Salesforce is a leading name in the CRM space due to the wide array of features, functionalities, and components offered by it. Regardless of their size and business domain, businesses across the globe are leveraging this robust platform to resolve their unique business while enjoying operational efficiency. However, implementing Salesforce is easier said than done as user adoption problems arise due to cultural change in the organization. It is worth partnering with a certified Salesforce consultant if you wish to ensure a seamless implementation journey.
Let's discuss in detail the common Salesforce adoption problems and ways to tackle them:
Resistance to Change: Employees usually show resistance when they are expected to handle a newly implemented system, primarily when they haven't dealt with the same beforehand. It is essential to understand the reasons behind this resistance, which mainly includes the absence of understanding and training. Before embracing Salesforce, abundant training and support should be provided to the users.
Data Inconsistency: Several users associate their CRM with different users, which may impede their data inconsistency. It's suggested to use Salesforce as the center of all their data and acquit themselves with different frameworks from that point onwards. It is crucial to note that old, fragmented and obsolete data decreases the legitimacy of their Salesforce reports and frameworks and drives sales reps crazy.
Complicated Entries: It becomes difficult for Salesforce users to work on long page layouts and unwanted fields as long page layouts require too much scrolling. At the same time, too many areas contribute to insufficient data. It is essential to keep it short and straightforward to ensure that users can gather data without hassle.
Absence of meaningful reports and dashboards: Salesforce reserves a vast amount of data, and it can be leveraged to generate actionable insights. However, users tend to lose interest if the reports generated are vague, which drastically impacts the adoption rate.
Not Leveraging the Complete Potential of Salesforce Workflows: Not utilizing Salesforce workflows is a common blunder, which Salesforce users usually commit as Salesforce workflows can help increase productivity by sending reminders for renewal, auto emails, notifications regarding stale opportunities, and more.
How to Tackle Issues Related to Adoption?
Begin with a Pilot Project: It's essential to do a pilot project before implementing a system. In this way, testing can be performed, gaps can be identified, and user's requirements and practical issues can be understood. To run a pilot project, it's important to select a user group and provide them with the necessary training materials to run the platform effectively.
Understand End-user Requirement: To implement Salesforce successfully, it is important to loop in the Sales team and discuss with them the dashboards, reports, features, and functionalities. By considering their viewpoint, it will be easy to streamline Salesforce configuration while increasing the user adoption rate. It is crucial to articulate the arrangement and set their expectations from day one. Users need to focus on a strategy that not just fits all the requirements of the stakeholders but is also consistent with their workforce.
Training: Quality training should be provided to users to understand the basic motive behind implementing Salesforce and how it can benefit them. With proper training, users can tackle errors that might arise during the Salesforce journey.
Quick Wrap-up:
In a nutshell, it can be inferred that the success and failure of a newly implemented system depend mainly on how well users are accustomed to its' usage. The better the users are adapted to the system, the greater are the chances of achieving higher ROI. By partnering with one of the best Salesforce consulting companies, organizations can ensure a greater adoption rate.
Salesforce is known to be one of the most popular CRM platforms available. This robust platform offers various cloud solutions that organizations can leverage to resolve their specific business issues. However, even after implementing Salesforce, many users fail to get the desired outcome, which may primarily happen due to improper implementation strategy. An inaccurate implementation strategy or planning can reduce the chances of user adoption.
A strategic implementation can lead to guaranteed success. For ensuring successful Salesforce implementation, it’s essential to follow the below mentioned best practices:
Choose the Best Implementation Strategy: The kind of implementation strategy a business adopts will depend on the type of business process. If a company isn’t satisfied with the performance of its sales, marketing, and customer services, they have two options at their disposal:
By implementing and migrating their processes to Salesforce in the best possible way.
By redefining their design and processes from scratch within Salesforce
Select Appropriate Implementation Stages:
Once you are ready with your future implementation, it’s essential to evaluate the possible ways of current Salesforce implementation. Mentioned below are two methods for that:
Multiple Salesforce Cloud Implementations: All the departments, including sales, service, and marketing, can be automated by implementing Salesforce. With this, organizations can enjoy streamlined business processes and other automation capabilities such as email notification, field updates, and sales service contributions. By leveraging the three important Salesforce clouds i.e., sales, service, and marketing cloud, the functioning of all the three departments can be augmented. With this, organizations can enjoy better customer engagement and retention. However, data integrity, data loss, corruption, and chances of failure increase with multiple implementations. To ensure a seamless implementation journey, it is essential to partner with a certified Salesforce professional.
