Salesforce CRM: 11 Critical Features and Benefits

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?
• What is Salesforce Used For?
• How Does Salesforce Work?
• Top 11 Salesforce CRM Features and Benefits
  1. Quote Management
  2. Quote to Cash
  3. Contact Management
  4. Opportunity Management
  5. Einstein Analytics
  6. Trailhead
  7. Lead Management
  8. Mobility
  9. Sales Forecasting
  10. Partner and Channel Management
  11. Territory Management
• Salesforce Pricing Plans
• Conclusion

What is Salesforce?

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?

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?

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. 

Top 11 Salesforce CRM Features and Benefits

Here are a few key benefits of leveraging Salesforce CRM for your business use case:

1. Quote Management
2. Quote to Cash
3. Contact Management
4. Opportunity Management
5. Einstein Analytics
6. Trailhead
7. Lead Management
8. Mobility
9. Sales Forecasting
10. Partner and Channel Management
11. 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:

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.

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