No matter which industry you belong to, what’s your focus and what kinds of products or services you offer, your customers are the most valuable asset of your organization. Salesforce is a widely used Customer Relationship Management platform which is cloud-based and is used by companies for managing their sales, customers and leads. Companies of different sizes and from diverse industries can use Salesforce to streamline and improve their businesses.
Before Salesforce was introduced, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) was hosted on the company’s own server. It used to take many months or even years to set up this system and the expenditure was also high. Even after the entire set up was complete, it was not easy to use. What could be a feasible solution to this problem? Yes, you guessed it right – making an affordable CRM solution and delivering it online to the company. This was the main idea behind Salesforce CRM.
Salesforce was not only about an efficient management solution at less cost but also about replacing the long installation procedures and securing all valuable data on the internet. This completely changed the business model. Now, there was no need of long-term contracts or costly licensing deals, any company can use Salesforce by paying a simple monthly subscription fee.
It is a battle-tested platform which has proven to help businesses manage the bulk of information and improve their communication across different departments, resulting in an efficient customer service. It helps in managing sales orders, marketing plans, customer application development, partner relationships, analytics, and customer support. The software is completely web-based and offers custom reporting tools which are controlled through an interactive dashboard.
Top Features of Salesforce Platform
Salesforce can manage a lot of things but here are some standout features that are beyond the reach of typical CRM platforms.
⦁ AppExchange
This feature creates limitless potential for the software and helps your sales team to reach the next level.
⦁ Marketing Cloud
This is an email marketing solution that is customizable and automated. It makes use of artificial intelligence to find new market segments and know the needs of the customers. It also offers some pre-built templates for marketing, thus, freeing up more time to close the deals.
⦁ Sales Cloud
It is a customer relationship management platform which is designed for marketing, supporting sales and customers in both business to business and business to customer contexts.
⦁ Service Cloud
Service cloud is all about offering services to the customers and building a long-lasting relationship with them. Other features like phone, email, chat, Google search, call scripting, contracts and entitlements, etc. can be used.
⦁ Community Cloud
It is a digital experience platform which allows companies of different sizes to develop branded CRM powered portals, sites, forums and mobile apps that are fast and efficient.
⦁ Field Service Lightning
This feature can connect your entire workforce to deliver productive, smart and more personalized online services.
⦁ Collaborative Forecasts
Salesforce offers this feature to predict your future sales performance and help you plan your future activities in a better way.
⦁ Workflows
Salesforce’s Workflow feature automates your internal procedures by making if/then rules. In other words, you can set an action to take place only if a condition is met. In such a case, the action takes place automatically or it doesn’t take place at all if the criteria isn’t met.
Top Industries that Make Use of Salesforce
⦁ Retail
Retail industries are employing Salesforce CRM solutions to offer personalized experiences to the clients across all channels. It keeps customers’ specific needs on top priority, listening to their preferences, and responding instantly. Salesforce connects the sales associates and partners with the significant information they require to offer the right products and services.
⦁ Business Services
Salesforce solution enables you to customize business processes as per the unique needs of your customers. You can share important data, get approvals, and push the business deals in a few seconds. With one-to-one communication with the consumers, your business can grow at a full scale.
⦁ Technology
With the advancement in technology, the processes in high-tech companies have automated and business models have become vital. In order to keep pace with the advancements, the companies need to adopt fully-integrated digital platforms like Salesforce. The suite of programs offered by Salesforce enables you to rapidly modernize the processes like lead assignment, quoting, contract generation, pipeline forecasting, invoicing and more. It can build modern sales procedures with endless options to automate sales such as calendar integration, email integration, task automation, goal tracking, quote generation, renewal visibility and more.
⦁ Banking/Insurance/Finance
Most of the influential investment banks and finance companies count on Salesforce to help them collaborate in a secure way and streamline their client engagement. Commercial bankers can conveniently access customer profiles across different products and business lines. Employees can get smart insight and identify new opportunities to convert more leads, and make customers for life.
⦁ Manufacturing
Salesforce CRM solution can help manufacturing industries in identifying quality leads. It can reduce the time lag between the client’s query and response which would generate more leads automatically. You can witness a better flow of productivity with seamless processes and more productive environment for the employees.
Here are the statistics of Salesforce revenue by industry:
Different industries use Salesforce CRM. It is incredibly common among mid-size companies including business services, retail, software, finance and manufacturing verticals. According to research, mid-size companies that employ Salesforce boast a yearly Salesforce revenue of around $1 – $50 million, more than 63% of these companies are manufacturing verticals, software, and business services. When the aforementioned information was ascertained, the findings indicated that the companies which employ the Salesforce CRM solution have a strong emphasis on sales and marketing. Additionally, these companies also have strong customer service teams.
Revenue Growth of Salesforce Vs Competitors
Although the Salesforce CRM platform is younger in comparison to SAP, Microsoft, Oracle, and some other key Salesforce competitors offering CRM solutions, it is positioned on top of the sector. The recent reports from Gartner indicate that Salesforce leads the worldwide CRM software providers with an 18.4% market share, compared to SAP, with a 12.1% market share. Salesforce also had the highest revenue growth of up to 28.2% as compared to Microsoft with 21.7% revenue growth.
Salesforce CRM solutions can be customized by any reputed Salesforce development company to meet your business-specific requirements. It helps in increasing productivity by managing contacts, opportunities, leads, and partners.
So, why put your business at risk? Invest in Salesforce CRM solution, and prove the valuable clients that you truly care about their satisfaction.
