An Overview of Salesforce—One of the Most Trusted CRM Software Solutions in the Market
What Is Salesforce?
Salesforce is an advanced CRM software solution designed for small- to medium-sized businesses and large enterprises across a wide range of industries. It is a platform which businesses can utilize in order to deliver excellent customer service, elevate user-experience, improve marketing and sales efficiencies and collect crucial business data.
The Salesforce brand is well known around the world and is an award-winning solution trusted by a number of organizations and enterprises worldwide. Salesforce is a suite comprised of a variety of software solutions, all designed to address different aspects of business processes and operations, from marketing and sales to customer support and analytics.
How does Salesforce work?
Salesforce is a cloud-based, all-in-one CRM software solution for businesses of all sizes and in all industries. It is a feature-rich CRM suite that does more than provide a customer relationship management solution.
With this platform, businesses and organizations can take advantage of a wide array of features and capabilities Salesforce has in store, with select packages designed to fit the needs and requirements of every type of business of every size, scope and financial resource.
As a CRM solution, Salesforce facilitates the monitoring process of all customer information and interactions from a single location, allowing for convenience and efficiency, especially when following and tracking down leads are your primary focus.
Salesforce CRM comes with a number of well-designed programs, including Lead Management, Marketing Automation, Partner Management and Sales Data, all of which are crucial when it comes to following leads and nursing them until the time comes when they’re ready for conversion.
What kind of solutions are available with Salesforce?
As mentioned, Salesforce is an all-in-one cloud-based software solution that comes with a number of products and features designed to effectively deal with various aspects of your business. Salesforce offers solutions associated with sales, service, marketing, commerce, analytics, platform and apps, community and so on.
Sales solutions
With Sales Cloud, SalesforceIQ and Salesforce Quote-to-Cash, you can empower your sales teams and allow them to easily convert leads, close more deals, increase output, keep the pipeline brimming with hot leads and be more efficient in completing assigned tasks.
Sales Cloud enables users to manage contacts and find openings from any computer or mobile device. SalesforceIQ provides smarter more advanced email marketing solutions, while Salesforce Quote-to-Cash allows your sales team to provide accurate quotes, better contracts and proposals. The latter also helps to automate the billing process, subscriptions and profit recognition.
Service solutions
The service solutions offered by Salesforce allow businesses and organizations of all sizes to improve their customer support, from self-service doorways to helpdesks. The tools and programs available are designed to be more responsive, intuitive and flexible. Solutions like Service Cloud and Desk.com provide your customer support staff everything they need to anticipate your customers’ wants.
Service Cloud gives your customers a much faster and smarter platform where they can get the help they need and deserve. Desk.com is Salesforce’s comprehensive customer support software that provides small businesses the help they need to deliver quicker and more personalized service to their own customers.
Marketing solutions
With Salesforce’s various marketing solutions, businesses and marketers can optimize and utilize every customer interaction. Users can build personalized, cross-channel customer relationships that focus on top-notch user-experience regardless of the online communication medium used.
As part of Salesforce’s marketing solutions, Marketing Cloud provides businesses the opportunity to build 1-to-1 customer journeys with one of the most robust and highly efficient digital marketing platform available today. Pardot is the marketing solution that helps accelerate your queue and ramp up sales with business-to-business (B2B) Marketing Automation.
Commerce solutions
Salesforce also offers commerce solutions that allow you to deliver exceptional shopping experience for your customers, across the web, social media and so on. With software solutions like Commerce Cloud Digital and Commerce Cloud Store, small businesses and enterprises can improve everything from shopping to satisfaction to customer service with built-in predictive intelligence.
Commerce Cloud Digital allows you to engage consumers on all digital platforms with personalized and innovative commerce solution for promotions, marketing, merchandising and more.
Commerce Cloud Store helps to bring new life into your retail business with a comprehensive, mobile-first solution for point-of-sale (POS) and other retail business processes. With in-store, AI-driven solutions, you are able to deliver a better customer experience and personalized product recommendations.
Platform and apps solutions
Nowadays, apps are important tools for businesses and organizations regardless of the industry you’re in. Consumers today rely on apps to gather information about businesses, place orders, make reservations, compare products and basically shop online. Basically, your business app is where your customer-base meets your brand.
The app is where customers connect with your company and with each other, where personnel interact with each other and where certain business processes are made more efficient and mobilized across your organization.
Salesforce is the perfect all-in-one software solution that allows you to develop, run, manage and optimize your business apps using technology and tools seldom found in other out-of-the-box software solutions. Salesforce Platform, Force.com and Heroku Enterprise are among the solutions offered by Salesforce that allow you to build, manage and optimize your business apps.
Analytics solutions
With Salesforce’s different tools for data analysis, you can transform the way your organization gathers, analyzes and disseminates vital customer information. The platform allows you to streamline data collection, analysis and distribution processes by combining datasets from multiple sources into one cohesive interface.
