reports give companies insight into future sales, yet we’ve worked with companies in which generating the weekly pipeline could take more than a day of cat herding and guesswork. Reps waste time updating spreadsheets. Managers waste time chasing reps and scrubbing data. Bosses waste time tearing their hair out because the information is old by the time they get it. The prevalence of cloud computing makes this traditional method of siloed data collection obsolete (or pretty darn inefficient). A good CRM system helps you shorten or eliminate all that pulling and pasting of data across multiple sources. As long as reps manage all their opportunities in one place that’s always available, managers can generate updated pipeline reports with the click of a button.
Collaborating effectively with your colleagues
Remember when you were the new person at the company, and you had to find out who knew everything about a particular customer, process, or product? Even at smaller companies, it takes time to discover who possesses that extra bit of historical knowledge that could help you close that important deal or resolve a support issue. Other times, you may be so busy that you’re out of the loop on certain key company updates, even when departments try to keep you informed. What if you could harness the insights from others within the company, yet not be overwhelmed by information overload? A CRM system should provide a means for employee communication that increases internal awareness and collaboration on the business issues that matter the most to you, so you’re always up to date and never caught unawares.
Working as a team
How many times have you thought that your own co-workers got in the way of selling? Oftentimes, the challenge isn’t the people, or even the technology, but standardizing processes and clarifying roles and responsibilities. A CRM system will let you define teams and processes for sales, marketing, and customer service so that the left hand knows what the right hand is doing. It should also be flexible enough to change all those team members the next time a reorg happens. Although a CRM system doesn’t solve corporate alignment issues, the tool should drive and manage better team collaboration.
Extending your sales force with partners
In many industries, selling directly is a thing of the past. To gain leverage and cover more territory, many companies work through partners. CRM systems should let your channel team track and associate partners’ deals and get better insight about who their top partners are. Partners now can strengthen their relationships with their vendors by collaborating more easily on joint sales and marketing efforts.
Beating the competition
How much money have you lost to competitors? How many times did you lose a deal only to discover, after the fact, that it went to your archenemy? If you know who you’re up against, you can probably better position yourself to win the opportunity. CRM systems let you and your teams track competition on deals, collect competitive intelligence, and develop action plans to wear down your foes.
Improving the customer experience
As a salesperson, have you ever walked into a customer’s office expecting a bed of roses only to be hit with a landmine because of an unresolved customer issue? And if you work in customer support, how much time do you waste on trying to identify the customers and reviewing the context of previous support interactions? A CRM system should let you efficiently capture, manage, and resolve a high volume of customer issues that come in from a variety of communication channels. The customer relationship doesn’t end once they’ve bought your product – that’s just the beginning. A CRM system should allow sales reps to have visibility into the health of their accounts, and service can stay well informed of sales and account activity.
Measuring the business
How can you improve what you can’t measure? Simple, huh? If you use your CRM system correctly and regularly to manage customers, you have data to make informed decisions. That benefits everyone. If you’re a rep, you know what you need to do to get the rewards you want. If you’re a manager, you can pinpoint where to get involved to drive your numbers. A CRM system’s reporting and dashboards should provide easy-to-use tools to measure and analyze your business.
Salesforce wasn’t the first CRM system to hit the market, but it’s dramatically different from the other CRM systems you may have used (spreadsheets and sticky notes count as a system, too!). Unlike traditional CRM software, Salesforce is the first successful business application offered as an Internet service. You sign up and log in through a browser, and it’s immediately available. We currently call this cloud computing, where the customers access “the cloud” (that is, the Internet) for their business needs, and are not required to install any traditional software on, presumably, Earth. As long as you have an Internet connection, you can be anywhere in the world and have access to the clouds.
You may already be at a company that uses cloud-based applications, as Salesforce.com’s success has spawned a whole new marketplace full of business applications done “in the cloud.” Or you may just be entering the workforce, but you’re very familiar with the use of Internet-applications in your personal life (think Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook). If this is your first foray into cloud computing, you may be taking a first step by yourself or with the rest of your company. Don’t worry – your company made the right choice by picking Salesforce.
Salesforce customers typically say that it’s unique for three major reasons:
❯❯ It’s fast. When you sign on the dotted line, you want your CRM system up and running yesterday. Traditional CRM software can take more than a year to deploy; compare that to months or even weeks with Salesforce.
❯❯ It’s easy. End user adoption is critical to any application, and Salesforce wins the ease-of-use category hands down. You can spend more time putting it to use and less time figuring it out.
❯❯ It’s effective. Because it’s easy to use and can be customized quickly to meet business needs, customers have proven that it has improved their bottom lines.
Salesforce’s success has empowered a whole new generation of managers and administrators to become business operations gurus. Cloud computing’s generally lower licensing costs, its ability to allow system configuration to happen with no prior programming experience, and its ability to make modifications quickly to the system mean that newer businesses can compete with slower, older, bigger competitors, but at a fraction of the cost.
In the next chapter, we cover more specifics about Salesforce.com’s products.
Chapter 2
Discovering Salesforce.com’s Products
IN THIS CHAPTER
Selling effectively with Sales Cloud
Enhancing leads with Marketing Cloud
Improving customer service with Service Cloud
Deciding what Salesforce size fits you
Now that you have a general idea about what Salesforce is, let’s delve into the various products that Salesforce.com offers. Generally speaking, the products we cover here fall into the three major categories or departments traditionally used to understand customer relationship management (CRM): sales, marketing, and service.
You may not have thought about it yet, but if you think about the basic structure of CRM, it follows the customer journey from pre-sales to sales and finally post-sales.
