Picking out a software solution is as crucial a decision as hiring a new manager for your business. The product you invest in can mean the difference between a steady growth of your enterprise or its stagnation. This is why you need to carefully assess your prospective programs to find out which will work best for your company. A CRM even becomes more significant in light of the pandemic, allowing employees to work remotely, handle an increase in customer queries, and providing a means to engage with customers.
This applies even to some of the most well-known products in the industry such as Salesforce CRM. To help you get a better idea of how this popular CRM software will help you streamline your sales operations, we will discuss the following to answer the question: What does Salesforce CRM do? With this guide, you should get a better idea as to the different functionalities you can take advantage of when you invest in this system as well as the benefits that you can reap.
What Does Salesforce CRM Do Table of Contents
There are plenty of reputable CRM software providers but there will always be those that stand out from the others because of their exceptional products. One such example is Salesforce. Having been in the industry for nearly 20 years, they have easily won a bulk of the market share when it comes to sales applications, marketing applications, and customer service applications. Proof of their strong market presence is Salesforce’s 20% year-on-year growth in 2020, amassing $1.36 billion in subscription and support revenue for its key Sales Cloud products.
Key Salesforce CRM Benefits
Source: Salesforce
Designed byAlso, Salesforce CRM is touted to have helped customers improve sales revenue by 37%, customer satisfaction by 45%, and marketing ROI by around 43%. This is by providing them with an easy-to-use platform to find and qualify leads, close more deals, and grow their businesses. Moreover, the Salesforce suite is all based upon a CRM framework that connects sales, marketing, help-desk, and other business processes under one roof.
What’s more, this comprehensive set of features is packaged in an intuitive user interface that both veteran SaaS users and neophytes will find easy to learn and implement. So, let’s get into some important aspects of Salesforce CRM in our brief overview.
Of course, in case you find that Salesforce isn’t the best fit for you, you can always check out the other Salesforce alternatives available on the market as well.
Overview of Salesforce CRM
Salesforce CRM has allowed many users to completely overhaul the way they conduct support and service operations. However, unlike other CRM platforms, these are not the only use. Salesforce CRM is not only for customer relationship management professionals involved in aftersales, service, or support. It is also for sales and marketing professionals. In fact, it really can be considered a total business solution.
Why? You can customize its deployment according to your industry and needs. Firstly, as a CRM software, it allows you to track and manage customer information. Secondly, using its collaboration tools, it connects your entire team and allows them to be on the same page. Thirdly, through its analytics module, it delivers instant insights including recommendations. Fourthly, you connect different processes from sales and marketing to business intelligence and IT under using a single digital hub.
Thus, this makes it a total business solution that is more than just a glue but a real platform for everything your business does. It serves as your central command.
You can use all the features for free for a period of time to see if the software matches your needs. Simply sign up for Salesforce CRM free trial.
Salesforce CRM
Try out Salesforce CRM with their free trial
Moreover, the platform’s cloud-hosted deployment makes it ideal for entrepreneurs, managers, administrative staff, and field professionals who need to access their CRM data on-the-fly.
What does Salesforce CRM do?
1. Leverage Customer Information to Increase Sales
Tools that track sales activities and previous customer interactions are included in Salesforce CRM’s arsenal. With these at your disposal, you can have a better understanding of your clients. It also uses client data from social media and emails, granting you further insight into what makes your leads and existing customers tick. This information will help you find out what kind of products or content your customers are looking for. In turn, you will be able to create marketing and sales strategies that are more suited to their preferences.
2. Gives You a Bird’s Eye View of Sales Pipeline
Conversions should be monitored closely, and this platform allows you to do this in real-time. Once you have sufficient data, you can create adaptive weekly forecasts for more organized compilation. Salesforce CRM also has an intuitive dashboard for data accumulation as well as detailed reporting and analysis; giving you a good sense of your sales performance.
With all the data collecting that goes on during the sales process, managing everything might be more difficult for you when all your tasks pile up. However, with Salesforce CRM, you can check on all aspects of your pipeline at one glance, from customer activity to conversion rates. This platform even provides you with customizable reporting and visualization options so you can view your data the way you prefer.
You can customize your Salesforce CRM dashboard to gauge and determine the quality of leads easily.