Salesforce’s analytics solutions allows team leaders, managers and decision makers to view crucial information from a single location, get answers quicker and take more immediate actions. There are three analytics solutions available: Einstein Analytics, Sales Analytics and Service Analytics.
Einstein Analytics allows any team member, personnel or individual to gather data and find new opportunities with a self-service platform. Sales Analytics delivers customizable sales insights to any computer or mobile device at any time, while Service Analytics helps you to properly monitor and keep track of your service team’s performance.
Why choose Salesforce? The benefits of Salesforce CRM software solution
Choosing Salesforce as your primary CRM software solution entails a few key benefits in addition to the obvious advantage of being able to effectively manage customer relationships. Here are a few benefits you may experience when using Salesforce all-in-one CRM solution:
It can help improve productivity and efficiency.
With the different features and capabilities available, such as the mobile apps for Android and iOS, the productivity and efficiency of your sales and marketing teams can greatly improve. Mobile applications mean you can take most of the main functions of the software with you everywhere you go. Whether you’re at home, on the field or out of town, you can still work on leads and opportunities in real-time.
The Visual Workflow allows users to perform business processes using a simple drag-and-drop mechanism. It is fast and much more practical, not to mention it doesn’t require for the user to be tech-savvy or have extensive knowledge in programming. Moreover, the solution also has functions that allow you to share and sync data in real time, thus allowing for a more productive and efficient communication between team members.
It allows teams and marketers to close more deals.
With Salesforce’s Opportunity Management function, you can get valuable insights on prospects and opportunities just waiting to be approached. The solution allows you to get a comprehensive view of the customer, including their activity history, social mentions and discussions and communications. It also allows you to track deals and look for competitive information via the Sales Collaboration module.
Another major component of Salesforce CRM is the Sales Performance Management feature, which lets users set metrics-based objectives and reward winning performances of your sales reps to cultivate healthy competition among team members.
It helps to spot and gather more leads.
By using Salesforce and its marketing and sales solutions, you are able to track leads more efficiently, create marketing campaigns aimed at your target audience and automate business processes in order to generate quality leads.
With software like Lead Management, Marketing Automation, Partner Management and Sales Data, you can empower your sales and marketing team by giving them the tools they need to systematically create a robust pipeline from spotting and gathering leads to actual conversion.
It provides valuable and actionable insights.
Get reports and insights of your sales team’s performance and conversion rates in real-time. A real-time view of sales personnel performance can help decision-makers and team leaders to create a more accurate and adaptive weekly forecasts.
Take advantage of real-time reports and dashboards to collect valuable and actionable information for a more detailed analysis and reporting. Manage teams and departments with the appropriate model to set peripherals and customer volume in order to maintain good workflow and balanced assignments among your sales reps.
It is easy to use and has a short learning curve.
Most, if not all, companies that provide CRM Software Solutions claim their product is practical and easy to use. But that isn’t always the case with most products. With Salesforce, however, you will find most of the tools and applications that come with the platform are indeed quite comprehensive but they’re not that difficult to understand.
Salesforce CRM and its many features and services are designed not just for business process efficiency and productivity, but for ease of use as well. You will find the software solution has a neat, well-designed interface that’s easy to comprehend. It really doesn’t require that much of a learning curve.
All the key features and functions of the platform are displayed clearly, allowing for easy navigation and seamless operation. You don’t have to be tech-savvy or an expert in coding and programming languages to effectively operate Salesforce and all of its functions. Once the software solution is implemented, your sales team and marketing personnel will be able to utilize the platform right off the bat. No extensive and costly training required.
How much does Salesforce CRM cost?
Salesforce offers a variety of packages and pricing plans to accommodate your business needs. Every solution and product they offer comes with different pricing plans. You simply have to choose the right package to suit your company’s needs and requirements.
Sales Cloud, Sales + Service, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Salesforce Platform, Community Cloud, Wave Analytics, Health Cloud, SalesforceIQ, Salesforce Quote-to-Cash, Pardot and Desk.com—all these services have different pricing that you need to carefully assess to figure out which of the products you might find useful based on your company’s needs.
You may visit the Salesforce official website here to get more information on their pricing plans and subscription packages. You may also contact their sales team directly for details on custom pricing and subscriptions. The contact information is available at the website.
Is Salesforce worth the investment?
Salesforce is a comprehensive advanced CRM solution that can do much more than what you normally expect from a standard customer relationship management service. It is an all-in-one platform that offers a wide array of features and capabilities designed to fit the needs of small- to medium-sized business and large organizations.
So if you’re asking if Salesforce is a worthy investment, the answer is a resounding yes. What you need to do is to carefully assess your company’s sales, marketing and CRM needs and check out the solutions Salesforce has to offer. There’s a good chance you will find a solution that you didn’t even know your company actually needs.
If you’re willing and capable of paying top dollar for a comprehensive CRM platform and exceptional service, Salesforce can provide robust, well-designed, highly customizable and effective CRM solutions that are trusted and relied upon by a number of businesses and organizations all around the world. If you’re still not convinced, you can always choose to avail of the free trial offered by the provider.
