We are living in times when businesses list climate change and waste management as priority. Enterprises are evolving from having a laser focus on profit margins and shareholders’ gains to doing things that would change the world. However, major change is possible for socially conscious, impact-making organizations only when their own coffers have the resources to carry through greater goals. This is why business profits remain steadfastly a key need for corporate firms. “Business with purpose” is possible only when real earnings flow in.
How can Salesforce help businesses realize their long-term goals, one of which is driving business profits?
The many possibilities of profit generation with Salesforce
1. Automation
Time is money. Clichéd; but nothing could be truer in the business world. With Salesforce, your business can get the bang for the buck as it helps automate business processes and tasks with little effort. Your workforce spends 69 days a year on administrative tasks, costing you approximately $5 trillion a year. And if you thought that making your staff multitask is going to reap you benefits, here’s another shocker stat – 40% of lost productivity is simply due to constant task-switching – that’s roughly 16 hours a week lost to what you thought was smart scheduling!
Thankfully, Salesforce swoops in to save the day – you can easily take routine chores off your employees’ plates and apply their skills to more business beneficial tasks. Routine tasks include:
- Sending email – By simply integrating the Salesforce Inbox with Gmail, your team gets the power of List Email feature. All they have to do is use a previously created template, make sure it looks good and hit send. Your team can set up numerous distribution lists by duplicating your lead lists and applying filters to target leads by geographies or any other criterion.
- Sharing key information – Prospect meeting preparations can be time-consuming for your team as they will have to dig into past email chains and calendar to review any contact they have made with prospects. With Salesforce Essentials’ Einstein Activity Capture, your staff can populate lead, contact, account, and opportunity records with every email and calendar entry between your prospects and any of your team members who use Salesforce. This can be done for up to a period of six months, and can be automatically added into your Salesforce organization’s activity.
- Scheduling meetings – Essentials with Salesforce Inbox makes it super easy to schedule meetings, especially when your team’s calendar fills up while waiting for others to respond. Salesforce Inbox automates the process, and all your team has to do is write an email from their inbox, pull up the calendar and choose convenient time slots that work for them. Next, they have to drop the calendar into their email, before shooting the mail off. The recipient simply has to choose from an open slot from the calendar, and the meeting is booked, blocking off the slot. The calendar is dynamic and is available in real-time, ensuring that there will be no double booking.
- Case routing – One of the most critical features achievable by automation is customer service case routing. With this, every customer case is routed to the best agent for effective and quick resolving of issues. The system combines skills-based routing with queue-based routing to keep requests moving to the right agents as quickly as possible.
- …And some more – Macros is a handy tool that allows your teams to customize automation by taking a series of activities and turning them into a single click in Salesforce. Your team can easily build a macro by doing exactly what they would do to handle a case, and save it. Next time on, this case would only be a single click activity, saving both time and effort.
2. Reporting and Analysis
Salesforce’s rich analytical app gives you the opportunity to explore data and unveil insights that can change how you do business; be it simplifying a sales pipeline dashboard or looking to make complex forecasting decision. It is nearly impossible for your teams to spot and analyze every trend by manual data exploration. Einstein Analytics is built right into Salesforce to empower your sales reps, service agents, marketers and analysts to analyze billions of data combinations, uncover predictive insights, and get prescriptive recommendations.
Einstein Analytics is ahead of business intelligence software, because it can:
- Identify trends by connecting data from any source, whether inside or outside of Salesforce, and bring the analysis right into Salesforce. Users can easily take next steps using built-in CRM actions connected to business processes.
- Customize what information you want based on your business’s needs and deploy analytics speedily with the help of tailored templates, third-party apps, or custom-built dashboards.
- Answer complex business questions with its AI-augmented data discovery and explanations that will help you make smarter decisions by telling you exactly what happened, why it happened, and what more is expected.
- Guide your business forward by predicting future outcomes and recommending actions to take within the apps you already use.
3. Integration
When business information is isolated in different systems such as in accounting software, CRM or ERP, it leads to loss of profits and productivity. Salesforce’s extensive integration options bring multiple platforms and data under one system, ensuring data security, and time and cost savings. Since Salesforce is one of the most widely integrated CRMs in the world, it easily becomes a holistic tool for your teams by having an integration option for a variety of apps and software, making it simple for your business to be streamlined. With integration, the possibilities of automation, customization and reporting increase manifold.
- Integration with ERP systems increases efficiency significantly, eliminating double entries, and enables better planning, detects bottlenecks and ensures all data gaps are duly filled in.
- Integration with CRM provides all relevant information in real-time—stores, customers, interactions, promotions, orders, products, inventory, pricing, and more, allowing them to stay connected with their shoppers from anywhere, while offering them innovation and personalization.
- Integration with marketing automation unravels customer info and shows the way to engage them with personalized experiences across channels.
- Integration with accounting helps focus on business growth, by keeping all financial data accurate and transparent.
4. Flexibility and Control
Flexibility and control in a business go hand in hand. Your business cannot grow in a box; and the technologies you employ to further your business goals must offer you the flexibility to grow with your business’s evolving needs. Salesforce, with its 100% customizable structure, offers seamless flexibility in your business environment, guaranteeing that your workflow and processes can be reinvented to suit the needs of the hour.
With the power to fuse different apps and software under one roof, Salesforce gives you control over what direction your business is growing in. With this cloud platform comes the promise of security and accuracy, which ensures that the minutest tasks and mammoth processes become fail safe, and your entire system runs smoothly.
