Compared to yesteryears, customers today are more aware and informed and thus expect a personalized experience besides quality services and products. Since customers are the lifeblood of every business, retaining them, especially the existing ones, is crucial as they spend 31 percent more than the new ones. This calls for a robust customer retention strategy that will not just ensure an increase in revenue but also a decrease in overall cost. It is possible to acquire a higher level of customer retention by implementing a robust CRM (Customer Relationship Management) platform like Salesforce.
According to a survey conducted by Salesforce, it has been revealed that acquiring new customers or clients is more expensive than retaining the existing one.
How to Boost Customer Retention Using Salesforce?
Tracking Customer Interaction: It is possible to keep track of your customers with Salesforce integration. From where your customers are, when they made the last purchase to what they are looking for on your website, Salesforce helps you know everything about your customers and prospects. This will help you understand customer behavior and preferences while helping you respond to their needs appropriately. Moreover, you will be able to engage with your customers by sending them personalized messages/emails while introducing them to your products and services.
Unify the Database of Your Customers: Since Salesforce helps gather, organize, and analyze all your customer data in a single location, which helps in customer retention. Your sales team will access all the data easily while staying informed. With this, data accuracy is increased, and data duplicity is reduced. Moreover, client satisfaction is ensured as transparent communication is ensured between business and customers. By partnering with a Salesforce consulting company, you will be able to make the most of this fantastic platform.
Power of Personalization: For every business, customer data is a mine of gold. By centralizing this wealth of data to be personalized later, it is easy to resonate with your customers. By leveraging Salesforce integration services, you will be empowered to take control of your customer relationship by using tools such as Pardot dynamic content that allows you to personalize emails, subject lines, and more. By personalizing communication, you show your customers that you care for them.
Engaging Inactive Customers: Salesforce enables you to interact with inactive customers by keeping track of their customers by consolidating emails, calls, etc., by checking their purchase history and buying preferences, keeping them engaged via personalized messages, and more. This way, you will save money and acquire new customers.
Integration of Customer Service Tool: Several customer service applications such as service cloud, desk.com, etc., offered by Salesforce can be leveraged to eliminate silos ensure collaboration between teams, especially the account management and customer service departments. By leveraging these tools, overall customer experience can be improved.
Quick Wrap-up:
Businesses should consider harnessing the power of Salesforce to grow their revenue and profit. So, make sure you get in touch with a certified and reputed Salesforce implementation partner to ensure the successful implementation of this platform, which will ultimately help you retain your customers and build a strong relationship with them.
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.
As a business entity, your priority lies in improving the bottom line of your business by generating greater ROI. To ensure consistent growth of your business, you need to chart out an appropriate customer satisfaction strategy as customers tend to be the life and blood of every business undertaking. The most important aspect of this strategy should be to have in place a robust system that can provide a single view of all the customer-related data.
Salesforce with its rich features, functionalities and ever-evolving ecosystem has become an obvious choice for business owners looking to streamline their otherwise scattered business processes to ensure increased efficiency and productivity. While this cloud-based platform is pretty flexible, easy to use and above all widely accepted across the globe, the real challenge lies in implementing it. This is because the process of Salesforce implementation requires 100 percent focus, dedication, and technical know-how, which practically wouldn’t be possible for you to dedicate while handling other essential business activities.
To make the most of your Salesforce investment, you must have by your side a reliable Salesforce Implementation Partner who can help you with successful implementation, conformation, and deployment.
Why Should You Hire the Services of a Salesforce Partner?
Rather than taking the less expensive route of doing the Salesforce implementation on your own, or hiring a less qualified Salesforce partner, it’s in your best interest to engage the services of a knowledgeable and experienced Salesforce partner. Doing so will help you realize the following benefits:
Ensures Business Process Efficiency: To enjoy a better return on your Salesforce investment, proper knowledge of accurately relating Salesforce’s features to your business processes is important. A knowledgeable partner with experience of working in your industry and knowledge of best practices will be able to dive into your processes and connect technology to your business goals.