Salesforce Cloud Integration: Gradual implementation of Salesforce clouds should be done to lower the integration risk. You can begin with implementing your priority cloud, i.e., sales or marketing, followed by the execution of service cloud implementation. However, to maintain internal departmental synchronization, you may have to perform provisional implementation parallel.
Planning of Implementation steps:
The sequence of Salesforce implementation generally includes the following steps:
Consulting: A Salesforce consultant you engage can help you select essential functionalities by analyzing the business process needs. A consultation may also suggest a better implementation approach for your business process and the best licensing option for your business.
Data Transfer to a New System: While importing data to the CRM, safety of data import steps should be ensured to ensure data quality. Other aspects such as data duplication, data cleansing, mapping of data objects etc. can be performed through migration tools.
Application Configuration: Since the implementation is incomplete without customization, Salesforce objects need to be customized through point and click tools to provide step-by-step functionality enhancements. Post customization, the implementation should be tested by testing engineers. The process is migrated to the UAT (user acceptance testing) for deployment.
Budget Planning: An important thing to consider while implementing Salesforce is the time taken to implement all the essential features. If the implementation scope is clearly defined, then the organization can easily do time and budget planning.
Implementation Risk: Risk forecasting is crucial as it impacts implementation results. Some of the risks include the following:
Inculcation of any irrelevant feature: You may want to purchase an expensive Salesforce edition with rich functionalities. However, you might not be requiring all the features and thus may end up paying more. Consequently, you may get a compliant solution with extra features without paying more.
Using Non-User-Friendly Solution: The adoption rate might drop if your users aren’t comfortable with the chosen functionality, resulting in lower productivity.
Final Thoughts:
Without complete user adoption, Salesforce implementation might be incomplete. Right from the beginning i.e., from the first step to the final stage, organizations need to consider all the aspects of user adoption. Besides this, organizations need to choose a proper and suitable implementation strategy, plan their budget and timeline. This will ultimately result in increased business ROI and a greater adoption rate. For any assistance regarding Salesforce implementation, it is essential to partner with one of the reputed Salesforce consulting companies.
The business landscape has evolved significantly over the years. The traditional selling methods are now being replaced by automated processes that help sales reps track sales activities seamlessly. Though technological advancement has paved the way for new opportunities, it has also increased customers' expectations.
Today, business partners of B2B organizations expect the same attention and personalization they witness in B2C environments. However, this is easier said than done because it's essential to have a holistic view of your customers in a single place, which could be achieved with a robust CRM in place. Salesforce Sales Cloud can empower your sales teams to turn your customers from leads to loyal customers.
As an entrepreneur, you will be able to draw meaningful insights into your business, which will help you shift your efforts and make informed decisions based on market changes. It would help if you considered getting in touch with a reliable Salesforce consultant to know more about this cloud-based software.
What Makes Salesforce Sales Cloud Preferable for Sales Reps?
As the number one CRM platform, Salesforce offers a wide range of solutions to help organizations achieve their goals and stay ahead of their competitors. One such solution is the Salesforce Sales Cloud, which allows businesses to sell smarter, faster, and the way they want. Among all the cloud services, Sales cloud is known to have generated most of Salesforce's revenue. Mentioned below are some of the crucial salesforce sales cloud features that are designed to help businesses achieve their targets with this robust platform:
Account and Contact Management: This feature allows users to access critical customer data such as key contacts, communication history, and more.
Opportunity Management: This feature helps users to focus on the most critical aspect of your business. It highlights the essential elements of their business, such as their competitors, the stage their deals are in, and what moves are required to win those deals.
Lead Management: This feature allows users to convert more leads into real-time opportunities while tracking accurate data about their leads.
Pipeline and Forecast Management: This feature offers comprehensive forecasting and allows users to drive predictable revenues. Users get an inclusive view of the entire pipeline and business activities. It helps you to make critical and informed decisions through data insights and predictive AI.
Process Automation: Sales cloud allows users to automate their business processes with drag and drop simplicity while driving easy strategies. The point-to-click interface present in the process builder helps users to automate their business processes. The cloud platform also allows users to create automated workflows for various deals, making the process fast and simple.
