Using Salesforce to Improve Your Sales Pipeline: Five Tips

Reliable connections between customers and businesses, seamless customer experience and smooth commercial transactions enable conversions and high client loyalty. A well-thought-out CRM (customer relationship management) system is a key to success as it allows salespeople to approach customers in the most efficient way. For the 12th consecutive year, Gartner names Salesforce a leader in the Magic Quadrant for Sales Force Automation. What makes Salesforce so great? Let’s talk about it in more detail.

Magic Quadrant for Sales Force Automation

What Is Salesforce?

Salesforce was a pioneer in launching a CRM on the cloud. Today, the company is the world’s leading developer of CRM solutions based on cloud technologies. It has also been dominating the market in other categories, such as the CRM Customer Engagement Center and Enterprise Application Platform as a Service, for many years in a row.

The platform offers a variety of tools and services not only for relationship management but also for custom app development, targeting both small businesses and large industries. With Salesforce, you can discover insights into customers, better understand their needs and treat them as if you are personally acquainted.

The range of Salesforce products includes:

• Sales Cloud — helps find more customers, accelerate sales productivity and close deals faster.
• Service Cloud — helps support customers from anywhere and hold a seamless conversation.
• Marketing Cloud — includes tools to unite marketing and sales on one platform and to engage with clients via different channels.
• Commerce Cloud — helps create a personalized shopping experience.
• Community Cloud — builds communities for employees, partners or vendors to improve engagement.
• Quip — a collaboration platform to organize your team’s work.
• Salesforce Platform — a unified platform that allows you to customize solutions, build your own apps, add security levels, etc.

Salesforce software products are used by thousands of enterprises of all sizes, covering multiple industries and various geographic locations. The company’s key areas are financial services, healthcare, retail, manufacturing, consumer goods, communications and media, and automotive. Among the most prominent clients are Aston Martin, American Express, Canon, Puma, L’Oreal and more.

Why Use Salesforce CRM?

Your business can develop at a rapid pace with the help of Salesforce. The following benefits of this excellent CRM will make your work experience more pleasant:

• Ease of Use. You don’t have to be an IT expert to set up and manage apps — you just need to log in and start blazing trails to your customers in a completely new way. Salesforce provides a complete view of the client, so you can make decisions easier. The intuitive interface, clear navigation and collaboration options make the work process smooth and seamless.
• Rich functionality. The platform is replete with default features and templates suitable for most business and organizational needs.
• Customization. One of the main benefits of the service is the ability to configure any solution according to the company’s needs. You can integrate your own apps, make necessary alterations, delete or add functions and extend them. To perform customization, technical expertise is needed.
• Scalability. The platform is able to grow as the business expands, adapting to all new specifications and providing enough storage space.
• Analytics. Sales representatives have the possibility to track customer activities, analyze them and anticipate customer needs. The system creates reports, graphics and dashboards that help measure performance, find the critical points and improve upon them.
• AppExchange. This is a special marketplace where you can find thousands of apps for integration with Salesforce. Such practice enhances client engagement and improves performance.
• Community. Salesforce undergoes continuous improvements and takes advantage of innovations. Its dedicated team and large-scale community always take user feedback into consideration and release new features three times a year, building up a good reputation for the product.

How to Use Salesforce for Sales: 5 Tips

Now, every concerned reader should have the following reasonable question: How can Salesforce help my business? We give you five practical tips on how to use Salesforce CRM for increasing revenues, and which tools to implement in each situation. Since we live in the age of digital transformation, all of them are connected to the automation of certain processes.

1. Sales Automation

Source: Salesforce

The first thing you should do for improving sales using Salesforce is automating your sales pipeline. Sales Cloud is designated for creating frictionless eCommerce and customer experiences and includes a wide array of features.

