Salesforce Consulting

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.

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.

Businesses run on documents and trust. Conga Composer – a salesforce app automates the tedious business process and provides actionable insights, so that customers can focus on what matters. Conga composer- a robust Salesforce application allows businesses to create error-free, sophisticated and template digital documents directly from Salesforce that too within seconds. This leads to increased productivity and engaged customers. What is Conga Composer? Conga Composer is a Salesforce app which makes it easy for Salesforce users to create sophisticated documents and reports using any data in Salesforce with only a few clicks. It can automatically populate richly-formatted templates with data from any standard or custom object in Salesforce. By leveraging this app, organizations can allow end-users to make selections, such as which template to use for the final merged files, or can pre-select templates and other options and run the solution entirely in the background.  Its key features are: A separate conga license needs to be purchased for each user. Reports can be generated via button on page lay-out or link on the home page Conga reports can be created through S/F report or SQL queries Reports can be created in different formats: MS Word MS Excel MS PowerPoint PDF Email HTML Email Conga Composer can be leveraged to create sophisticated and accurate digital documents using pre-built templates and populated with data from Salesforce automatically. The tool also helps organizations send consistent and personalized documents that not just promotes their brand but also delights their customers. You can generate any document like: ✔ Quotes ✔ Proposals ✔SOW (Statement of Work) ✔ Invoices/receipts ✔ Contracts ✔ Work orders ✔ Reports & charts ✔ And more! Why to Integrate with Salesforce? Composer can use data from any Salesforces’ Standard or Custom Objects or even from external database and can directly populate into your document. It can generate documents in multiple formats as mentioned above. It creates customized, personalized, and on-time reports and documents with delivery-ease for every scenario. It can store documents wherever you want them to be kept. It can easily create accurate, consistent, pixel perfect documents. It can automate documents, presentation and reports. It is lightning ready You can fetch almost 50 other objects, additional data in Salesforce using Salesforce reports or SOQL queries. Users can create documents from their browser or mobile devices. Conga Composer allows multiple options for downloading, storing and delivering the documents: Downloaded immediately Saves directly in Salesforce or Google drive Emailed automatically Sent for E-signature  Technical Insights Conga Composer can be installed from Salesforce App Exchange but before that you need to Configure Composer as a Connected App, Enable Remote Sites, and Assign Licenses before building solutions. In order to install, you must have one of the below mentioned Salesforce editions: Performance/Unlimited Enterprise Professional Developer You can use Queries, as well as Salesforce reports to create the document. Conga queries contain a SOQL Select statement which is specially built to work in combination with Conga Composer and Conga Mail Merge. You can configure Conga Composer in a Sandbox: You can configure the SF instance so that if you later generate a Sandbox from the production, Conga automatically transfers the license information to the Sandbox. This is recommended for any organization using Sandboxes. Note: Configuring Conga Composer Settings in a production instance will only affect new sandboxes, and does not have any influence on existing, refreshed sandboxes. It is lightning ready and for that we need to make sure that we are on the updated Conga version, else the Conga Composer using Salesforce reports will not work in Lightning experience. In that case we must replace Salesforce reports with Conga Queries as a data source for your Composer solutions. It is recommended that we replace all reports with queries as soon as possible. Add-on to Composer Apart from Composer, there are some add-on apps too using which you can extend the efficiency of Conga Composer. Conga Batch Conga Batch or Conductor saves your time and effort when sending out your documents. You can consolidate, schedule and deliver the documents you create. You just need to choose how you want to launch and send, whether automatically or on-demand. It can consolidate up to 50 records or files for immediate download. Then, distribute as email attachments, eSignature documents, or other common Salesforce record attachments. You can launch it from a button on a list view, page layout, or Batch record. Instead, you can schedule delivery at any interval: hourly, daily, weekly, or monthly.  Conga ActionGrid Conga ActionGrid turns reports into actionable grids so that productivity can be increased, as well as user experience and user-adoption rates can be improved. Its powerful interface enables users to understand and digest their data quickly, to filter and group, to see relationships, and to take action quickly. Edit fields directly in Salesforce like you would in Excel and add records without opening additional forms Allows more advanced filtering It requires additional license like conductor Mass update up to 50 Million rows of data History tracking can be enabled Add information in bulk; copy and paste from a spreadsheet into Conga ActionGrid Create user-based controls and permissions so that the security can be maintained Conga Sign Conga Sign is an easy-to-use, modern eSignature solution built for Salesforce. It creates personalized documents in Salesforce delivers structured, templated communication to any eSignature signer-inside or outside of Salesforce Automates the contract experience with timely reminders, automated eSignature  Tracks the status of eSignature activity Conga Contracts Conga Contracts streamlines and accelerates contract negotiations so that the deals can be closed faster without leaving Salesforce. Simplify and accelerate the entire contract lifecycle Streamlines and accelerates contract negotiations Close deals faster with automated contract creation, controlled negotiations and streamlined reporting Effortlessly bridge the gap between CPQ and eSignature with an end-to-end solution Being built on Salesforce Lightning, it allows to be business-ready quicker than most CLM (Contract Lifecycle Management) solutions in the market Wrap-up: Using Conga Composer, you can deliver your documents in almost any format and by any method, and store those documents anywhere you want. You can provide your teams the power to create documents and reports whenever they need. You can automate the process, schedule documents or trigger to shorten business cycles. By getting rid of all the roadblocks, you can pave way for increased business efficiency, productivity and more happy customers. About Girikon Girikon – A reputed name in the IT service space offers Salesforce consulting and Salesforce implementation services to clients across different domains and industry verticals. As a Salesforce consulting partner they follow industry best practices to deliver quality services and solutions.  