Data Management: The data management feature offered by the Sales cloud will allow users to provide the correct data to the right person at the right time.
Benefits of Using Salesforce Sales Cloud:
Go Mobile: With Salesforce Sales cloud, it allows entrepreneurs to monitor their sales activities from anywhere across the globe. Irrespective of your location, this solution allows entrepreneurs to track their sales team's activities from their device. They can check sales charts, reports, dashboards, call logs, and more with simple clicks.
Sales Forecasting: Another benefit of the sales cloud is the extremely easy and simple forecasting, which helps them make informed decisions. This functionality not just provides a real-time view of the forecasts but also provides multicurrency support.
Increase the Leads: The platform contains all the essential features required for managing leads. It offers a lead management feature that allows users to track their leads closely while monitoring campaigns across multiple channels. The platform also provides access to the right data that will help users to augment their sales and marketing productivity.
Boosts Productivity: The AI-powered Salesforce sales cloud allows users to automate processes, prioritize leads, and help teams convert leads quickly. In fact, the Einstein AI built-in sales cloud has proved to be a blessing for organizations looking to boost their revenues.
Final Words:
So, suppose you are looking to boost the revenue and productivity of your organization. In that case, Salesforce Sales cloud offers the perfect solution to help you attain organizational objectives by empowering your sales team. You must consider partnering with one of the best Salesforce consultants to implement this software within your business ecosystem.
Effective business communication is the cornerstone of every business undertaking. Today, there is no dearth of internet-driven communication tools that can ensure effective communication compared to yesteryears. However, SMS (Short Messaging Services) is a preferred mode of communication due to its excellent penetration effect, more open rates, and cost-effectiveness. When integrated with a robust CRM platform like Salesforce, the messaging platform offers advanced features to take business communication to a new level. In fact, the integration of the SMS App with Salesforce paves the way for automated texting, which helps businesses with faster and time-saving business processes.
Smart SMS app is a Salesforce messaging App built natively on the Salesforce platform and leveraged by organizations to communicate effectively with their customers through single/Bulk SMS/MMS. The powerful App has gained much respect due to its versatility, easy access, and handling. Listed below are some ways in which automated texting can help transform business communication:
Simultaneous Conversations: A mundane routine for communication isn’t sufficient to fill the lead pipeline quickly. This is because employees can access a limited number of prospects in the absence of automated testing. However, with automated texting, agents can get into multiple conversations. This will help them to attract several leads from different directions using various conversational routines.
Meaningful interactions: One way of automating texts is through message rescheduling. This helps in sending the messages at a preferred date and time. When messages are sent at the right time, more meaning is added to any conversation. To reduce manual intervention, users can schedule time-sensitive messages beforehand while determining whether they wish to send them weekly, monthly, or annually. To follow up with unresponsive leads, marketing, and onboarding of students, users can organize SMS drip campaigns.
Support Services: Chatbots are an essential aspect of automated testing. Users require configuring a few commonly asked questions, following which they can allocate an appropriate response to an incoming response with the desired keyword. In this way, users can design chatbots for different cases while providing round-the-clock support to their prospects and customers.
Reduce Manual Involvement: Automated texting opens doors of opportunities to pave the way for self-driven interactions. This frees up time for employees as they can prioritize other essential business activities such as prospecting. Besides this, organizations can accelerate the process of interaction, assist their customers, and improve their overall experience through meaningful conversations.
Quick Wrap Up:
These are how a Salesforce texting App can benefit organizations significantly by taking their business communication to the next level. So, if you wish to better connect with your customers, you must consider automated testing as part of your business strategy.
In today's competitive business landscape, organizations need to cater to their customers in the best possible way to sustain themselves. Be it providing them with prompt responses to their queries, ensure a personalized experience, or interacting with them through multiple channels, it's important to make your customers fall in love with your business. A robust cloud-based CRM (Customer Relationship Management) like Salesforce offers everything required to manage a healthy customer relationship.
Salesforce – a Software as a Service (SaaS) platform is also known for a powerful application to handle all types of business needs and problems while providing you with cloud-based solutions. One such cloud solution is the Salesforce commerce cloud that offers software as a service solution for eCommerce. It manages the technical roadmap to free you up from all sorts of business demands while figuring out how to move ahead while considering the eCommerce features. This robust commerce cloud is a highly persuasive solution for brands and retailers looking for a one-stop solution to their business problems. You must avail of Salesforce integration services to integrate it within your business ecosystem.