The impact of Salesforce on your Sales Pipeline
How Salesforce helps put different pieces of business together is quite clear from what we discussed in this blog up until now. That business profits feel the positive impact of organized workflow and processes because of Salesforce is accepted. But an area where tangible cash flow comes from is the sales pipeline of a company. The health of your business’s sales pipeline decides how your sales team performs, how prospects are identified and classified, how deals are closed, and so on.
Improving the efficiency of your sales pipeline by leveraging Salesforce will have a direct consequence on the bottom line of your business. Let’s look at some ways Salesforce can help with improving the sales pipeline of your business.
- Sales pipeline automation – An automated sales pipeline, where manual processes are taken care of, empowers sales reps and gives them time to focus on business crucial tasks like nurturing leads and improving sales processes.
- Improved decision making – When powered by Salesforce Einstein that deliver actionable insights, teams get to make quicker and more intelligent decisions. Consequently, sales get accelerated, business processes are optimized, and ROI is maximized.
- Better communication – The Salesforce community cloud offers a connected ecosystem comprising partners, distributors, resellers, customers, and employees, which enhances the opportunities of collaboration, leading to improved sales and productivity.
- Improved customer service – Salesforce service cloud enables businesses to take customer service to the next level. Sales reps are empowered to close deals quickly, respond to queries in a timely and effective manner, personalize customer care and even predict future needs; all leading to enhanced customer experience.
Giving customer experience (CX) a powerful makeover with Salesforce
2020 has been touted as the year when customer experience will overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator. So there is no way we can talk about making business profits without putting CX at the helm. Consider this – according to the State of the Connected Customer report, a Salesforce research, 84% of customers say the experience a company provides is as important as its products and services. In addition, 86% of buyers are willing to pay more for a great customer experience.
Customer experience is here to stay, and any company serious about staying in business will work at delivering a consistently good buying experience and the best value to their customers. In the words of Peter Schwartz, Salesforce Senior Vice President of Strategic Planning,“Customer experience and service have converged. It’s more than call centers and successful responses to problems; it is service opportunities in sales, support, and marketing. Delivering great customer experiences now means providing amazing almost magical service at every opportunity.”
CX is no longer about customer service; it’s much broader and deeper, spanning several aspects such as different touchpoints with the customer – including on the website or while speaking to a sales rep or while shopping at the store – and the general perception of the company, during onboarding, or post sales, and so on. This is exactly why 88% of companies now prioritize customer experience in their contact centers. You got to give the modern customer everything he wants – be it near-instant responses, live chat, call back options, and near instant tweet replies, being aware of, the whole time, who they are, what their business history is, and what they (will) need.
All of this, falling under the category of CX, is not new; but is relevant. And if you don’t work at it, one in three of your customers is going to stop buying from you immediately.
While earlier in this blog we discussed some aspects of how Salesforce can help your business, let’s now focus on how the cloud platform can make an impact on the CX you deliver.
1. Salesforce integrates with your other technologies
When a customer’s data is spread over different platforms or lie in various silos, customer communication is the first thing to take a hit. After just two or three negative experiences, such as not having an issue resolved or having to repeat issues to different reps, 92% customers are going to walk out on your business. Fortunately, Salesforce brings all customer data together, eliminating the need to manually transfer between apps or software, keeping every relevant employee aware of each customer’s journey. So when a customer moves from marketing to sales, or from sales to accounting, or between any other departments, his data remains unified and flows transparently between employees, ensuring seamless customer experience.
2. Salesforce gives you the power of personalization
Salesforce Einstein Analytics is pure magic – it gives you a better grasp of who your customers are, and what their wants and needs are. It helps uncover great actionable insights, enabling you to constantly re-evaluate your customers, understand their uniqueness, and honor their individual needs and concerns with personalized solutions. Einstein pulls in insights from a variety of channels, bringing them all into your Salesforce platform, and offers recommendations that you can use to offer custom-built experiences.
3. Salesforce Desk transforms your customer service
In 2019, 49% of American consumers switched companies due to poor customer service. After-sales is no longer about just checking in on your customers or sending them offers. With Desk.com you get a 360 degree view of each customer. It helps service reps view the customer journey, analyze customer information, and make cohesive communication between departments, while helping them improve their own productivity. Desk.com also facilitates customer self-service – latest research states that 90% consumers now expect a brand or organization to offer a self-service customer support portal. It’s a great tool for customers to help themselves, while saving time and effort of service reps, and enhancing overall customer experience.
Customers are looking for connected customer experience – research says 69% of them. Consistent interactions across departments of a company is no longer an option; it is a given. When customer relationships become the single aim for the business, you eliminate disjointed, unsatisfactory experiences, and facilitate an aligned view of customer interactions, thereby delivering unified customer experience across all business lines.
Your business’s profits lie in strengthened relationships with your customers – experiences that are personalized, memorable and differentiated. If you need assistance with this, write to services@suyati.com. Our approach to customer experience can be summed up in one phrase – Buyer Rhythms (BR). BR is the deep understanding of your customer by focusing on, and learning from, the repeated patterns they create while interacting with your business. It offers you detailed insights, delivered in a seamless manner within your existing IT ecosystem. Suyati helps companies across the globe leverage their best on web and cloud through our platform integration, data analytics and customer engagement services. Learn more: www.suyati.com.