Provide the Right fit: It is to be noted that when it comes to Salesforce implementation one-size-fits-all approach, doesn’t seem to work. A reliable Salesforce partner will ensure you get the most out of your Salesforce investment. Rather than using the common implementation technique, an experienced Salesforce Consulting partner will make the necessary adjustments to provide your organization with the right implementation.
Provide Training and Support to Your Team: Getting your team to use a new system can be challenging. However, with a knowledgeable and skilled implementation partner by your side, your team will have an easy go-to resource if and when they have queries while handling the new system. Your Salesforce partner will provide your team with the necessary training for operating the new CRM solution in the best possible way.
Help You Capitalize on Opportunities: Reviewing your business systems and developing them regularly will ensure that they align with your business objectives. A skilled Salesforce partner can help you frame up your objectives and the way they connect with your CRM. This will help you develop a roadmap for the future while helping you realize a better return on your investment for the times to come.
Help You Save Money: If you take into account the internal overhead necessary to manage a project, you will realize that a reliable Salesforce partner will not just outperform an internal team but will also be more cost-effective.
Quick Wrap-up: Whether you are thinking about implementing a new Salesforce CRM or already have one that requires a bit of customization and configuration, it makes sense to have a skilled Salesforce implementation partner by your side. By leveraging their expertise and experience, you will not just be relieved of the stress involved in doing it yourself but will also reap in the benefits of better process efficiency and ROI.
What are the important questions you need to ask yourself before setting up or managing an existing in-house Salesforce Development Services team? Here are some questions I have heard from discussions with colleagues and customer during my time managing software businesses. It is common across all software applications and industries where organisations are always looking for cost effective development service solutions which delivers a quality result.
• What is the experience level requirement for technical staff and what industry should they have worked in prior to joining the team?
• How do I train these resources and keep them producing quality outcomes?
• Would I require specialist consultants’ roles such as Architects, Business Analysts, Senior Developers, application Developers, UI/UX developer, Scrum masters or testers? The list goes on!
• How many of each resource would service our organisational needs?
• Can I employ graduates from a local university or even outsource this whole services?
• What is the best approach? How do I establish a function which services the organisation’s needs and provide a quality outcome for the business?
Many organisations who require Salesforce Developers or Consultants usually start with the employment of a Certified Salesforce Consultant usually a Salesforce Administrator or Salesforce App developer to configure and/or make changes to the Salesforce product(s) that are in use. The company often believes that they will avoid paying hefty premiums of in-demand Salesforce Consultants on an adhoc or regular basis from the larger consulting firms. Yes, in the short-term organisations do achieve the peace of mind of having an in-house team and substantial cost advantages.
The downside is that in-house teams’ members often require the appropriate level of professional development and training to keep abreast of technology changes, new products, new features and releases. In-house staff also often require clear progression paths and motivation to stay at the organisation. Retention is sometimes very challenging when the organisation’s Salesforce Consulting Services is not a core business offerings.
There are many challenges facing organisations who have made the decision to setup a Salesforce Consulting Services or Salesforce Development Services Team as part of the IT department, PMO or standalone. I personally have fielded these questions and challenges coming from my colleagues across a variety of industries, prospects and clients. Girikon believes it has developed a cost-effective offering which will answer every question above and provide you with the peace of mind, quality of service and have testimonials from a wide variety of organisations to prove their method works.
Now let’s look at the options……
Imagine you had access to a range of Salesforce Consultants including Architects, Salesforce Developers and Salesforce Administrators working within your time-zone onsite and/or offshore to ensure all your Salesforce Development needs are all addressed.
All your Salesforce consultants are certified and with a wide range and relevant experience levels and offer up to 50% of the cost of an inhouse team. Girikon believes local presence is essential when dealing with complex software packages and business critical systems. Girikon is fast becoming global with offices in the USA and now in Australia/New Zealand and Development Centre in India.
Girikon’s Salesforce Consulting Services in USA and Australia provide a reach and local presence to organisations around the globe and are anticipating further growth in the future with offices planned in the UK/Europe as the next frontier.