What is SAP Commerce cloud?
The architecture of SAP Commerce Cloud has scalability, agility, and flexibility with native cloud capabilities. It helps deliver personalized digital commerce experiences, simplify digital transformation and accelerate time-to-value. SAP Commerce Cloud empowers companies with out-of-the-box modules such as product content management, order management, and experience management with ready-to-use functionality. These modules can be customized by adding extensions to tailor them as per the specific requirements of different industries.
Benefits of Using Salesforce Commerce Cloud?
The growth of the online market has forced every business to come up with a strong online base. Developing a solid marketing strategy is no longer enough to generate outstanding sales. Rather, it's crucial to have an eCommerce website that exposes your business to the entire world without any geographical limitations, with a very low financial investment, healthy promotions, and more. While multiple platforms offer software solutions for eCommerce, Salesforce eCommerce cloud has become the future of eCommerce.
Why Choose Salesforce Commerce Cloud over SAP Commerce Cloud?
Admin interface: When it comes to the Admin interface, the Salesforce commerce cloud is more advantageous than the SAP commerce cloud as the Salesforce platform is highly user-friendly for daily operations. However, SAP commerce has the control to merge the interface elements that existed in earlier versions. It brings together all the picture-perfect and tailor-made back-office UI via an enhanced product content management (PCM).
Support: Speaking about customer support, Salesforce displays a distinguishable edge over SAP. While users can use a phone, email, tickets, and live chats to connect with Salesforce, SAP users can only utilize phones and emails. Salesforce commerce cloud has more efficient commerce operations as compared to SAP commerce. Additionally, Salesforce commerce cloud supports multiple languages compared to SAP commerce cloud that only supports the English language.
Features: Salesforce again takes an edge over SAP when it comes to superiority and diversity of features. The Salesforce platform offers an extensive range of user-friendly features. It comprises AI-powered personalization, customer segmentation, catalog management, native targeting, pricing, targeted promotion, search engine optimization, and more within the Salesforce commerce cloud. However, SAP Commerce Cloud, on the other hand, presents features like document management, financial management, agile charging, and optimized pricing.
Mobile and Social: When it comes to building mobile apps, Salesforce offers custom-branded and low-code mobile development policies that are simple to use. Organizations can list their customized Android and iOS applications in the Google play store and App Store. On the other hand, SAP helps organizations develop their existing solutions with the help of micro-services and SAAS applications. Though SAP mobile apps support customer self-service, chats, SAP users do not support knowledge supervision videos.
Personalization Experience: Salesforce commerce cloud takes a distinctive edge over SAP commerce cloud when it comes to the personalization for shoppers. SAP, on the other hand, is still following the steps of Salesforce.
Conclusion
Salesforce Commerce Cloud is undoubtedly a better choice when we talk about providing personalized shopping experiences. Besides that, the robust platform can interlink many exceptional capabilities for its ecosystem in Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Community Cloud, and more. So, if you wish to leverage the benefits of Salesforce commerce cloud, make sure you partner with a certified Salesforce consultant.
Maintaining customer relationships has become the cornerstone of every business undertaking. Today, forward-looking organizations leverage robust and cloud-based CRM (Customer Relationship Management) systems like Salesforce to manage their customer relationships while streamlining their business processes. What sets this robust CRM apart from the rest of the pack are the multiple features, functionalities, components, and the new user interface, i.e., Salesforce Lightning that can help you build experiences to make users more productive.
The new Salesforce Lightning experience developed by Salesforce has a modern interface that is built on the Salesforce mobile technology. The new interface is more responsive across devices, promises faster navigation, and is more intuitive than Salesforce classic. Apart from this, the new back-end design system that offers a streamlined developer experience along with a growing library of innovative features makes the upgrade to Salesforce Lightning a must-have. However, it is important to be conscious that migration is not without hitches and can be tricky. It’s prudent to connect with one of the best Salesforce partners to enjoy seamless migration.
Listed below are some of the challenges that usually creep up during migration to the Lightning platform:
Complications in Customization: Though Salesforce is known for its adaptability, making a shift from a customized Salesforce Classic platform to the Lightning platform can be challenging. This can be overcome by documenting all the customizations that have been done in classic completely. Following this, an appropriate solution in Lightning should be figured out and set them up for hassle-free migration.