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.

A popular term that we constantly hear today in the tech marker is Cloud Computing. Salesforce is one of the technologies that is dominating among all the the cloud computing solutions. In this blog, I ( A Salesforce Consultant) will give a brief introduction of Salesforce and will answer few questions: Why Salesforce? What is Salesforce? What are the services offered by the Salesforce? Why Salesforce? 1.People who are using Salesforce say it’s unique for three major reasons: • Fast: If we talk about the legacy CRM system, it takes year to deploy. But Salesforce provides you a fastest path from Idea to App. You need not to think about the infrastructure but building your app. • Easy: In easy to use category Salesforce is the Boss. You need to spend more time on developing rather than figuring it out. • Effective: The ability of customizing Salesforce to meet your business needs, consumers find it very effective. 2. Salesforce is handy, it is there on cloud, a device and internet connection and your team is good to go. 3. As compared to other CRM’s, Salesforce is easy to integrate. You can integrate Salesforce to your Outlook as well as your accounting software. 4. Salesforce is highly scalable to your growth. 5. Salesforce is for all, even the startups and small businesses can use Salesforce. Salesforce is affordable considering its vast variety of services. What is Salesforce? I hope I have answered the above question well, why should we use Salesforce. Now it’s the time to discuss what is Salesforce? Salesforce.com is a company and Salesforce is a technology. Salesforce.com started as SAAS (Software as a Service) CRM Company. Along with various software solutions, now Salesforce.com provide a platform named Force.com for the developers for building and distributing custom software (PAAS). Salesforce is the technology which works on Multitenant Architecture, that describes multiple users can share the common access to the software instance. On Salesforce platform, software and infrastructure upgrade happen automatically. So your organization need not to worry about managing technology, rather focus on innovation. What are the Services offered by the Salesforce? The importance of Salesforce in Cloud Computing market cannot be understood completely, without knowing about the wide variety of products and services that Salesforce offer. Below are the cloud services that are offered by Salesforce: • Salesforce Sales Cloud • Salesforce Service Cloud • Salesforce Community Cloud • Salesforce Marketing Cloud • Salesforce Commerce Cloud • Salesforce Analytics Cloud • Salesforce App Cloud • Salesforce IOT Cloud I tried to touch the basic technical aspects of Salesforce in this article. We as an organization and Salesforce implementation partner provide Salesforce development services in all the major areas.