In this technology-driven era, businesses are leveraging technology solutions to stay ahead of the race. One such technology solution leveraged by companies to streamline their business processes and customer relationships is robust CRM software like Salesforce. In fact, Salesforce being a cloud-based CRM, enjoys enormous popularity and a wide adoption rate. Apart from this, it also offers a wide array of useful features, functionalities, and tools that are designed to resolve the unique issues of different businesses. One such tool is the Salesforce community cloud that enables organizations to create branded web portals for connecting customers, employees, and partner engagement. In other words, it helps to build branded communities for seamless collaboration and streamlined business processes. By leveraging the Salesforce community cloud, organizations can launch communities for their partners and customers. Through these communities, organizations can create a channel of collaboration and communication for their stakeholders. It is essential to get in touch with one of the most Salesforce partners to know more about this platform. Salesforce community cloud offers several benefits to the businesses adopting it. Listed below are some reasons why it is a must-have for organizations today:   Build Customer Community: The Salesforce community cloud allows customers to engage with company representatives and other fellow customers within an online community while providing them with customized solutions. It provides customers with access to tutorials, forum threads, articles, FAQs, and more so that they can seek answers to their questions and become self-dependent. They can buy products and connect with other users to share their experiences.    Enhanced Customer Experience: The online community cloud offers multiple self-service options such as articles, FAQs, etc. on the portal to be accessed by customers, thereby making them feel empowered. Customers can seek resolution to their issues through continuous service and support. All this translates to enhanced customer satisfaction as customers get a platform to collaborate and communicate with each other. This creates a strong connection between the company and the users.   Reduced Costs: Since custom templates and third-party apps are pre-built in the community cloud platform, creating customized in-house solutions is done away, resulting in cost savings. Apart from this, the cost involved in resolving a customer's ticket in the absence of useful information can also be saved. With a robust tool to manage organizational processes, organizations can save plenty of employee time, which otherwise might get wasted in analyzing disparate sets of information. The robust cloud platform can help businesses develop a good relationship with their customers and employees who can act as brand champions later on. This can help them save money, which they would otherwise spend on encouraging brand stories across different portals. Product Improvement: It is possible to create customer, employee, and partner communities, acting as a research hub. By gathering and analyzing communicating data, meaningful insights regarding customers, partners and employees can be gathered. Customers can have access to the answers to the most frequently asked questions. It has also been observed that marketing leaders can seek help from online communities to manage their customer relationships online. The Bottom Line:  In a nutshell, it can be inferred that Salesforce communities provide organizations the space they need to reach their business objectives regardless of what they are looking forward to, including improved customer satisfaction, increased sales, and employee inclusivity. In short, organizations can make things complex or straightforward with such a high degree of customization. The software can seamlessly be integrated with the existing systems as it is highly affordable. It is prudent to partner with one of the best Salesforce Consultants to implement the software successfully. 

Creating and sustaining a memorable customer experience is necessary for organizations to survive today’s competitive business world. Compared to yesteryears, an average buyer’s journey has drastically changed, with consumer expectations evolving steadily. Today, with the advent of technology, marketers have access to marketing automation tools that help automate repetitive tasks while augmenting the efficiency and output of marketing and sales teams.  What is Marketing Automation? Marketing automation is the usage of the software that organizes the activities of a marketing campaign such as social media, emails, blog posts, and more, thereby making these tasks more manageable and less time-consuming. Marketing automation empowers marketers to create an ongoing, one-on-one cross-channel journey that provides a connected customer experience. One of its primary purposes is to deliver the right content, to the right customers, at the right time while nurturing their trust in the brand. Apart from this, marketing automation helps in tracking and analyzing customers’ behavior, as well as their buying patterns. This data can then be leveraged to segment target audiences for delivering personalized messaging.  Benefits of Marketing Automation There are several benefits of marketing automation for businesses. It helps organizations to stay relevant while keeping up with the demands of their customers. Benefits of marketing automation software include the following:  Improve the Efficiency of Marketing Team: Once your team gets introduced to marketing automation basics, it becomes easy for them to create and manage automation campaigns. In fact, sending targeted and relevant messages to their targeted audience becomes possible. This helps organizations to improve their customer experience.  Increased Customer Retention: Organizations can connect with buyers seamlessly through multiple channels by leveraging marketing automation tools. Organizations can keep their customers engaged all through their buying journey through relevant content. If a buyer gains an excellent shopping experience purchasing from a brand, they will likely become a brand loyalist.  Personalization: Marketing automation empowers brands to create a tailored and unique experience for every customer. This increases engagement and boosts sales. Increase the Average Purchase: One of the significant benefits of marketing automation is growing the average purchase. This can be done by cross-selling and upselling after buyers have finished their purchase by recommending compatible products or offering some perks.  Find Bottlenecks: Marketing automation helps organizations to identify bottlenecks in the process, thereby making operations efficient.  Keep the CRM Active: Apart from gathering data from various sources, marketing automation works the other way by enriching the CRM data by adding its actions to their accounts. This makes operations more customer-oriented and improves customer management.  Convert Better: Prospects come to know about your brand through various sources. However, only a part of them turns into buying customers. However, with a marketing automation tool like HubSpot in place, the conversion rates increase significantly as a robust platform keeps customers constantly engaged.  Final Words: Embracing marketing automation isn’t just about assuaging your marketing department from executing repetitive tasks. Instead, it is all about optimizing the customer experience, the efficiency of the campaign process, and the marketing team’s time. To make the most of a marketing automation tool like HubSpot, you must seek HubSpot Consulting from a reliable service provider. 

