Salesforce

As a cloud-based platform, Salesforce continues to rein the CRM space as it occupies a market share of around 20 percent. It is indeed the most popular and widely adopted CRM system due to the vast array of valuable features and functionalities offered by the platform. What makes it unique and one of the most preferred platforms is the release of new products and features year after year. With several new releases and acquisitions back and forth, Salesforce has come a long way. With such an evolution, users of Salesforce technology should learn to stay ahead of the curve. Instead, customers need to understand how they can use technology to increase business ROI, which significantly impacts the bottom line. Listed below are some great features that can help organizations optimize their Salesforce implementation for mitigating costs incurred due to customer and employee churn. It is always a good option to seek support from a reliable Salesforce consultant to know more about these features: Lightning Page Performance: This powerful feature allows users to deal with inconsistent lightning pages that aren’t optimized while working in a Salesforce org. The Lightning page performance is built natively into the Lightning App Builder responsible for doing all the analysis. This feature provides analysis about the performance of the pages on desktop/ mobile while providing tips to enhance performance and user experience. By benefitting from the Lightning Page Performance and optimizing the placement of the lightning component, end users can accomplish their duties much quickly and efficiently while dealing with the urge of distractions while opening multiple pages to fulfill their daily tasks. In-App Guidance: This feature assists employees with reminders, tips, and gradual walk-throughs to help them navigate the system appropriately. This feature can be configured to display a floating message or a prompt message in the utility bar. To measure the effectiveness of your implementation, data about the interaction of employees about guidance messages is recorded. This feature provides resources to users even before they recognize the need, thereby increasing the company’s ROI. This not just saves time but also improves efficiency. With supporting resources, and efficient workflows, employee morale is increased, and productivity is optimized. Salesforce Survey: For an organization to improve their ROI, they need to understand where the opportunities for enhancement are. Shortcomings usually exist in lengthy sales processes, product-related issues, slow response time, and more. However, identifying the bottom of the matter is necessary for implementing change. To understand customer experience regarding their products and services, organizations can directly gather customer feedback by using Salesforce surveys. This feature is endowed with a wide array of functionalities and the ability to automate the sending of the survey, customize email templates, and more. By gathering and analyzing survey results, organizations can better serve their customers. Social Studio: This feature is leveraged by organizations to connect with prospects and customers on social channels such as Facebook, Linked In, Twitter, and more. Eventually, this feature connects the sales, marketing, and service teams with their customers, enabling employees to develop meaningful relationships with customers and communicate with them on a common platform used both inside and outside of the workplace. Social Studio allows organizations to identify what prospects/ customers are speaking about the company, respond and track prospects as leads, and much more. With Social Studio, data-driven insights can be gained, which provides a deeper picture into how your customers engage with your social strategy, which can lead to enhanced lead generation and sales opportunities with the likelihood of maximum closure. Final Words: Businesses are seeking ways to save time and money by removing operational bottlenecks. The cost incurred as a result of employee and customer churn as a result of poor customer experiences can be alleviated by optimizing Salesforce and making the most of all the great features. To know more about these robust features, make sure you get in touch with one of the best Salesforce partners.

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. 

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.

In today’s era of cutthroat competition, conducting your business in a way that yields the desired outcome isn’t easy. This is primarily because customers have become more informed and expect personalized and timely interaction with your brand. Consequently, marketers should also be ready for change.  According to an IDC study commissioned by Salesforce, about 65% of B2B buyers engage with vendors only after they have made a purchase decision and 83% of them are willing to hear only from those that are relevant and contextual.  While marketers and sales reps make every effort to turn prospects into sales opportunities, yet they do not want to appear as spammers who would spend an entire day cold calling. Rather their goal is to build a strong relationship with them, which would help them to close sales deals quickly. However, personalizing every interaction across a long sales cycle can be daunting and thus requires having in place a well-thought-out lead nurturing strategy.  Given the fact that the average buyer’s journey is complex, and the content (problem awareness, solution consideration, and decision regarding solution purchase) that helps them to move down the sales funnel should be perfectly timed and polished, it’s practically impossible to cut it using random emails. Automating lead nurturing allows for the methodical tracing of lead engagements with appropriate content and accurate pinpointing of that lead’s stage in the sales cycle.  So, if your business is struggling to nurture leads consistently then Salesforce offers the perfect solution to manage your leads and support your sales team in multiple ways. It makes sense to get in touch with a reliable Salesforce partner if you wish to seek assistance for the automation of your lead nurturing process.  Organize Lead Information: Information gets scattered and leads might not be handled properly without a robust system in place. By installing a cloud-based CRM like Salesforce, managing lead information becomes easy. You can enter the contact details of your leads, keep a track of their calls, and emails while schedule follow-ups to fulfill business needs. You can also modify several data entry features to meet your business needs.  Access: Even if your lead information is well organized, it won’t be of much use if your team can’t access it. Since, Salesforce is a cloud-based platform, it helps your team to share, view, and update information at any point in time.  Track: While it is important to access and organize lead information, it isn’t of any use if you aren’t able to track your leads. In fact, it is crucial to have details regarding leads that are qualified and where they are positioned in the lead nurturing process for driving sales and upholding best practices. Salesforce with its features allows you to categorize lead status and convert qualified leads to contacts.  Quick Wrap-up: It’s important to include lead nurturing within your sales and marketing strategy. However, it’s important to utilize automation resources for nurturing your leads especially if you are scaling up your business to ensure you’re connecting with your audience at every step of the buying process. To know more about the benefits of using Salesforce for nurturing your leads, it’s prudent to partner with an experienced Salesforce consultant.