Girikon are Salesforce Experts and an excellent choice to be your Salesforce Development Partner. Girikon, a Software Development Company will meet your requirements with a variety of additional services such as Salesforce Implementation, Salesforce Support and Services including customization and Salesforce Integration.
Also, as a Salesforce Implementation Partner, our experienced and Certified Salesforce Developers, Administrators and Architects are available onshore and offshore. We ensure the Offshore Salesforce Development for your implementation or business as usual is made simple, less time-consuming and comparatively Cost-Effective.
Girikon’s delivery models provide the flexibility to establish a balanced onshore/offshore model with proven agile development processes. Our Salesforce Development Company provides the assurance of a high accelerated delivery timelines driving huge reductions in Time-to-Market and costs.
The questions posed at the start of this article are all relevant and important when you are deciding to establish an in-house Salesforce team, determining what the team would look like including optional questions to reduce overheads.
Girikon’s offering above addresses all the questions including our Salesforce Consultants experience levels, industry exposure, commitment to continuous improvement include training, have a variety of roles deployed within reasonable timeframes and more cost effective than graduate programs and pure outsourcing models. More importantly Girikon have a proven approach and model that has and will continue to address our partner’s needs.
Find out more at https://www.girikon.com/offshore-salesforce-development/. Please share your feedback for this article, in case you need Salesforce Consultant, Salesforce Implementation Partner or Salesforce Development Services then please feel free to reach out to us at sales@girikon.com
How imperative is it to get the right level of Support for your third-party software? What level and type of Support do you need to underpin your whole business?
There are a few options including setting up an internal support team, relying on the third party software provider for all levels of support which could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars or engage a specialised support partner with the same level of knowledge and experience as third party software provider with added benefit of in depth industry experience and spends time with their customers to understand the business and its processes. Below I will examine the options and provide some examples where a Salesforce Support Services partner such as Girikon could be the answer to all your support needs.
Internal Support Teams
Internal support teams often struggle to keep up with internal stakeholder demands and in some instances lack the capacity and capability to deal with issues, defects and enhancement requests from their third party software providers.
Setting up an internal Support teams can sometimes be a long and tedious process. Firstly, the organisation needs to determine an appropriate support framework to underpin the business including the level of support to be provided, providing an effective interface between the organisation and the third-party provider and setting up the capability and systems to underpin the internal support structure.
Once the support framework is designed, suitable and capable operational staff are required to implement. This will include selecting the right candidates, assessing appropriate skill sets, training regimes, familiarisation and understanding the business and what is unique about the business.
In some cases, organisations setup internal support teams with ease. This is due to effective planning and experience in house. Girikon offer these type of organisations with highly skilled, certified and experienced Salesforce Consultants to work collaboratively with internal Support teams at cost effective rates with the flexibility of onshore or offshore models to suit.
Software Support Providers
Entering an annual support contract from the organisation’s 3rd party software provider such as Salesforce can sometimes be costly and gives the organisation access to a level of support which may or not suit the organisation’s needs.
In some cases, the software provider’s support team resources often differ from the project team who successfully managed the software implementation. How often do we encounter a sub-standard handover from Implementation to BAU where there is little to no documentation or the lack of enough training to support staff? In these instances, there is a requirement for Subject Matter Experts (SME) to be internally selected to champion the software support, acting as the interface between internal stakeholders and the software provider and in some cases triaging issues coming through from internally stakeholders. SME must then in turn determine if the issues are appropriate to log, the priority of issues and follow through on service levels.
Usually the SMEs are employed to do a specific role outside of support in the organisation and taking up the SME title is usually casual or part time due to many reasons including showing a level of interest, being a conscientious employee, the employee’s technical abilities or just being thrust into a position due to resource constraints.
When an organisation chooses to proceed with the option for 3rd Party Software support it is important to ensure that all business processes are well documented and how the software is used including who will be completing updates after every upgrade, a support process is established to ensure all responsibilities are known and communicated to all stakeholders. This will ensure the unnecessary pressure is not placed internally on SMEs and the level of support and service is in line with the organisation’s expectations.
