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.
Salesforce is one if the leading CRM platforms used across the globe. According to Girikon’s Salesforce Consultants it is one of the largest and widely used CRM software in the market. Salesforce has two types of storage i.e. Data storage and File storage. File storage includes attachments, items a user has uploaded into the Documents tab, and Salesforce CRM Content. Contact Manager, Group, Professional, Enterprise, Performance, and Unlimited Editions are allocated 10 GB of file storage per org. Essentials edition is allocated 1 GB of file storage per org. All other data, including activities is considered a record and counts towards your Data Storage allocation. Data Storage limits for every Contact Manager, Group, Enterprise, Professional and as well Performance editions are calculated at either 1 GB or on a per user limit (20 MB per user) whichever is required for production orgs. For a business keeping their expenses in check keeping an eye on storage limits is the main goal.
We all agree that Salesforce is a great CRM but when it comes to licence pricing it can get very expensive when you consider licence per users etc. If the organisation’s concern is storage cost and the users are continually uploading data at an alarming rate, then it is important to apply Girikon’s strategy for managing the orgs data. Emails and Cases are very crucial pieces of information and they can take up a lot of space. Each email takes around 2Kb – 10Kb data (it varies on a case by case basis depending on the email content) and each attachment sent alongside the email can be up to 20Mb. Management of the orgs data can be more effective by managing by archiving and then restoring the emails when needed.
The Archiving strategy is very simple, and it has proved to be very effective. Our Salesforce Consultancy Services team often advise users to use the two custom buttons which are Archive and Retrieve which does all the work for the users. When clicking on archive, the emails in the related list gets archived or gets stored as an attachment.
Before sending or receiving the email.
After sending the email. The email is showed in the email related list and the data storage is increased.
When the archive button is clicked.
A visual force page pops up to ask you that “Are you sure you want to archive?”
After archive the email gets into the attachments and the data storage is decreased.
Let us explore the backend logic behind the storage when an email is sent or received, it creates a record in emailMessage object and the attachments along with that email creates a record in attachment object in salesforce. The record that is created has a parent Id equals to the case Id and the attachments that were sent along with that email have their parent Id equal to the email record Id. So, when we hit on archive button the code runs in the background which creates a new record or file i.e. email(emailId).txt in the attachment object which have the email and its details such as: – BccAddress, CcAddress, TextBody/HTML body etc. And for the attachments that were delivery with the email, the parent Id of those gets re-parented and now is equal to the caseId. After that the email record in the emailMessage Object gets deleted which reduces the Data Storage.
Email retrieving is also necessary after the user has archived as per the step above to be viewed at a future date. There is also an opportunity for the user to delete the emails.
Click on retrieve button.
A visual force page pops up and asks, “are you sure you want to retrieve?”
The email is retrieved. And the data storage is increased.
Let us explore the backend logic behind the storage when an email is retrieved. Code is written in such a way that it reads body of email(emailId).txt and then creates a new record in the emailMessage object from it. For the email attachments, they are again re-parented back to the email with the help of a custom field which the system created in the emailMessage Object to retrieve the attachments. The custom field contains the old Id of the email when it was not archived. After all this is done the code deletes the email(emailId).txt file from the attachments.
About Girikon
Girikon is a Salesforce Consulting, Oracle Gold, Microsoft Application, Adobe Bronze Technology Partners. We are also ISO 9001 Quality Management and ISO 27001 Data Management system certified. Girikon’s Headquarters are in the US, with offices in AUS and Technology centre in Noida India with over 150 employees across the three offices. Girikon is a Salesforce Consulting Company that provides cost effective services through a hybrid offshore/onshore model, quality delivery and great testimonials.
Girikon’s Salesforce Consulting Services team are certified and experienced with both Pardot and Salesforce Marketing Cloud. They have a depth of knowledge about both automated marketing solutions and have many insights to share.
Pardot and Salesforce Marketing Cloud are both marketing automation solutions where Pardot can be seen as a tool, Salesforce Marketing Cloud is seen a comprehensive toolkit for Marketeers. Both Pardot and Salesforce Marketing Cloud both allow for a level of social media sharing through their tool/toolkit and both also grant a user access for building custom email campaigns.
Despite these similarities, Pardot and Salesforce Marketing Cloud have some differences including the Lead Scoring Model. does not include a lead scoring model however Pardot has default scoring functionality and model that allows for various prospect activities to be scored.
In this Blog our Salesforce Consultant will endeavor to show a user how to generate lead scoring from Email based on [_Sent], [_Open] & [_Click] Data Views.
Data from [ _sent ] , [ _open ] & [ _click ] by join operation in query to be saved in Data Extension ‘ DE_1’ :
Simple perform a Query and join these data view in a separate Data Extension based on
your JobID.
Ex:
from [ _sent ] as a full JOIN [ _open ] as b on
a.[subscriberkey]= b.[subscriberkey] full join [ _click ] as c
on b.[ subscriberkey ] = c.[ subscriberkey ]
Where a.[ JobId ] = < JobID >.
For your reference: join syntax: https://www.w3schools.com/sql/sql_join.asp.
Create a Data Extension with default score value and save it in Data Extension ‘DE_2’:
Import a file containing subscriber key & Initial Score using Import wizard and save these records in separate Data Extension.
