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.
It is essential to create a seamless customer experience across multiple channels and platforms to ensure customer satisfaction. This not just leads to better collaboration between different teams but also aids in business growth. All this requires having in place a robust solution, and Salesforce Customer 360 offers proper Salesforce support.
What is Salesforce Customer 360?
Salesforce customer 360 is a platform designed to help organizations better connect with their customers by promoting consistent internal operations. The platform supports internal collaboration by bringing sales, marketing, analytics, commerce, service, and IT. By leveraging this data, the platform creates unique customer IDs that can be used across all Salesforce and other applications. With this, a seamless customer experience can be created as all the teams in an organization will have access to this data.
Listed below are some reasons why Salesforce customer 360 can prove to be a game-changer for forward-looking organizations:
Personalized Customer Experience: Small businesses that manage their data on spreadsheets or sticky notes fail to deliver personalized experiences to their customers as it is difficult to understand customer contexts. Businesses should provide their customers with personalized experiences to maintain lasting customer relationships to remain competitive. Salesforce customer 360 enables teams to craft reliable data on genuine customers and their needs. This enables organizations to augment their customer service and solve customer issues.
Better Customer Experience: Figuring out genuine business customers and where they are isn’t easy. Customers, too, are apprehensive of sharing their data again and again. Salesforce customer 360 simplifies the customer satisfaction index when they connect with a business entity. Businesses leveraging such a system can benefit their entire workforce from marketing, sales, and service as they can store data that’s accessible to all. With this, customers start trusting the business and their efforts towards customer success.
Business Forecasting: Businesses can achieve sustainable growth when they meet or exceed the expectations of customers. However, this is a big challenge for small businesses. Businesses must consider leveraging Salesforce 360 to help them adapt to various apps related to sales, marketing, support, and service while fulfilling customer expectations and business growth. In fact, this platform is designed to manage a small team size of 1-20 people that can avail both sales and service functions in a single app.
Better Business Decisions: For making intelligent decisions, it’s vital to have access to well-researched facts, figures, and data points. By having a rich customer database demand forecast, sales forecast expected revenue, and customer market projection, better decision making becomes possible as, in the presence of factual data, better planning can be done. With well-articulated figures in place, both long-term decisions and planning for short-term ventures can be ensured. By having in place a robust solution like Salesforce 360, a foundation for consistent and trustworthy and business intelligence can be laid as it offers features such as Salesforce scripting, reporting, content management system, and more.
Final words:
In a nutshell, it can be inferred that the power of a robust solution like Salesforce 360 can be leveraged to improve the internal operations of a company and significantly improve customer experiences. However, investing in a powerful solution like Salesforce 360 requires time, thought, and advice from a certified and experienced Salesforce consultant.
In today’s technology-driven era, the pace of innovation has never been faster. The digital disruption has significantly impacted the way businesses conduct themselves. In fact, businesses across different industry verticals have benefited from the wave of digital transformation. One such technology solution that has helped companies to transform their customer experiences while improving business process efficiency is the Salesforce CRM. As a cloud-based platform, Salesforce, with its wide array of features and functionalities, allow organizations to resolve their unique business challenges while remaining competitive.
In the manufacturing industry, Salesforce is the enabler that keeps the machinery moving. The Salesforce manufacturing cloud by Salesforce can be leveraged by manufacturing companies with forecast accuracy, collaboration, visibility, and streamlining processes. The cloud solution addresses the pain points of the traditional system by automating processes, which helps minimize cost and improve efficiencies.
The cloud platform offers features such as marketing automation, sales management, partner relationship management, and customer service. This powerful cloud-based offering assists companies in handling client accounts, conduct, track sales prospects, noticing marketing outreach, and offering after-sales service & support. To implement the Salesforce manufacturing cloud, organizations should consider getting in touch with one of the best Salesforce consulting partners.
Listed below are some of the compelling benefits offered by this robust platform:
Increased Sales: The ultimate goal of every manufacturer is to augment their sales and revenue by increasing their customer reach and engagement. Salesforce CRM collates all the crucial information, which can then be analysed to gain meaningful insights. The relevant information gathered by the robust CRM can be analyzed to draw actionable insights that can be used to take necessary steps for customer retention.
Improved planning: The CRM provides users with volumes of data that facilitate data analysis and planning. With the availability of clean and precise data, strategic planning can be done. Mundane tasks can be automated, and work processes can be streamlined, which improves overall productivity.