The success of a business is directly proportional to the extent their customers are satisfied. With a robust CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system like Salesforce in place, organizations will not just be able to improve their customer relationship but will also be able to increase their sales and revenue. As a leader in the CRM space, Salesforce has displayed promising statistics, which includes an annual growth of 29% in the financial year 2020. Apart from this, its customer base, which currently stands at 150000 is also increasing year on year. To, implement Salesforce, organizations should seek Salesforce Support from a reliable service provider. Here are some of the latest trends that will rein the Salesforce CRM space in the year 2021 and beyond: Customer 360: Uncertain situations like the recent Covid-19 pandemic have forced businesses to change the way they function. While customers have become digital-first, organizations too are moving towards digitalization to retain their customers. However, to sustain the market competition, organizations should equally focus on creating innovative solutions rather than just digitalization. Statistics reveal that around 69% of customers look for digital ways to get their products and services while 54 percent of them are seeking other ways to connect with a company. For the year 2021, Salesforce is coming up with a customer 360 tool that will enable companies to get a complete view of their customers.  Data Analysis:  Organizations these days are looking to analyze the data of their customers from multiple sources such as social media profiles, phone support, newsletter, etc. However, a report shared by Salesforce reveals that only 50 percent of companies can access all the data. This happens because most of the data is dispersed, which makes it difficult for organizations to analyze and visualize it. Consequently, organizations are adopting Salesforce as it helps them to gather data in a single place so that the sales, service, and marketing teams can work together without any doubt. Salesforce empowers organizations to create a data-driven approach by bringing together sales, service, and marketing cloud to arrange for data using customer 360 solutions.  Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning: The AI-powered platform by Salesforce i.e. Salesforce Einstein provides actionable insights and suggestions that help organizations to make informed decisions. The platform has built-in deep learning models that predict by reading CRM data. Few other features that show how Salesforce is utilizing AI and ML to develop intelligent platforms for an organization include the following: Tableau:Tableau is a business intelligence and analytics software that helps in creating a dashboard within a few clicks.  AppExchange:It is a marketplace for third-party apps. Salesforce is working to upgrade it by offering apps that are more installable to increase sales and client interactions of the businesses. Analytics that is Voice Enabled:Salesforce launched Einstein’s voice, which uses NLP (Natural Language Processing) for processing the user request. Users can update records using their voice. Einstein voice bots empower users to create their voice assistants for custom apps.  Salesforce Ecosystem: As one of the most popular and widely adopted CRM software, numerous applications can be integrated within the platform, which in turn helps in extending its capabilities and functionalities.  Lightning Web Components: These are HTML elements that empower users to create lightweight UI designs.  Mobile Applications: Salesforce is striving to get the entire CRM into a mobile app for which it has laid a solid foundation to achieve the goals. Some of the upgrades aimed at by Salesforce include the following: Salesforce has re-developed the native Salesforce app by partnering with Apple to make the most of Siri and other Apple features. It has developed low-code mobile builders that allow users to convert spreadsheets to apps without the need for any formal training. Industry-specific Platforms: Though Salesforce is more efficient in Sales, marketing, retail, and finance, it has now started developing solutions for other industries given the growing demand.   Final Words: Being one of the most popular and widely adopted CRM, Salesforce keeps on innovating to provide users with a more efficient and robust platform. By implementing the aforementioned trends, Salesforce is striving to transform the CRM industry. To stay ahead of the race, organizations will look for business-specific solutions, which Salesforce is striving to fulfill. It’s prudent to partner with a certified and experienced Salesforce Consultant to know more about Salesforce and its latest offerings.