• Account and Contact Management. These tools are able to draw a 360-degree picture of each client by tracking their activities, contacts, communications and discussions. You will also gain insights from the most popular social networks — LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter.
• Opportunity Management. This tool helps control all of your deals, tracking products, payment, delivery terms and other details. Team members stay informed about updates in real-time mode and can help if needed.
• Lead Management. More leads can convert into actual sales if you route and assign them to the right sales reps.
• Sales Data. You can get the latest and most accurate data easily with Lighting Data and Data.com solutions. They automatically update crucial information about contacts, leads and accounts, helping you drive processes. Two free tools — Data Loader and Excel Connector — import and synchronize information from various sources.
• Mobile. You can upload Salesforce to your mobile device and work from any place as if from an actual office.
• Workflow and Approvals. Use the Visual Workflow tool to design and visualize any business process. Approve requests directly via Chatter or email without delaying deals.
• Files Sync and Share. Work with files as a team from anywhere, synchronize and share them quickly and securely, search for information, track content, publish news and correct mistakes.
• Reports and Dashboards. Detailed reports are created automatically to show the real picture of your business at a glance.
• Sales Forecasting. AI-driven algorithms make accurate forecasts on the basis of all the available information. This helps provide timely updates and necessary adjustments, set reasonable goals and track your team members’ performance.

2. Marketing Automation

Source: Salesforce

A specialized tool, Marketing Cloud, helps manage marketing processes and promote your company products through various channels. Its main features are:

• Journey Builder to make connections across all channels and power 1-to-1 relationships with clients.
• Email Studio to build personalized email campaigns.
• Salesforce DMP to capture and activate data from any source.
• Data Studio to acquire high-quality data and activate it for finding new audiences.
• Social Studio to engage with clients via social media channels.
• Advertising Studio to create target ads.
• Mobile Studio to facilitate mobile interactions including SMS, push notifications and group messaging.
• Interaction Studio to visualize user activities in a real-time mode on all channels and drive valuable engagement at the right moment.
• Pardot — a service to support the B2B segment, coordinating the actions of the marketing and sales departments when working with corporate clients.

3. Service Automation

Source: Salesforce

A personalized Service Cloud manages the support (technical, information, service, etc.) of customers at the after-sales stage. It focuses on solving maintenance tasks and automates the key functions of this process, optimizing cooperation with clients and increasing their satisfaction.

The customer can get assistance over the preferred digital channels (social networks, live chats, mobile messaging or in-app). AI-powered chatbots provide instant answers, eliminating the long wait.

There’s also a possibility to build self-service portals where users can find information on their own.

4. Collaboration Automation

Source: Salesforce

The Community Cloud solution provides an opportunity for companies to organize interactions between customers, partners and employees. The functionality of the service facilitates the exchange of information in a real-time mode, the transfer of any files, data or records on stationary or mobile devices.

You can use out-of-the-box templates, themes and branding to create a personalized forum or portal matching your business needs. This will help you engage the audience and streamline the communication with each member.

5. Analytics Automation

Source: Salesforce

Analyze data faster, reveal hidden insights and opportunities and turn data into revenues with the business tool Einstein Analytics. The AI-driven tool is able to consolidate data from all sources, analyze all possible combinations, make predictions and give recommendations.

As a result, you’ll be able to make business decisions much faster. You can integrate the tool into existing apps or build your own applications for data analysis with the help of Einstein Analytics Platform.

To Sum Up

This was a brief introduction on how to use Salesforce for simplifying sales operations. The main conclusion that can be made is that the implementation of a cloud-based CRM is a good investment that promises to increase revenues, improve internal communications and customer satisfaction, and create a more profitable organization. Salesforce is a tool with multiple benefits that can greatly improve your business performance. Hence, it must be considered when choosing a CRM for your company.

Nevertheless, you should remember that even the best digital systems can’t completely replace people in the retail industry. The human touch plays a crucial role in closing deals, while automation just simplifies the procedure.

SaM Solutions is an experienced player in the IT market. We provide various software development services for multiple industries and have experience in creating projects using different technologies, Salesforce included.

Ask your questions by filling out the contact form on our website. Let’s build the best solutions together!