Salesforce is a robust Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform, powered by Customer 360. It further offers a complementary suite of enterprise applications that focus on Marketing Automation, Data Analytics, Customer Service, and Application Development.
This blog talks about the features and benefits of Salesforce CRM in great detail. This also includes a brief introduction to Salesforce, eliciting its purpose, use cases, and working.
Table of Contents
What is Salesforce?
Image Source
Salesforce serves as an integrated CRM platform that provides a single, shared view across all your departments including Sales, Service, Commerce, and Marketing. Salesforce can help you empower and develop your Sales teams with integrated Lead Management, Forecasting Tools, and the ability to Quote, Price, and Configure every deal. Salesforce provides a comprehensive Cloud platform (Sales Cloud) that gives you the Customer Management Solution that is the right fit for every growth phase of your company.
Sales Cloud is an all-in-one Sales tool that also doubles as CRM software. Sales Cloud is flexible enough to accommodate businesses of any industry or size and scalable for anything you might need from it. It allows you to access data on the go through its mobile app. It can also help maximize Sales with AppExchange integrations thus boosting business growth.
Here are a few salient Salesforce features:
- It allows you to build mobile-ready Salesforce apps for every employee. This helps boost productivity and helps build a more connected workforce. Apart from this, it also helps you streamline the employee help desk for faster self-service.
- Salesforce offers a boost on its core services with additional functionalities such as Application Integration and Artificial Intelligence. This includes building custom-branded mobile apps; easy integration of data from ERP, IoT, and databases; and addition of predictive capabilities to every service and Sales application.
- You can make your apps more personalized and smart to meet your needs in real-time engagement, service, and purchase.
- With Experience Cloud, you can evolve on a fast, flexible platform and maximize your return on experience. It allows you to build stronger relationships with a Single Source of Truth.
- Salesforce provides a highly curated library of industry-specific expert help. This includes process flows, apps, templates, and components built to tackle every single issue faced by the user.
Salesforce CRM ensures a personalized experience with its Customer 360 Platform. Some of the key products offered by Salesforce as a part of their suite are as follows:
- Salesforce Service Cloud: Salesforce Service Cloud offers all the tools you might need to strengthen Customer Engagement. It allows you to automate business processes with intelligent workflows, support customer interactions across each channel, get actionable insight into every customer interaction, and drive revenue with the power of Artificial Intelligence.
- Salesforce Analytics (Tableau CRM): Tableau allows you to leverage intuitive drag-and-drop analysis at every skill level. It also allows you to quickly spot visual patterns and share insights across teams to drive growth.
- Salesforce Commerce Cloud: The Salesforce Commerce Cloud allows you to convert more customers with personalized buying experiences. You can implement your strategies faster with easy-to-use tools. This allows you to stay agile and start generating a higher ROI (Return on Investment) sooner.
- Salesforce AppExchange: Salesforce AppExchange is an Enterprise Cloud marketplace. It allows you to find proven experts and apps to help you solve business challenges fast and extend your Salesforce Customer 360 from anywhere. This can be extended across any Department, Industry, and Product. It also offers app guides to help you zero in on the right apps to suit your unique business challenges.
What is Salesforce Used For?
Image Source
Salesforce supports and creates CRM software that essentially breaks down the technology silos between departments to give companies a holistic view of their customer. This platform enables a deeper understanding of customers/prospects interacting with your company.
Salesforce helps Government Agencies, Educational Institutes, Non-profit Organizations, and Businesses deliver exceptional experiences for those they serve. This extends across industries: from the public sector, retail, consumer goods, financial services, manufacturing, hospitality, and more.
Salesforce CRM also enables your employees to share a single customer view from any device, anywhere in the world. The Salesforce Customer 360 is named so because it is a collection of powerful apps that help you see a holistic view of your customers.
Salesforce CRM is primarily leveraged by enterprises to make their data more readable and shareable.
How Does Salesforce Work?
Image Source
Customer 360 allows employees to access the information that they need to do their best work. It also allows them to align and collaborate with their colleagues much more easily. This is possible because Customer 360 offers apps that unite every team- Sales, Marketing, Commerce, IT, and Service around a shared view of customer data on an integrated platform.
This ultimately leads to more personalized and connected experiences for your customers which enables you to build stronger relationships. This is because this holistic view of each customer reduces the time it takes for companies to resolve customer issues.