The business landscape, especially the internet marketing industry, has become highly competitive. As the internet continues to revolutionize the way we find, sell, buy and interact with brands, it's evident that marketing is transforming on a fundamental level. Today, the traditional and intrusive marketing tactics are losing their luster, and new models of inbound marketing are gaining momentum by providing value to customers.   While the benefits offered by inbound marketing are endless, organizations should address some common challenges that might prevent them from realizing the benefits: Incomplete Strategy: Inbound marketing strategy is all about attracting qualified leads and turning them into customers. As a result, you need to create a strategy that is built around the clear personas of your buyers while having in place a plan of action for each stage of the buyer's journey. For instance, if you're willing to do social media marketing, you'll have to recognize the social sites that your prospects are utilizing while creating a posting schedule. With clear strategies in place, the challenges of inbound marketing can be eliminated or reduced.  Sufficient Resources: Inbound marketing is all about producing relevant content consistently, which requires an ample amount of time and resources. The success of your inbound marketing can be inhibited if you do not have the necessary time and resources to push your marketing rigor.  Persona Alignment: It's essential to ensure that your inbound marketing and content strategy aligns with your target audience. When you curate content specifically for your target audience, the content required can be reduced. When you narrow down your search, you place quality over quantity, thereby helping you reach your potential customers. Besides reaching potential clients, you will generate qualified leads, collect insights, improve engagement across different channels, and create a great customer experience while maximizing your ROI.  Proper Marketing Tech Stack: One of the primary challenges faced by marketers practicing inbound marketing is the lack of appropriate resources. It might be challenging to choose the right tool that best meets the needs of your business. It's important to work smarter while selecting the tools that need to be integrated into your overall strategy. In fact, without a marketing tech stack like a CRM, marketing automation tool, analytics, email marketing tool, CMS, etc., it isn't possible to run an inbound marketing strategy. Choosing the right tools like HubSpot can enable your team to take your marketing to the next level by automating manual tasks, aligning sales and marketing teams, streamlining processes, and more. It makes sense to seek Hubspot Consulting from a reliable service provider. Low User Engagement: If you are witnessing poor user engagement even after having the right tech, time, resources, and strategy that matches your buyer personas, then you might wonder if something isn't right with the strategy. Rather than throwing it out of the window, make sure you check your website. One of the significant challenges of inbound marketing is a poor website experience, which is evident through the high bounce rates and low on-page time. A poor website experience can be due to poor mobile optimization, website design, and user experience.  Misalignment of Marketing and Sales: One of the common challenges faced by organizations is the misalignment of sales and marketing teams, as each one of them has a different viewpoint. To get traction in your inbound marketing strategy, you must focus on aligning marketing and sales teams.  Final Words:  These are some of the challenges that need to be addressed to pave the way for a successful inbound marketing strategy. However, overcoming all the challenges doesn't ensure that you would be able to grow your website traffic, generate leads while converting them into paying customers instantly. It's essential to have realistic expectations that are well-aligned and set up-front. Though inbound marketing challenges can be difficult to overcome, it's worth all your time and energy. However, if you or your team find it difficult to manage everything on their own, then you must consider getting in touch with a reliable HubSpot Implementation partner.

Every marketer has a common goal of attracting more and better leads. However, the cut-throat business landscape has made it challenging for marketers to get qualified leads that can be converted to sales. The answer to this is a marketing methodology called inbound marketing that has transformed the way marketers drive quality leads to their websites.

