources of that business, and who in your team is making it happen. What about the step preceding that, though? There’s no use in filling your pipeline with leads that won’t actually follow through. So, how do you make sure your leads are qualified?
Pardot, Salesforce’s marketing automation tool, ensures that you fill your pipeline with the highest-quality leads. You can use the tool to create custom landing pages, lead capture forms, and targeted personalized emails. This helps your business shorten the sales cycle and close deals faster. You can set up personalized lead scoring based on criteria that you decide, to evaluate how qualified prospective buyers are. You can control which marketing content and messaging goes out to those leads based on that score criteria. Finally, you can add those leads that aren’t quite ready to buy to your nurture campaigns, so that you can spend more time “nurturing” them into high-scoring leads that will more likely purchase your product. This, in turn, accelerates your pipeline and ensures that team effort is being spent where it will pay off most, all from a central place.
When the sale is closed, good companies don’t say sayonara. An organization should still keep tabs on customers, or have relevant purchase history ready on the off chance that the customer will reach out with questions or issues. This is the foundation of customer support. Salesforce Service Cloud is a tool that helps call centers and customer service agents track customer interactions after point of sale.
This section provides an overview of what you can do with Service Cloud. For a lot more information, see Salesforce Service Cloud For Dummies, by Jon Paz and TJ Kelley (Wiley).
Managing customer interactions with cases
Remember when you used to call a toll-free number about a broken product that you bought? Maybe you emailed a support email address or filled out a web form. Whichever method you chose, chances are, you weren’t at your happiest at that moment. And who can blame you? It’s critical that customers receive world-class customer service from companies. Today, customers demand satisfaction more than ever before. If they aren’t