The era of CRM platforms being a treat only multinationals with paramount budgets could afford, has passed. Small and medium businesses now have a chance to hop on the bandwagon, too. Today, multiple suppliers offer CRM solutions that can be tailored to your needs. There are providers like Shopify for smaller businesses with a more local scope, or platforms such as Salesforce, for more dynamic business processes. We’ll give you 10 benefits of Salesforce for SMBs.
According to McKinsey, over 30% of sales- and marketing-related activities can be automated. Marketing automation is a set of tools that automatically manages these processes across multiple channels. These track customer analytics, deliver content, capture leads, increase conversions, and more. Marketing automation is no magic trick. You need an effort to transfer these manual processes into an automated structure, but you’ll be rewarded big time. An integrated CRM lets people work in their trusted systems, brought together automatically by a mutual interface. That’s optimal productivity, a better synergy and without any long-term manual effort whatsoever. This leads to a 360° view of your customers, your campaigns, and your processes.
That’s the first of 10 benefits of Salesforce for SMBs. And it’s the one that facilitates the other advantages.
Time is any SMBs most precious resource. As you channel prospects through your marketing funnel, staying on top of your leads can quickly become a major time-sink. That’s why you can use platforms like Salesforce to automate lead management.
Of course, you need to invest time in setting up effective workflows and training employees on how to use them. But if you do this right, you need only minimal follow-up and adjustment along the way and your workforce will use their time more efficiently. Nucleus Research, for example, states that marketing automation drives a 14.5% increase in sales productivity.
But there’s more; saving time will lower overhead costs. Read on for more information.
Saving time automatically reduces overhead costs. By automating important but repetitive tasks, you need fewer people to do ceaseless processes. Additionally, your workflows take care of both repetitive tasks that exist within your campaigns and ROI reporting of these campaigns. This dissolves your need for extra manpower to take care of analytics. This facilitates optimal productivity because your employees can focus on projects that will make a long-term impact. Moreover, using a CRM solution like Salesforce eases handovers and follow-ups when colleagues resign or take leave. This significantly reduces up to 12.2% of training and onboarding costs.
Especially as a SMB using a mix of online and offline marketing efforts, tracking ROI can be a pickle. Either you don’t have the time or tools to analyse the ROI effectively, or your efforts are mostly offline, complicating your ROI calculation.
You can use specific criteria to determine when a particular customer may be a strong candidate for upselling. By identifying these criteria, automated marketing platforms quickly and cost-effectively increase the value of each lead. Similarly, Salesforce customers report a +25% increase in marketing ROI.
But that’s not all. While Salesforce solutions, of course, require time and budget to implement, they don’t require periodical redundant investments that non-cloud-based CRMs need. Think about onboarding new people, repeating tasks, subscribing to third-party data warehouses, and so on. In other words, Salesforce is a one-time serious investment. This saves you money eventually, with a clear view on ROI because of exquisite Salesforce Analytics.
But what exactly is the advantage of marketing automation? Well, there’s many. Especially for SMBs. Using marketing automation, you can build a better and more personalized customer experience. If you target people in a way that speaks to them and them alone, you will reach more qualified leads. These leads are easier to convert, because you know you are targeting the right audience that identifies with your communication. This means you don’t need to waste time filtering out the unqualified leads that will only cost you money without gaining you any ROI.
Some practical advantages of Salesforce as CRM platform, are Buyer Persona to help you target the right customer groups (which are used by 44% of B2B marketers), unified omni-channel experiences (did you know 73% of shoppers use multiple channels during they customer journey, and all of them expect a consistent experience throughout these channels?) and branded portals for community management.
We’re halfway into our 10 Benefits of Salesforce for SMBs. Let’s carry on.
What’s the point in generating leads when they don’t convert? First, by offering a better customer experience (through automation), you automatically increase customer conversion. Why? Because as we said, you will target more qualified leads in the first place. Second, using Salesforce CRM bring a streamlined organization of business processes, as we mentioned earlier on. This streamlining ensures access to information by everyone involved in the sales and marketing processes. Subsequently, it offers a chance to align communication from different departments to the customers. This means a personalized approach for your audience without having to face them one-by-one.
And what’s the point in converting more customers if they don’t come back? This too, you can solve by the customer experience that Salesforce makes easy. Your CRMs AI can filter out those leads that don’t have a high change of conversion, for example. This means you’re focusing your efforts on market segments that are the more likely to bring revenue. In other words, integrated CRM saves you money by eliminating above the line tactics and elevates customer retention.
Additionally, the Salesforce CRM allows better tracking of customer information, facilitating quicker and more automated personalized follow-ups. Think about email campaigns to prevent shopping cart abandonment, promo codes for sleeping customers, and so on.
Another reason why Salesforce is a boon to SMBs, is the easy and dummy-proof reporting that allows forecasting. CRM, eCommerce and Marketing Automation data can all be included in Salesforce Analytics to help you design buyer persona, run predictive analysis and get customer insights. And in a world that grows more digital every day, SMBs can benefit from data to build competitive advantage. More importantly, they can use data so they don’t lose that advantage. Make sure to read our latest blog on Why Your Data Doesn’t Bring You Profit to overcome some of the most frequent forecasting and data pitfalls.
With more and more digital processes, it can be hard to keep track on what you’re spending and where. Salesforce CRM offers easy report building. From ready-to-use dashboard templates to the predictive Einstein analysis we talked about before. You can have a 360-view of what is working and what is not, so you can decide where the money goes next.
Additionally, the transparent collaborative character of Salesforce CRM allows everyone in the organization to access the information they need. No complicated handovers, password exchanges and extended onboardings. Just the essential information for everyone involved, and detailed insights for decision makers 24/7. Finally, automated Salesforce reporting ensures effective reporting and eliminates human errors.
The versatile application of Salesforce solutions is the last of our 10 Benefits of Salesforce for SMBs. Along with the desktop version, Salesforce Cloud Solutions are widely available on mobile devices like tablets and smartphones. This gives both you and your sales reps ready access to all your data while on the road or working from home. Bye bye, FTPs.
What’s more, it eliminates one more traditional argument from your reps to not use your CRM platform! They’ll have a hard time trying to get out of this one 😉
Easily automate up to 30% of sales and marketing.
Save your SMBs most precious resource: time.
Lower up to 12% overhead costs.
Increase ROI by + 25% with Salesforce Analytics.
Generate better leads by building better and more personalized customer experiences.
Convert more customers by extending the customer experience through automation.
Retain more customers using Salesforce AI and eliminating above the line tactics.
Forecast with the greatest of ease with Salesforce Analytics to build your competitive advantage.
Provide bite-sized information to decision makers.
Work from anywhere with the Salesforce mobile application.
Optimize your next salesforce project with our free playbook.
Proud member of initiatives that make the world a better place:
Important Note: The minimum token amount per ticket is 100.
Estimated token costs for common ticket types
TICKET TYPE
TOKENS
Update 5 users with new configuration of access rights (permission sets, profile or public group) and update “City” on a user record
100
Add 5 new fields to a report and modify 2 filtering criteria
100
Develop automation to update the case whenever a certain condition is met and trigger notification
500
Updated Apex class and LWC to present data in a table like format
800
“My automation is breaking – I don’t know what is happening”, support agent work: Investigation or issue, correction of a SF flow, documentation of changes, presentation to a user
600