As a robust and cloud-based CRM (Customer Relationship Management) platform, Salesforce enjoys widespread popularity and adoption rate. Besides the wide array of features, functionalities, and components, Salesforce releases new products and features year after year, which sets it apart from its counterparts. Consequently, those leveraging Salesforce must learn to make the most of this robust platform to stay ahead of the curve. For most customers, the idea of evolution requires comprehending how this platform can be utilized to increase ROI, and improve the bottom line. For this, both customers and internal employees need to be taken into consideration. The cost incurred as a result of poor customer experiences can be alleviated by optimizing Salesforce implementation and making the most of all the great features out there. Listed below are some of the robust features of Salesforce that can increase the ROI. To make the most of these features, it’s prudent to get in touch with one of the best Salesforce implementation partners. In-app Guidance: The in-app guidance feature offered by Salesforce provides employees with tips, walk-throughs, reminders, etc to help them navigate the system. This feature can be configured to showcase prompt messaging in the utility bar. To measure the efficacy of your implementation, data regarding the interaction between employee and guidance message is recorded. This feature improves the ROI of an organization by providing users with resources even before they feel the need to have one. This results in improved efficiency in terms of time and performance.  Salesforce Survey: This feature helps in gathering feedback regarding customer experiences around the product and services of a company by implementing a strategy for collecting feedback at any phase of the sales, marketing, and sales cycle. This feature offers a wide array of functionalities such as customizing email templates for workflows, automating the sending of a survey. Businesses can figure out ways to serve their customers in a better way by analyzing gathered survey data. Social Studio: This feature helps organizations to communicate with prospects and customers on social media platforms such as Facebook, Linked In, Instagram, Twitter, etc. This feature helps organizations to connect with the sales, service, and marketing teams of their clients and helps employees to develop personal and decisive relationships with customers while communicating with them on their terms. Social studio helps users to understand the opinion and perception held by customers and prospects about the company while being able to respond via social platforms, track leads, and more. The social studio also helps to gather data-driven insights about customers and the way they engage with your social strategy. This will lead to the generation of qualified leads and sales opportunities with the highest probability of closure. Command Centre: This is an advanced feature by Salesforce that envisages statistics as to how customers engage with a brand by allotting all touchpoints and evaluations under one roof. By centralizing real-time data across Sales, service, and marketing cloud, the Command center drives health statistics across all customer touchpoints. This feature offers users a peep into the resolution time of customer issues and efficacy of emails, ads, etc, which helps companies to accurately predict the best way of retaining and enhancing customer portfolios.   Final Words: These are some of the many features that can be leveraged by organizations to increase their ROI. By optimizing Salesforce implementation, businesses can help remove bottlenecks from their operations while improving customer experiences by making the most of all the useful features. It’s important to seek assistance from a Salesforce consultant to know more about the features of Salesforce.

The Covid-19 has wreaked havoc on businesses across the globe. While complexities such as a shift in consumer demand, disruption of distribution channels, and unreliable data forecasting undermined some businesses; few others struggled to meet the sudden spike in demand for products that happened overnight.  While new challenges arose as a result of the pandemic, the need to manage revenue didn’t change. Rather it has become more urgent now. With tightening budgets, B2B buyers are looking for quick and flexible purchasing and payment options along with personalized and prompt services to adjust their contract rather than waiting for weeks. However, delivering on their expectation is difficult with multiple stakeholders and a growing network of partners and acquisitions. Apart from this, legal and compliance regulations around revenue reporting make precision critical. Salesforce – a leading name in the CRM space has introduced Salesforce revenue cloud, which provides businesses the flexibility to make the process of buying quicker and easier, generate new revenue streams, and augment revenue efficiency across different channels. It does all this by bringing together CPQ and billing, B2B commerce, and partnership management.  Since, revenue cloud is a part of the Salesforce customer 360 platforms; it will allow organizations to create a single source of truth by connecting their sales, operations, and finance teams revenue and customer transaction. To implement the Salesforce Revenue cloud, organizations should seek Salesforce support from a reliable service provider. Businesses will be able to reap the following benefits by leveraging the Revenue cloud: Transform the Buying Experience: The introduction of new B2B Commerce and CPQ connector helps in the customization of digital storefronts for complex B2B selling. Apart from this, functionalities such as customizable pricing to digital carts for a self-service experience for customers can be added. So, when a customer shares their specific needs, it becomes easy for sales reps to resolve their queries as they have access to the entire purchase history of customers. This will allow customers the ability to move across different sales channels with the help of sales partners and digital storefronts. New Sources of Revenue: The implementation of revenue cloud empowers sales and marketing teams to form new revenue generation strategies including the launching of subscription packages, implementing pricing policies. The recent acquisition of Vlocity made by Salesforce adds to the workflows for revenue management. With the new Multi-Cloud Billing feature, organizations can create revenue streams by gathering data from other clouds on a single platform.  