Salesforce CRM also effectively eliminates any redundancies in communication and enables highly tailored interactions.
A fully managed No-code Data Pipeline platform like Hevo helps you integrate data from 100+ data sources (including 30+ Free Data Sources like Salesforce) to a destination of your choice in real-time in an effortless manner. Hevo with its minimal learning curve can be set up in just a few minutes allowing the users to load data without having to compromise performance. Its strong integration with umpteenth sources allows users to bring in data of different kinds in a smooth fashion without having to code a single line.
Get Started with Hevo for Free
Check out some of the cool features of Hevo:
- Completely Automated: The Hevo platform can be set up in just a few minutes and requires minimal maintenance.
- Transformations: Hevo provides preload transformations through Python code. It also allows you to run transformation code for each event in the pipelines you set up. You need to edit the event object’s properties received in the transform method as a parameter to carry out the transformation. Hevo also offers drag and drop transformations like Date and Control Functions, JSON, and Event Manipulation to name a few. These can be configured and tested before putting them to use.
- Connectors: Hevo supports 100+ integrations to SaaS platforms such as Salesforce, files, databases, analytics, and BI tools. It supports various destinations including Salesforce CRM, Google BigQuery, Amazon Redshift, Firebolt, Snowflake Data Warehouses; Amazon S3 Data Lakes; and MySQL, MongoDB, TokuDB, DynamoDB, PostgreSQL databases to name a few.
- Real-Time Data Transfer: Hevo provides real-time data migration, so you can have analysis-ready data always.
- 100% Complete & Accurate Data Transfer: Hevo’s robust infrastructure ensures reliable data transfer with zero data loss.
- Scalable Infrastructure: Hevo has in-built integrations for 100+ sources, that can help you scale your data infrastructure as required.
- 24/7 Live Support: The Hevo team is available round the clock to extend exceptional support to you through chat, email, and support calls.
- Schema Management: Hevo takes away the tedious task of schema management & automatically detects the schema of incoming data and maps it to the destination schema.
- Live Monitoring: Hevo allows you to monitor the data flow so you can check where your data is at a particular point in time.
Sign up here for a 14-Day Free Trial!
Top 11 Salesforce CRM Features and Benefits
Here are a few key benefits of leveraging Salesforce CRM for your business use case:
- Quote Management
- Quote to Cash
- Contact Management
- Opportunity Management
- Einstein Analytics
- Trailhead
- Lead Management
- Mobility
- Sales Forecasting
- Partner and Channel Management
- Territory Management
1. Quote Management
Salesforce CRM allows you to simplify your Business and Sales processes with productivity and Forecasting Tracking. Quote Management of the products can be simplified by tracking your products. This includes metrics like Quantity, Standard Price, Product Code, and Quoted Price. You can also establish a revenue schedule and quantity. This reflects the payment and delivery terms. The Salesforce CRM app houses a built-in quoting mechanism that can automatically quote client data. It can also create PDFs of the approved template and send them as an email, directly to the customer.
Salesforce Mobile app provides real-time updates to help you stay on top of any news regarding deals.
2. Quote to Cash
With Salesforce CRM, you can simplify Quote Management by automating three important elements namely: Configure, Price, and Quote (CPQ). CPQ allows sales representatives to select the right quotes for the customers with the latest discounts. The users can make accurate quotes and submit the proposal significantly faster with Salesforce CRM. Salesforce Lightning helps simplify the cash collection and invoice sending process.
3. Contact Management
Salesforce CRM ensures hassle-free Contact Management by providing access to critical customer data and interaction history. It also provides a complete customer picture that includes engagement-enhancement strategies and insights. You can leverage the social data of the customers for a deeper understanding of their particular behavior regarding any service or product.
Cloud-based Contact Management allows you to easily collaborate in the organization. You can also share important documents and insights to create a knowledge-sharing workplace. It further allows you to trace the movement of the deals by accessing all the contact data.
4. Opportunity Management
Opportunity Management is a salient benefit of Salesforce CRM. It provides a chance to view the activity timeline of your customers. It also depicts the various stages of a particular deal, which helps you to decide your next move. With Opportunity Management, you can also view critical details of the activity timeline along with the business competitors. Ready-made templates assure hassle-free emailing to the clients.