Enhanced Customer Satisfaction: With a robust cloud solution like the Salesforce manufacturing cloud, manufacturing companies can ensure better collaboration among all the departments. The empowering cloud solution can help companies deal with service and warranty-related issues. This will empower customers to be valued, which will pave the way for customer loyalty and satisfaction.
Expansion of Business: This cloud-powered CRM helps businesses expand beyond their local boundaries and customer base. Salesforce CRM enables the process of expansion by prequalifying prospects, focusing on potential clients, and ensuring better communication. Moreover, employees become more sharp and attentive with a Salesforce CRM by their side, which leads to enhanced business productivity.
Final Words:
Implementing Salesforce Manufacturing cloud within your business ecosystem can create efficiencies up and down the organization. While several manufacturers might be cautious of transitioning to new technology, the business benefits of deploying this technology are endless. Companies adopting Salesforce manufacturing cloud can help them stay competitive in a cut-throat business landscape. It is prudent to get in touch with a certified Salesforce consultant to know more about the Salesforce manufacturing cloud.
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.
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.
For a business to sustain in this competitive landscape, the sales and marketing teams must align with each other for ensuring better organizational growth in terms of efficiency, productivity and revenue. However, this is difficult said than done as the goals of sales and marketing teams are misaligned, which encourages them to prioritize their own goals over organizational profits. So, how to deal with this situation? The key lies in having a steady flow of qualified leads that the Sales team can close readily, and this can be made possible by having in place a robust lead scoring system for prioritization of leads.
What is the Need for Lead Scoring?
Though, the main priority for marketers is to generate constant flow of sales-ready leads, only a small percentage of the leads generated by the marketing team are considered closable. According to statistics gathered from recent industry research, around 40%-50% of all inbound sales leads aren’t followed up by the salespeople. And even if they do so, a lot of time had already passed by for leads to be converted to customers.
Lead scoring, which is a key aspect of lead management helps marketers make the most of all the leads generated. By providing an objective way of sorting through all visitor interactions and ranking them basis their likelihood to buy the company’s products, lead scoring divulges details about the most sales-ready leads besides providing insight about how and which leads should be nurtured. By helping organizations rank their leads basis several behavioral and demographic factors, marketers can determine and focus on the most potential leads.
Evolution of Lead Scoring Tools and Capabilities:
Having information about which leads to follow up and which to ignore can be more of a speculation than science. Lead scoring provides sales and marketing experts a head start on the lead qualification process, which otherwise is time-consuming. Before the recent developments in technology, lead scoring was conducted manually and included making a detailed research on potential customers, recording their details on a database, and finally scoring them.
Today, Marketers have access to tools and capabilities that can help them rank, manage and nurture leads, so that more leads carry a higher probability for positive sales results. Automated capabilities and processes provide powerful ways to handle lead scoring and nurturing to help get the most from every visit to the website.
CRM assisted Lead Scoring:
Since, the task of manual lead scoring was strenuous and time-consuming, CRM (customer relationship management) systems emerged as the savior by automating and simplifying processes. With a robust CRM in place, businesses were able to gather data regarding every single lead and scoring them basis the selected criteria. While integrating a robust CRM system like Salesforce improved the manual way of scoring leads, it still lacked the efficiency required to quickly score leads basis their quality with sales and marketing teams still spending a lot of time gathering details about leads.
This paved way for another innovation i.e. marketing automation. While marketing automation is doing its bit by analyzing and processing a wide variety of data in an automated way, it doesn’t provide the efficacy to differentiate between visitors who are actually interested in making a purchase and those who are simply visiting the site without any intention of making a purchase. This has left space for a new player that offers a solution to all the lead scoring woes i.e. predictive lead scoring using artificial intelligence.
Predictive Lead Scoring: A Game Changer
Powered by Machine learning and Artificial Intelligence, predictive lead scoring allows businesses to determine the criteria for defining a strong lead, creating models for lead scoring based on the specific needs of your company while adapting themselves in a changing market. The Einstein AI capability of Salesforce provides lead scoring an altogether new approach by streamlining a variety of tasks associated with it. Right from automatically collecting and analyzing CRM data for determining strong leads, creating finely tuned lead scoring models to gathering account insights, using Salesforce Einstein AI for lead scoring will augment the efficiency of sales and marketing teams by saving their time significantly. However, you must get in touch with a reliable Salesforce consulting company for any assistance regarding lead scoring including the creation of appropriate lead scoring formulae.