Note: At least match a few SubscriberKey with ‘DE_1’ while creating import file.
Join the two Data (DE_1 & DE_2) Extensions and save it to third Data Extension (DE_3):
Using case Statement in Query increment or decrement your Initial Score and save it in ‘Updated Score’ field in the target Data Extension which I have mentioned below in figure (3.2). Along with join these two Data Extension and save it to the Third Data Extension using Query based on SubscriberKey.
Ex:
CASE
WHEN a.[ < Column name > ] IS NOT NULL
THEN [ Initial Score ] +
ELSE [ Initial Score ]
END AS [ Updated Score ]
For reference: Case Statement : https://www.w3schools.com/sql/sql_case.asp.
Create an Automation and Run the following Activities:
After Running these Activities in Automation your records will be updated in Data Extension with updated score:
About Girikon
Girikon is a Salesforce Consultancy Partner, IT consulting and development company, headquartered in the US with development centre in India and office in Australia. Our Global network allows Girikon to quickly respond to customer’s requirements effectively delivering quality outcomes.
Girikon’s team of experienced and certified Salesforce Consultantsincluding Architects, Developers, Consultants, and Administrators.
Our MEAN Stack, Atlassian APP, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Mobile APPs, JAVA, PHP, ASP, .NET and AI consultants and professionals also provide services which are second to none.
Our customers and services are many and varied from large multinational companies implementing large programs to small-medium enterprises implementing solutions to improve their competitiveness.
Girikon also supports its customers on all leading technology platforms and Girikon’s team of dynamic, seasoned and qualified professionals have a vast experience in IT across many verticals, Product development including design, testing, support and supported by resourcing / staffing models to suit any type of business.
Our Vision is to develop scalable & simplified solution for our clients.
Salesforce is a cloud-based CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software. It offers which offers great products in almost every field such as Sales, Support, Marketing, etc., and aids all kind of businesses (big or small) in their day to day activities.
Girikon’s Girikon’s Salesforce Consulting Services Team member Nirupuma Shree discusses some of the key features of Salesforce which have aided business’ in their everyday activities:
Contact Management-
In the Salesforce, the sales rep can record the contact details and then track their progress against a company (Account) which is linked and opportunities they are tagged. The tracking is seamless and with teeny-weeny human effort.
As Salesforce is a cloud-based CRM, it gives freedom to the user to add or edit contact’s information anywhere and at any point of time and the users will have the updated contact details available to them instantly.
By integrating Social CRM with Salesforce CRM, the sales rep can also view and examine the conversation (with salespeople) that contacts are having on social networks.
Opportunity Pipeline Management-
With Salesforce Opportunity Management, the sales rep can focus more on closing a deal. Track minute details on the opportunity detail page without missing out on any of it. The sales rep can track the products tagged to an opportunity and its price, quantity and product type
The user can set up payment terms, special instructions or any other details. The user can generate quotes & contracts automatically by setting up workflows and on the selected templates.
Analytics and Forecasting-
With the help of Einstein Analytics, the sales rep can view business data at a glance. Salesforce offers customizable dashboards and reporting tools which provide key performance data and much more to boost sales.
Through Salesforce Forecasting, the sales rep can get an expected sales revenue based on the roll-up of a set of opportunities.
Marketing Campaigns-
Salesforce Marketing Campaigns can benefit the users in several ways like assisting in setting up Google AdWords, sending campaigns across multiple channels and getting leads to the CRM from the campaigns sent.
Let us also discuss some of the key benefits which sales rep receive by using Salesforce CRM:
Integrations with the 3rd Party Applications-
The user has the liberty to install Salesforce apps such as the Smart SMS from Girikon into the Salesforce Org without the need of programming. Most of the applications have some basic steps for installation which helps in installation.
Easily Accessible-
The Sales rep can access their data, records anytime and anywhere on Salesforce CRM, thanks to its mobile app. It is a perfect tool for users who want to get connected to their sales members and to the sales rep who wants to get updated with the progress of their opportunities.
Setting up Activities-
Salesforce offers a wide range of features which can be used by the Sales Managers to keep things moving. They can create a task or tasks and assign to their team members, send mail to the client from the record detail page.
With this, I am ending today’s article on Salesforce CRM – Key Features & Benefits. Apart from the above-mentioned features & benefits, there are abundant of features which help sales reps to close deals. If you have any query related to this article or want to know more about Salesforce CRM or if you require Salesforce Consulting Services, then do contact us at sales@girikon.com
About Girikon
Girikon a Salesforce Consulting Partner has a collaborative approach to assist with the development of a pragmatic roadmap Salesforce Adoption. Girikon’s clearly defined Roadmap, Strategy and Change Management methods will bring you success and ensures a positive engagement with leads, prospects and customers. This can be extended to an organization’s employees and ensures the transformation is adopted by all in your business. Girikon’s Salesforce Consulting Services apply best of breed methodologies which will assist you to fine-tune your business processes to meet your objectives.
Girikon will not be matched in Salesforce Consulting Expertise and have proven experience in implementing Salesforce solutions across all industries.
If you are looking for Salesforce Development Services Girikon will translate your requirements into real business outcomes and real solutions which will push the boundaries of the possible to positive outcomes.