3. Gauge and Determine Sales Opportunities
Salesforce CRM gives you insight into the different aspects of your sales process. These include your customers’ preferences, the progress of your sales and marketing activities, and your conversions. This platform will also determine sales opportunities, gauge their value, and help you prioritize them according to significance. Through sifting strong leads from the weak ones, you can focus on prospects who are more likely to turn into paying customers instead of those who are not as engaged yet.
4. Improves Your Marketing Pipeline
At every stage of the pipeline—from gathering and qualifying leads to turning them into opportunities—the Salesforce CRM software can help you. While managing prospects and customers effectively, you can also make sure that no leads fall in the cracks by automating follow-ups and tracking where your leads are in the sales funnel. Whatever opportunity comes your way, you will likely make the most of it thanks to efficient contact management and data-driven user engagements.
5. Develop More Effective Sales Cycles
If you compare Salesforce CRM with other solutions on the market, you’ll find that it not only helps you understand your clients and your opportunities better; it also helps you streamline your process. The platform is equipped with workflow automation and task management features to help you fine-tune your sales cycles and stay on top of them at all times. These will help you map out your data-backed strategies and gain real-time visibility over your sales cycles. In turn, this will allow you to move leads through the sales funnel faster.
Salesforce CRM provides robust workflow visualization tools to streamline sales processes.
6. Make Teams More Efficient
Unlike spreadsheets and ledgers that can be misplaced or stored in disjointed filing systems, Salesforce CRM consolidates all of your data in one database. With this, you allow your marketing teams, sales teams, and administrative staff to get access to the same comprehensive pool of information and stay on the same page when it comes to the different aspects of your operations. This means employees can coordinate better and get tasks done faster and more efficiently.
7. Reduce Conflicts on Sales Channels
Every now and then, friction occurs between your sales representatives because they are focusing on the same territories. With Salesforce CRM, you have access to robust territory management tools. This will help you set boundaries according to customer volume and employee assignments to achieve a balanced workload among your reps.
8. Boosts Lead Nurturing
Generating leads and converting them into paying customers takes more than getting your brand noticed. In fact, 79% of leads never convert into sales because of poor lead nurturing. You need to be more proactive in monitoring your prospective customers and getting in touch with them. With Salesforce CRM, you can track clicks, create campaigns, and automate the whole process. This allows you to generate quality leads, nurture them, and accelerate the conversion process while reducing the time spent on the sales cycle.
Salesforce CRM helps you keep up with leads and opportunities. In this way, you can nurture relationships with leads, prospects, and loyal customers.
9. Provides Tools for Field Personnel
Salesforce CRM is a completely cloud-hosted platform, making it ideal for sales and marketing teams that are always on the go. This allows you to access your dashboards, reports, and other CRM data on mobile devices so your field professionals won’t have to go back and forth to the office just to get the information they require.
10. Integrates Well with Your Current Infrastructure
Similar to other products in the Salesforce productivity suite, Salesforce CRM is built for flexibility. It was made to blend seamlessly with other software ecosystems through powerful APIs. With this feature, you can integrate with third-party applications like JIRA, Freshdesk, Zendesk, Samanage, FinancialForce, and more making it easy to extend the capabilities of the platform. Moreover, this allows you to retain your existing business systems and even consolidate the data from all of your applications in a singular interface for easier monitoring.
Other Noteworthy Salesforce Details
So, there you have it. Salesforce CRM can do many things to help you gain leads and improve business performance. We have spilled out the details on how it benefits its users. Also, to make it easy for you, we’ll provide you a summary list of its features below.
Core features
- Contact Management
- Customer Engagement Tools
- Workflow Creation
- Task Management
- Opportunity Tracking
- Collaboration Tools
- Analytics
- Intuitive, Mobile-Ready Dashboard
Features for Marketers
- Marketing Leads Monitoring
- Social Media Integration
- Email Integration
Features for Salespeople
- Sales Leads Monitoring
- Communities for Sales
- Sales Forecasting
Also, Salesforce CRM has reasonable pricing plans that depend on the number of features you will be needing for your operations. Here they are below:
- Startup companies and small businesses that require minimal features can opt for the Lightning Essentials package which is available at $25/user/month.
- For medium-sized businesses that require more advanced CRM functions, there is a Lightning Professional package that costs $75/user/month.
