Salesforce: A new way of connecting that changes everything

This blog entry is the start of a new series related to the “Salesforce world”, in which we will analyse the huge potential this tool brings to the cloud-based Customer Relationship Management (CRM), which provides a unified vision of the customers all areas of the company (including marketing, sales, customer service and e-commerce). All of this within an integrated platform.

In the aforementioned definition of Salesforce, the keyword is “customers”. Salesforce transforms the way a company relates to its customers, since it is a total, systemic transformation. It is a true revolution; the 360-degree focus along with the complete customer centric vision brought by its solutions means a disruption in the way of understanding the relationship with the customers.

Furthermore, it’s a revolution that affects the company as a whole: its processes, its focus, its vision of the customers and the way of approaching how to connect with them during their customer journey in the long-term. This transformation affects the company’s internal and external relationships:

1. Externally, it affects how we connect with the customers and relate to them, how we communicate and develop our Marketing strategy, how we sell, how we give support…
2. Internally, it changes the way we see our customer, our way of compiling the information, how we manage the customer relationship (through our knowledge of their needs) and how we anticipate from that knowledge, as well as our way of sharing information with the rest of the organization.

In that sense, Salesforce becomes a single platform of vision, management and knowledge of the client within the organization. Here is where the first great advantage of using Salesforce arrives: it allows us to centralize the knowledge of the client in order to optimize our ability to relate to them. This new ecosystem optimizes the focus on our customers and supports business growth, bringing the tools and information necessary for our teams to achieve our goal.

Salesforce means transformation

We spoke of disruption because, as we can see, Salesforce is a new way of connecting that changes everything. However, it is important to highlight that a Salesforce project doesn’t just focus on implementing a technology solution, it goes beyond technology and enters the soul of business; and that is why it is so powerful.

These are the main effects a Salesforce project generates within an organization:

• It fully involves people and teams (it requires imagination, creativity, a human touch necessary to manage change, to lead the challenge).
• It boosts the expert knowledge of the digital environment (new protocols, processes, profound understanding of the customer and the customer journey, time control, digital skills, etc.)
• It increases the expert knowledge of the “business”: value chain, sales process, marketing process, customer service, value proposition, etc.
• It affects the knowledge of Technology and integration of tools, apps, AI, cloud solutions, architecture, etc.
• It accelerates the knowledge of Business Intelligence & Analytics: data driven focus, management and control of data and information flux.

Joining the Salesforce world is worth it

The benefits of implementing a solution such as Salesforce are clear:

• We boost the ability and potential of our business development team: greater control of the customer’s life cycle, maximization of opportunities within our funnel, greater knowledge of our customers throughout their whole customer journey.
• We improve productivity: opportunity detection (Salesforce has an artificial intelligence layer that helps us understand which opportunities we should prioritize), faster customer relationship management, more visual and intuitive analysis of the client (custom dashboards), follow-up tasks automation that reduces relationship management time.
• Better knowledge of the customer: strong insights that give us a total vision of our client in every touch point of our relationship, all the information of the customer in a single place (opportunity archive, interactions, key data, etc.)
• Better communication between the teams that connect with the customer (synergies between teams and optimization of the conversation with the customer.)
• The speed of a cloud solution available 24/7 in any device.

Companies that implement Salesforce thanks to the aforementioned advantages have important challenges ahead, since a revolution requires a change in the way of working, in the relationship culture and customer management. It also demands technology capabilities (business and talent) needed in order to carry out the transformation project successfully.

We have already seen the challenge is worth it, and the data proves that companies that use Salesforce solutions (and transform their customer relationship vision) improve their results in a consistent way. In addition, this improvement happens in all key indicators: more opportunities (leads), more sales, higher conversion rates, more income… And a more collaborative way of working with the teams surrounding the client (more and better knowledge of the customer, collaboration between multidisciplinary teams, greater efficiency in Marketing actions, etc.)

How do we approach a Salesforce project?

We have already discovered a Salesforce project “changes you as a company”. In fact, it makes you anticipate technological and strategic needs. That implies a company that initiates this project needs to understand:

1. The current situation on which the project will be developed (key business elements, how the technology is used, how to connect with their customers, the value proposition, etc.)
2. Where they see themselves in the future (possible scenarios and how are they going to use everything at their disposal to get there), visualizing the long-term and creating the necessary conditions to face the challenges to come with guarantees.
3. How to align Salesforce technology with your business. This point is critical: any implementation that does not consider the synergies with the business and looks to influence the key processes will not reach all previously stated benefits. The primary goal: improving the company’s results (usually, the turnover, but in reality there are many other KPIs in Sales, Marketing, Customer Service, etc.)

This implies the company needs to work the following vectors well:

• Business knowledge to be able to transform the company with a total focus on clients and their needs.
• Digital capability that optimizes the mix of methodologies & processes.
• Technological knowledge to fully understand Salesforce and its modules, define an implementation and integration strategy with other tools and solutions such as, for example, the company’s ERP.
• Change management to reinforce the transformation in the way of facing the relationship with the customer throughout the whole life cycle.
• Capable talent to lead the project and execute it.

In the next article, we will carefully analyse each one of these vectors and the most adequate strategy to face a Salesforce project. At Integra we give special importance to the relationship with the customer and monitoring all our commercial actions to make the sales process more efficient. If you want to know how to implement a CRM in your company or integrate it with other tools, contact us.