Salesforce - A Quick Guide

What is Salesforce?

Salesforce’s key proposition is that it brings customers and companies together to establish and strengthen their relationships.

What is Salesforce CRM?

CRM stands for customer relationship management. This technology allows you to manage prospects and customer relationships, helps align sales behaviours and processes and also allows you to track data related to all your interactions. 

In addition CRM:

• Helps teams collaborate, internally and externally
• Track important metrics
• Gather social media insights
• Communicate via email, phone, social and other channels

All this information is stored safely in the cloud in Salesforce, providing users with an on demand, any time any place capability.

How do they do that?

Salesforce provides a single data platform that can be designed and configured to take care of all your data, stores and organises it into a simple user interface.  

It is one safe place for you to:

• Manage all your contacts
• Work with your prospective customers (Lead Management)
• Organise tasks and to-do items, with associated alerts
• Automate approvals and focus on the right deals (Forecasting)
• Collaborate with your team
• Add real customer value by up and cross selling appropriate solutions
• Win more business
• Drive customer success

Salesforce provides a place for you to store all your important customer, product and services information and data. It is all stored in a secure cloud, meaning you can access your data anytime and anywhere via a desktop or mobile device. 

By keeping everything in Salesforce you don’t need to worry about the note you scribbled down on a sticky note on your desk somewhere – you can find everything you need just by logging in. 

You also don’t have to keep updating your manager on how a prospective lead is going, instead your manager can just log into Salesforce and see the data in real time, and discuss where specific support is needed to help your customer buy your products and services.

Salesforce has options for who can view and edit data with a central administrator determining the settings of your account. Access can be simple or multi-layered depending on the complexity of your company’s needs. 

With the correct security, your whole company can be on Salesforce providing a significant market opportunity through timely internal collaboration.

When you think about the Salesforce architecture, imagine a series of layers that sit on top of each other and can be extended through MuleSoft or other middleware solutions to connect with external data systems, allowing you to provide both employees and customers with a differentiated and valuable experience.

What is collaboration and how can you use it to benefit your work?

This salesforce platform allows you via a built-in feature called Chatter to:

• Create groups
• Follow people and topics
• Request and post results on quick polls
• Share files and links
• Mention colleagues you would like to connect with

In addition, you can also:

• Find experts who can help you with overcoming issues as they come up, 
• Ask questions and get answers – crowdsourcing expertise from across your company. 
• Search for competitive information to help you throughout the negotiation stage
• Get help from leaders and teammates as you start to close deals

The most useful part about collaborating in Salesforce is that it is all stored for future reference – no longer do you need to try and remember what ‘Bob’ told you to help you close a deal at 9am Monday morning before you had your coffee. You just have a look in Salesforce and you have the conversation stored. 

Because this is all in Salesforce, the collaboration can happen in context, right on individual deals, tasks, support issues and much more, giving you a true 360 degree view of all your customers and their current situation.

This is the power of good quality data and employee collaboration.

For an informal and fact-finding conversation please get in touch at [email protected] to discuss in more detail how we can help take your business to the next level.