Augments Revenue Efficiency: The process of tracking revenue is manual, and time-consuming. Automating these processes relieves teams from the burden of manual transfer of crucial data between systems, data reconciliation, and approvals. Automation helps in commencing sales orders and consolidating invoices. These will do away with the issues relating to underbilling or making incorrect modifications to contracts. The new Customer Asset Lifecycle management tool provides a visual dashboard of whatever a customer has purchased while keeping a record of all the amendments made in a contract over time.  Apart from this, effective assessment against KPI’s such as lifetime value of customers, net revenue retention is beneficial for all the teams. This will help teams to make key decisions regarding cost- cutting and who to target now. Final Words Salesforce revenue cloud is another powerful addition to the cloud platform. This robust cloud solution allows businesses to track and report the generation of revenue with accuracy. The revenue cloud platform can help businesses accelerate growth by filling the gaps created as a result of lost revenue or improving on the areas where a business is doing well. Irrespective of the complexity of the business models, deals, or revenue processes, Revenue Cloud provides a single source of truth for transactional data. To know more about Revenue cloud, it’s important to get in touch with a certified Salesforce consultant.

Ever since its’ inception Salesforce has made several new acquisitions. With every new acquisition, the company is improving its performance. Its compatibility with the AI platform i.e. Salesforce Einstein is due to the 12 acquisitions that it made in the year 2016. All the acquisitions made by the company till date has made it compatible with all the latest technologies and applications, platforms, and business types. It is in your interest to partner with one of the best Salesforce consulting partners to know more about Salesforce and its collaborations. Let’s take a look at some of the most successful and popular acquisitions made by Salesforce: ExactTarget: This tool was acquired by Salesforce to expand its pre-sales and marketing department services. This robust application has become a popular business tool as it is comprehensive and can provide them with email marketing services. In fact, this tool empowers the core marketing functionalities of Salesforce and improves its marketing suite. The complete product suite can simplify many operations such as SMS, emails, digital advertising and more. MuleSoft: The in-built API’s of this tool can be leveraged by organizations to build application network. Users of this tool can converse and exchange data with each other. Though, this acquisition had been one of the most expensive acquisitions, it provided Salesforce with a new direction by allowing it to provide enterprise-level solution to its users. The middleware connectivity offered by Mulesoft APIs helps enterprise to migrate to the cloud. This robust tool can provide organizations a complete view of their integration.   Tableau: The acquisition of this Seattle based company has been one of the most significant acquisitions as it has helped improve organizational performance considerably. Tableau is a robust and one of the best data visualization tools that has turned out to be extremely profitable for both companies. This acquisition has helped Salesforce users get access to user database of Tableau. With the help of Tableau, Salesforce users can know about their ambitious customers, which in turn can help them make intelligent decisions. Quip: This document management tool is used to gather, amalgamate, and store documents and spreadsheets thereby improving efficiency. Though, document processing tools like spreadsheets aren’t preferred any more, users are familiar with them. Salesforce CRM spreadsheets can be stored on the cloud. Quip is able to provide bi-directional collaboration of document together with synchronized data from Salesforce. Quip users can send videos, texts, and images apart from simple documents.  Bonobo: This tool can help users to gain deep insights about customers in form of texts, support calls, speech and other modes of communication. Bonobo was acquired by Salesforce to support Einstein, which is an AI powered platform that uses its self-learning capabilities to support various business operations. Griddable: This powerful tool helps in seamless integration of data across all cloud platforms of Salesforce. The tool offers users of Salesforce to get a grid view of data while ensuring smooth and quick migration of data. Salesforce users can access data from different sources and use it as and when required. With such availability of data, Salesforce has become a reliable CRM that can enable users to gather data from different sources and make the most of it. Quick Wrap-up: These are few of the many acquisitions made by Salesforce that are not just popular but also some of the most used ones. However, the list continues to grow as Salesforce is trying to team up with many more brands to provide better services to its existing customer base. To know more about the acquisitions made by Salesforce and the benefits that can be leveraged out of them, it’s prudent to seek Salesforce support from a reliable service provider.