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Most business leaders across the world recognize the value of Salesforce. They are aware of how the world's leading cloud-based CRM platform can help them cultivate rewarding customer relationships, address gaps in customer service, and enable them to adopt a more holistic approach to managing day-to-day operations. What many of them are not aware of, however, is the role of a Salesforce consultant to help them navigate the challenges involved in transitioning to Salesforce. And that's not the full picture. Salesforce consultants can also help to optimize and automate business processes to enable a seamless transition.
What is a Salesforce Consultant?
Salesforce consultants help customers achieve their long-term business goals by ensuring the smooth implementation of Salesforce tailored to their unique business needs. They also assess the dynamic market landscape and adapt the customer's operations to be future-ready.
Salesforce consultants also manage customer relationships, and project plans, do market research, understand user needs and sentiment, gather requirements, research organizational data, and train employees to get the most out of Salesforce.
The best Salesforce consultants have deep knowledge of Salesforce technology, rich experience in similar prior implementations, and awareness of the best business practices.
Challenges that Salesforce Consultants face and how they can solve them
As a business leader, if you really want to unlock the true power of Salesforce, we recommend that you choose the best Salesforce Implementation Partner. Apart from implementing the CRM, they can also help you solve various key business challenges. Here’s a look at some of them.
1) Handling sensitive information
One of the key challenges organizations must deal with while transitioning to Salesforce is ensuring their customer data is safe. Any data breach can result in drastic consequences for the business.
A Salesforce consultant will follow industry best practices to ensure that there are adequate safeguards in place to secure the data exchange between your existing systems and Salesforce. Additionally, they also ensure that once your data is in Salesforce, it can be accessed easily by users. This allows them to get a comprehensive view of their customers including contact details and interaction history in the least number of clicks. This helps them to make data-driven decisions leading to greater customer satisfaction.
2) Providing personalized assistance
All businesses are unique. This is true even for businesses offering similar products or services with a similar customer base. Each business has its unique vision, goals, and strategies that set them apart from each other. Consequently, they may have completely different reasons to implement Salesforce and completely different expectations from the implementation based on their unique business objectives. A vastly experienced Salesforce is well aware of the nuances of customer goals and expectations and works closely with customer and implementation teams to ensure the CRM implementation is fully tailored to the customer’s unique needs.
3) Offering valuable insights
Salesforce has been purpose-built to provide a 360-degree view of your customers. It includes everything from your contact information, purchase history, service interactions, interests and preferences, and social media interactions. As a business owner, you want to have deeper insights into customer behavior along with intelligent recommendations in a single place.
A good Salesforce consultant makes that possible. They can help aggregate siloed data and give you a unified, single-window view to help you better understand customer preferences and behavior patterns, regardless of which channel they interact with you on. This enables you to provide seamless interaction experiences to your customers across sales, marketing, and customer service across multiple channels.
4) Providing instant support
When customers interact with a business's customer support, they want instant resolution to their problem. And businesses are no different. When you invest in a platform like Salesforce, which includes licensing and implementation costs, you want your users to be up and running quickly so that they can close deals faster and resolve customers' concerns quickly.
While a library of documents, manuals, and videos may be helpful for your users, they may not be able to help in resolving a critical issue that may be disrupting operations. What businesses need is the support of an expert who has been there and done that. That expert is your Salesforce consultant. A Salesforce consultant understands the nuances of the platform and knows where to make tweaks to resolve common issues.
5) Configuring user permissions
Would you allow complete access to your financial data to all your employees? Would you allow access to customer information to your HR department? Sounds absurd, right?
Assigning the right access privileges to users is a critical part of any Salesforce implementation.
Creating the right user-profiles and customizing permissions in Salesforce requires a certain level of expertise that your existing IT team may not be equipped to handle. This is where the roles of Salesforce consultants become important. They can ensure that your users have access to only that functionality of Salesforce that allows them to do their job effectively. Not less and certainly not more. A Salesforce consultant can help you navigate the complex domain of user management to get the most out of your users.
6) Discovering business-specific solutions
The goals and needs of small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are different from their larger counterparts. Consequently, their CRM platform needs are also different. How do you go about designing a solution that is tailored to your unique requirements?
Purchasing a Salesforce license is just the starting step. Salesforce has virtually limitless capabilities and you may not have the requisite expertise in-house to choose the best-fit features of the platform to achieve your vision. A good Salesforce consultant leverages their prior experience and deep knowledge of the domain to establish clear goals and business requirements. They then use this information to recommend solutions that are aligned with your goals and needs.
7) Boosting user adoption
Poor user adoption is one of the primary reasons why many Salesforce implementations fail to achieve their true potential. In fact, industry research indicates that the problem is so acute that in the absence of adequate guidance and training, teams are likely to stop using the platform altogether. And this should be a matter of concern for you. When users don't use the platform, each of them relies on personal, non-standardized methods to manage customers and their data. Without a unified view of customers based on gold-standard industry practices, your executives are unable to make critical strategic decisions.
Which is why you need a Salesforce consultant. With adequate guidance and training programs tailored to each user group based on their job functions, they can ensure that your employees feel empowered when they look at customer data, giving their productivity a shot in the arm.
8) Other challenges
Quick setup
Setting up and managing Salesforce can be complex unless done by an expert. A Salesforce consultant knows the nitty-gritty of configuration, where to tweak the platform and configure the right security settings to ensure a robust and secure CRM that works for your business.
Enhance customer experience
Organizations that have achieved success with Salesforce will be able to tell you the value a Salesforce consultant brings to the table to improve productivity and provide enhanced customer experiences. With deep insights on customer behavior, and automation of customer service, they can help you close service cases faster translating to greater customer satisfaction.
Easier and faster Salesforce adoption
A good Salesforce consultant can help you go live quickly with minimal disruption in your day-to-day operations. They draw upon their extensive experience and deep business domain knowledge to come up with a comprehensive roadmap that includes implementation, training, and strategy to drive user adoption.
Risk reduction
A certified Salesforce consultant has the right experience and technical know-how to help organizations manage uncertainties associated with Salesforce implementation such as data migration and security, process automation, and migration to ensure a seamless holistic transition.
Salesforce Consulting Services from Girikon, a Gold Salesforce Partner, can help you unlock the true power of Salesforce. With customized solutions aligned with your unique business needs, we have helped many businesses improve productivity, boost efficiency, and increase revenues. Get in touch with an expert to learn more.
About Author
Indranil is a technology enthusiast with over 25 years of experience in project management, operations, technology and business development. Indranil has led project teams in egovernance, business process re-engineering, product development and worked with Government and Corporate customers. Indranil truly believes in the power of technology to drive productivity and growth for teams and businesses.
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