5. Einstein Analytics
Einstein Analytics allows you to unlock Service Insights and Complicated Sales with Business Intelligence. It helps connect users to the Community, Service, and Sales Clouds with embedded dashboards. Einstein Analytics has been known to consistently display data and actionable insights to partners and employees. It primarily focuses on data security with over 150,000 enterprises leveraging it to get intelligent insights to propel business growth.
6. Trailhead
Trailhead is a Salesforce offering that targets startups and budding small businesses. This application has built-in intelligence and provides the best-in-class services to customers. Trailhead can capture data automatically from support channels, emails, and calendars giving you a 360-degree customer view.
Trailhead also houses a setup assistant to answer the customer queries quickly. It offers in-app tutorials to get a better understanding of the platform.
7. Lead Management
The Lead Management of Salesforce CRM features a rich activity timeline. It provides access to the up-to-date contacts on the timeline with the best industry practices. It leverages the Sales Path to get a better understanding of the relevant documents. This CRM app functions as a fast lead converter machine that provides valuable information about the original source of the leads. It also boosts your revenue-generating mechanism with automatic emailing.
Every day, your inbox is filled to the brim with thousands of emails. By utilizing Salesforce CRM you can automatically score your leads and assign the hottest lead to the right executive in no time. This allows you to always stay on track while propelling business growth.
8. Mobility
The Salesforce Mobile App lets users access CRM data from anywhere, anytime. They can view events, meetings, and account updates at their fingertips. It also offers offline data updates, that allow you to work without an internet connection as well.
You can view your real-time data on the mobile application itself that can go a long way in closing the deal in a short span of time. You can also collaborate with your team via instant conversations. The Salesforce Mobile app gives you more flexibility to work from anywhere with simplified document and file sharing.
9. Sales Forecasting
With Salesforce CRM, you can get a comprehensive view of your Sales Pipeline and understand how your business is doing in the market. It tracks the journey of the leads in the pipeline to check if they are reaching their destinations. By analyzing this information you can get a good forecast on Sales.
You can use your judgment coupled with the forecasted amount to help you plan your strategies. The Sales Forecasting Report lets you know your top performers on a real-time dashboard. Salesforce CRM also steps in to streamline complex sales processes by ensuring the right overlay process. It gives the credit to the right person and allows you to view the forecast based on overlays.
10. Partner and Channel Management
The Salesforce CRM app allows you to quickly create the ecosystem of your partners. It plays the role of Indirect Sales Channels where you can manage the onboarding, recruitment, and training of the partners. You can easily collaborate with your partners to make effective, results-oriented Marketing Campaigns on the Cloud.
The users don’t need code to extend the Marketing Cloud of Salesforce. As a platform, it simplifies product sales for partners. It also allows you to tailor the information access and refurbish partner ties. You can run multiple programs to incentivize the performance of your partners on Salesforce CRM. You can create a more engaging destination for your partners by leveraging Salesforce’s Content Management System (CMS).
By delivering powerful insights to the partners and connecting to the right data at the right time can help you understand their business in a better way. Salesforce CRM also allows you to share reports and dashboards with your partners. It can help partners track key metrics and discover upsell and cross-sell opportunities from any device.
11. Territory Management
Salesforce CRM’s Territory Management helps you manage territory assignments, new hierarchies, and assignment rules. Users can assign one rule to various territories from the territory hierarchy. The assigned users can identify their colleagues by utilizing territory rules. For example, Salesforce CRM can assign different rules to users in various territories.
Salesforce Pricing Plans
Salesforce offers various pricing plans to its users that cater to specific use cases. Here is an illustration to help you understand the Salesforce Pricing Plan structure better:
Image Source
Conclusion
This blog talks in great detail about the various features and benefits of leveraging Salesforce CRM for your unique use case. It also talks about the different use cases and purpose of the Salesforce CRM.
Extracting complex data from a diverse set of data sources like Salesforce to carry out an insightful analysis can be challenging, and this is where Hevo saves the day! Hevo offers a faster way to move data from Databases or SaaS applications like Salesforce to be visualized in a BI tool for free. Hevo is fully automated and hence does not require you to code.
Visit our Website to Explore Hevo
Want to take Hevo for a spin? Sign Up for the 14-day free trial and experience the feature-rich Hevo suite first hand. You can also have a look at the unbeatable pricing that will help you choose the right plan for your business needs.