The Bottom line:
The value of figuring out sales-ready leads is inestimable. However, it isn’t easy to manually analyze humongous data to determine closable leads. A robust lead scoring system will help organizations to align their marketing and sales team while ensure better utilization of resources, improve rate of conversion, and condense sales cycle, which will ultimately translates to increased revenue. This will allow sales and marketing teams to close deals quickly while forge a strong relationship with their customers.
As a cloud-powered CRM, Salesforce has become preferred choice of businesses due to the wide array of features, functionalities and components offered by the platform. To make the most of this platform, it’s important to partner with a reliable and experienced Salesforce implementation partner.
Our Salesforce Consulting Team steps through a simple MuleSoft Integration
At Girikon, a Salesforce Consulting Company we believe Salesforce is the world’s no. 1 cloud platform based on CRM (Customer Relationship Management) capabilities. Early last year Salesforce agreed to acquire MuleSoft for a mutli-million-dollar cash and stock deal. MuleSoft, a software company that provides integration software for connecting applications, data and devices.
Girikon’s Salesforce Consultants specialise in many Salesforce products and after the announcement our consulting team gained certifications in MuleSoft. Girikon is commitment to keeping ahead of the pack with knowledge and certifications for leading technologies.
In this blog we are focusing on Salesforce integration with MuleSoft.
Firstly, we will need a Salesforce developer account by clicking on the following link:
https://developer.salesforce.com/signup.
Then a MuleSoft account by clicking the following link:
https://anypoint.mulesoft.com/login/signup.
In this first example we can send a couple of contact records to Salesforce with the help of MuleSoft. For this we have to download any point studio which is a MuleSoft IDE by clicking on this link https://www.mulesoft.com/lp/dl/studio.
We are going to use any point studio for this data transfer. First download the any point studio. Then extract the zip file in your directory and the click on the application to install it. After installation is finished click on the any point studio icon it will launch a wizard like shown in the figure below.
Fig: – Launch Wizard of Any point Studio
Click on the launch button after selecting the directory of your workspace. It will then open the any point studio as shown in the figure below.
Fig: – Any point Studio
Open the example project in Any point Studio from Any point Exchange by logging into your MuleSoft account.
Download Import Contacts into Salesforce application. Note: do not run the application.
Login to your Salesforce account.
In the left navigation bar, open My Settings under the Personal Setup heading, click to expand the My Personal Information.
Click Reset My Security Token. Salesforce resets the token and emails.
Open your mail account where the security token is sent and copy the token onto your local clipboard.
Now open your Any point Studio after downloading and opening the application it will look like as shown in the given fig.
Fig: – Any point Studio with application
In your application in Studio, click the Global Elements tab. Double-click the Salesforce SFDC config global element to open its Global Element Properties panel.
In the Security Token field, paste the Salesforce token that you copied from your mail.
Alternatively, configure the global element in the XML Editor.
Change the contents of the Username and Password fields to your account-specific values, then click OK to save your changes.
This application project includes a sample CSV file, contacts.csv, that you can use to view the end-to-end functionality of this application. The CSV file will look like this.
Fig: – contacts.csv
In the Package Explorer, click the src/main/resources folder to expand it, then find the contacts.csv file inside this folder. Double-click the File config tab in the Global Elements tab and set the Working Directory field to point to the src/main/resources folder. In the Package Explorer, right-click the import-contacts-into-salesforce project, then select Run As > Mule Application.
Studio runs the application on the embedded server. After the application runs successfully it will create two contacts records in salesforce which the csv file contains. Open your salesforce account, then navigate to the Contacts tab. It will show you two new entries: John Doe and Jane Doe.
Fig: – Two new contacts created
About Girikon
Are you looking for a Salesforce Integration expert? At Girikon it is where the search ends. Girikon is a Salesforce Consulting Partner and has the required set of tools, skilled resources and technical knowledge to understand the platforms an organisation uses and transforms your existing systems to a truly interoperable solution.
Girikon’s Certified Salesforce Consultants understand the rapid increase of mobile, cloud and social platforms. They are here to assist customers who are left to their own devices to develop a solution for their organisation. Girikon Salesforce Consulting Services team made up of Architects, Developers, Business Analysts, QA experts have the required knowledge and are certified to design and delivery integrations to suit your needs.
Our Service team are cost-effective, and our Consultants will develop a strategy to bring together a quality solution which can be across multiple applications and technology platforms such as Salesforce, Microsoft, Oracle, Abode, SAP etc.