- There is also a Lightning Enterprise package at $150/user/month that supports a larger number of process automations
- A Lightning Unlimited package at $300/user/month with all the features that the platform has to offer.
Are You Ready to Try Salesforce CRM?
Salesforce CRM is undoubtedly a leading solution when it comes to customer relationship management. It offers a comprehensive set of tools that can scale up and down according to the needs of your operations, reliable customer support, and reasonable pricing plans. It is the software at the pinnacle of CRM. In fact, for many minds, Salesforce and CRM are equivalent.
Like what we mentioned before, the platform doesn’t just stop at CRM. It goes beyond it and applies the CRM framework to sales, marketing, and customer support. It serves as a centralized hub or, better yet, command central. Thus, many believe it to be a total business solution. If you want to investigate the features closely, you can easily do so when you sign up for the Salesforce CRM free trial plan.
However, like any other platform, there may be some aspects of it that fall short of your expectations. If this is the case, we highly recommend that you check out some of the other products available on the market. One of the best places to start browsing would be our list of the 10 best CRM software.
Additionally, it is best that you keep yourself abreast of these top CRM trends for 2020. After all, new technologies emerge and new types of customers rise almost every year. So, getting a deeper understanding of these can help you stay ahead of the curve at all times, especially with all the uncertainty surrounding the market due to the pandemic.
Key Insights
- Comprehensive Platform: Salesforce CRM offers an omnichannel platform for managing customer relationships, sales, and marketing processes seamlessly across various channels.
- Increased Efficiency: It provides tools that enhance team collaboration, streamline workflows, and reduce conflicts among sales representatives by managing territories effectively.
- Enhanced Sales Processes: The platform helps in leveraging customer information, providing a detailed view of the sales pipeline, and identifying key sales opportunities, thus improving overall sales performance.
- Marketing Integration: Salesforce CRM integrates well with marketing efforts, automating follow-ups and ensuring no leads fall through the cracks, thereby improving the marketing pipeline.
- Field Support: With cloud-hosted deployment, Salesforce CRM is ideal for field personnel, allowing them to access necessary data on-the-go, which enhances their productivity.
- Integration Capabilities: The platform integrates seamlessly with existing business systems through powerful APIs, allowing for the consolidation of data from various applications.
- User-Friendly Interface: Its intuitive and mobile-ready dashboard makes it easy for users to navigate and utilize the platform’s comprehensive features.
- Customizable Deployment: Salesforce CRM can be tailored to fit specific industry needs, making it a versatile solution for various business requirements.
FAQ
- What does Salesforce CRM do? Salesforce CRM provides an omnichannel platform that helps users manage customer relationships, sales, and marketing processes efficiently. It offers tools for tracking sales activities, customer interactions, and insights into customer preferences, which aid in creating targeted marketing and sales strategies.
- How can Salesforce CRM improve my sales pipeline? Salesforce CRM offers a comprehensive view of the sales pipeline, enabling real-time monitoring of conversions and detailed reporting. This helps in creating adaptive forecasts and managing the entire sales process from customer activity to conversion rates more effectively.
- What are the benefits of using Salesforce CRM for marketing? Salesforce CRM improves the marketing pipeline by managing prospects and customers efficiently, automating follow-ups, and tracking lead progress. It ensures no leads fall through the cracks and helps in creating data-driven user engagements to maximize opportunities.
- Can Salesforce CRM help in reducing conflicts among sales representatives? Yes, Salesforce CRM provides robust territory management tools that help set boundaries according to customer volume and employee assignments, ensuring a balanced workload and reducing conflicts among sales representatives.
- Is Salesforce CRM suitable for field personnel? Absolutely. Salesforce CRM is a cloud-hosted platform, allowing field personnel to access their dashboards, reports, and other CRM data on mobile devices, which enhances their productivity and efficiency while on-the-go.
- How does Salesforce CRM integrate with existing business systems? Salesforce CRM is built for flexibility and integrates seamlessly with other software ecosystems through powerful APIs. This allows businesses to retain their existing systems and consolidate data from various applications for easier monitoring and enhanced functionality.
- Is Salesforce CRM user-friendly? Yes, Salesforce CRM features an intuitive and mobile-ready dashboard that is easy to navigate. Its user-friendly interface makes it accessible for both veteran SaaS users and newcomers, facilitating quick implementation and usage.
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