Declining Performance: Performance issues usually crop up post-migration. For instance, longer page loading time, etc., may lead to navigation difficulties, impacting user experience. Therefore, it is important to assess Salesforce org health and find areas that are causing barriers to the workflow. It is also essential to evaluate the quality of data before migration.
Overload of Functions: Salesforce Lightning offers a wide array of customizable features. However, choosing the right and required function can be difficult with such an assortment of choices available as companies might go out of the way with the customization tool. This causes more disruption than enhancement. It is important to browse through every available customization and choose the necessary ones to improve processes and keep them running smoothly to overcome this challenge.
Wrong Timing: It isn’t a prudent decision to rush into adopting Salesforce Lightning just because; it is a new and improved user interface. Migration should only be done when the time is right, as starting the migration at the wrong time leads to backlogs occurring as projects get delayed.
Delays in Implementation: Once the migration is complete, few users might find it challenging to use the new system properly. To get everyone on board, it is important to ensure phase-wise rollout with only a few users using the platform during the cushioning period.
Lack of Readiness from the Team: It is important to check your team’s readiness before migrating to the new platform. It is crucial to provide them with proper training depending on the function they would be using while using the Lightning interface.
Quick Wrap-up:
The journey of transitioning from Salesforce classic to the innovative Lightning platform might not be easy. However, this should not discourage you from enjoying all the benefits that Salesforce Lightning has to offer. With proper planning, the transition can be ensured more seamlessly. To ensure smoother and successful migration from Classic to Lightning, you must consider partnering with a reliable Salesforce consultant.
In today’s digital era, the business landscape has undergone a significant transformation. Today, customers have become more informed and expect personalized services from sales reps. Since sales play an important role in customer experience, AI prediction builders and other recommender systems appreciate investing time in exploring new products. AI tools can be leveraged by the sales team for making intelligent business decisions and tailor their strategies as per customer behavior and preferences while providing them with an enriching buying experience. It’s better to partner with a certified Salesforce consultant to make the most of these tools.
Mentioned below are some tools that can be leveraged to make the most of AI in Salesforce:
Effective Sales Strategies: Effective sales strategies should include reaching out to the prospects at the right time. This can be ensured by drawing meaningful insights regarding customer emotions from the customer data that is primarily available in an unstructured form such as emails, social media posts, sales meetings, and more. These insights, when combined, can be used to resolve issues regarding revenue, territory, competitors, and more. Tools such as Einstein Account insights and Einstein opportunity insights can be leveraged here.
Improved Lead Prioritization: Understanding need hierarchy and customer behavior are essential for accurate prediction of leads and modification of lead generation strategies. Salesforce algorithms work similarly, thereby allowing lead scoring models that are based on the following:
Behavior Analysis: It helps in analyzing which customers’ are inclined towards the website pages. Apart from this, it also helps to know which pages are performing better.
Company Details: Every detail beginning from recent mergers, leads, revenue, and other factors play an essential role.
Engagement: Engagement is the attraction shown by your customers towards a product and at a specific frequency. For instance, a visitor subscribing to a newsletter shows their engagement with a product or service.
Better Insights: While Salesforce shows excellent efficiency in collecting structured data, it fails to efficiently collect unstructured data from emails, social media data, sales meetings, and calendar events. For gathering insights regarding customer behavior and preferences, activity data is significant. However, doing it manually can be time-consuming and would require many efforts. In fact, a considerable portion of time is spent researching, entering data, generating quotes with very little time spent on core selling. Salesforce engages Einstein Activity Capture to sync all the activities while managing time-consuming activities, ensuring higher productivity and sales.
Accurate Prediction: It becomes easy for the sales team to calculate the revenue that is expected to be generated by making use of AI tools. The calculations are done basis multiple factors such as customer’s shopping history, sales performance, and records. Einstein forecasting provides the sales team with real-time insights along with graphical representation.
Final Words:
To sum up, we can say that AI is no longer a future technology anticipated to bring revolutionary changes in every sector. It is already here and is benefitting every domain, including the e-commerce sector, where most customer interaction will be done through AI. With the provision of practical algorithms, innovative selling solutions, and all-inclusive analytics, AI can improve the decision-making of sales reps. It’s better to get in touch with one of the most experienced Salesforce consulting partners to know more about Salesforce AI tools and their benefits.