In some cases, organisations work through the Support process early in the journey with their 3rd party software providers and have a well-established support framework to underpin the organisation’s operations.
Girikon offers an alternative to this type of support service for organisations using Salesforce. Girikon will spend time understanding your business processes, document required artefacts to ensure knowledge about the business is not lost. Girikon’s end to end Salesforce support process includes a robust support model, best practice framework and highly skilled, certified and experienced Salesforce Consultants to deploy immediately. Girikon works with your staff at cost effective rates with the flexibility of onshore or offshore models to suit any size business.
Specialised Salesforce Support Services Partner
When it comes to Salesforce Support Girikon offers a cost advantage by using both onshore and offshore resourcing model blended to ensure maximum efficiencies. Girikon’s quality is guaranteed, extensive experience across industries and Salesforce products and most importantly customer testimonials to provide a level of confidence to all stakeholders. As a Salesforce Implementation Partner we focus primarily on providing the highest of service to our customers;
• Through Girikon’s on-shore presence it takes the time to understand the business, the processes and the culture of the organisation
• Girikon’s Salesforce Consultants design a bespoke support solution to ensure maximum effectiveness in set up and BAU.
• Girikon a Salesforce Consulting Partnerunderstands the importance of providing consistency through the implementation and go live period and prefers to be involved early in the project to ensure this consistency.
• Girikon provides Salesforce Supports across time zone which is ideal for globally diverse companies
If you are searching for a Cost-Effective Salesforce Support Services, your search can end here!
Find out more at https://www.girikon.com/salesforce-support/. Please share your feedback for this article, in case you need Salesforce Consultant, Salesforce Implementation Partner or Salesforce Development Services then please feel free to reach out to us at sales@girikon.com
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.
The success of any software implementation depends on the user adoption rate. In any organization, a new system is implemented for the betterment of its employees as the new system eliminate some or all redundant process, manual efforts.
Well, it is not necessary that the newly implemented system does the above-mentioned work. In short, it helps in boosting the employees’ efficiency.
The same goes for Salesforce Implementation . If your employees’ are not used to Salesforce environment, then it will be quite difficult for the users to adopt the system and work on it on the daily basis.
“There are innumerable reasons determining why users are not adopting a new system. In the below segment we will be discussing those factors and solution for solving them and getting more and more users onboard.
Training Sessions for the End Users:
It is important to provide full-fledged training, especially to the immediate end users before switching to a new Salesforce solution. Video, tutorial, live demo, webinars on UAT Mode proves to be quite beneficial and helps a lot in adapting.
One can also provide customized training for different users depending on their permission, groups. When the employees attend the training, they share their doubts, feedback about the solution which in turn helps in making the solution even better for the employees.
Prepare the End-users:
It is important to keep your users notified that a new system will be introduced to them for their daily work. You can do this 1 month or 15 days prior to the implementation depending upon the system.
You can start with pamphlets, newsletters, etc., and as the implementation day approaches you can organize one to one training so that user adoption is smooth and the user will also not find that hard to settle with the new system.
User Manual for the users:
It is a good practice to provide User Documentation of newly developed system so that the end users can refer that document whenever they get stuck. User manual with system images gives more clarity and helps the end users to find the solution easily.
Realize your users the need of new system:
It is vital to explain the need for introducing a new Salesforce solution to the end users and what benefit can one achieve from the new solution so that the adoption is less complex.
Implement the new system in sync with the existing business flow so that the users can understand it and find it not hard to adapt it.
Provide support to the end users after implementation:
After the implementation, provide hands-on training to the users and resolve all the queries asked by the users. Sometime, a user may get confused by seeing new user interface may end up asking minor questions. All you have to do is be patient and answer all the questions asked and show them how to achieve it.
That’s all for this article, in case you need a Salesforce Consultant , Salesforce Implementation Partner or Salesforce Development Services then please feel free to reach out to us at sales@girikon.com
Girikon is a one-stop destination for Salesforce Development related work having its offices in USA, Australia and India