Nowadays, the CRM industry offers a wide range of solutions, being Salesforce, in my opinion, the best one. If you are new to this market, you may find intriguing the fact that Salesforce is one of the most expensive CRM solutions in the market and yet, it is the world’s leading cloud-based CRM. In this article, I will help you better understand this reality and how Salesforce can help your business.
Founded in 1999, Salesforce presented itself to the market with a constant obsession for success and customer satisfaction and did not change ever since. From that time on, Salesforce evolved to be on the vanguard of the most innovative and comprehensive CRM solutions, fitting all business characteristics without hassle.
Having this in mind, as a consultant, I curated the 10 reasons I hear more frequently from customers when telling why they favor Salesforce over other CRM solutions in the market.
1. Salesforce keeps navigation simple
Without user adoption, no software or application can ever bring results to the business. Salesforce is the most intuitive CRM for the end-user since it gives a 360º view of the customer in one single place. So, if you know how to handle properly the user-friendly Salesforce platform, you can easily access all your customer’s data. No need to learn tons of systems, no need for integrations, no need for complex software. Besides, the information is organized in modules and it is possible to navigate between them with just one single click. The KISS concept!
2. Multi-tenancy is not optional
By using Salesforce you do not have to worry about upgrades to the platform. Why? Simply because multi-tenancy allows you to share the same platform infrastructure with everyone else. The updates will occur automatically ensuring your instance receives the newest innovative features, while at the same time, keeping your data safe. Salesforce delivers three releases per year with new features that become automatically available for all users without the need for you to change or adapt anything.
3. Salesforce functionalities will mind-blow you
There are a lot of functionalities and technical features which will help you tailor the platform to your business needs. Salesforce is highly customizable and versatile. Moreover, if your business operates in a more specific business field, you also have industry clouds, such as Health Cloud, Financial Cloud, or Education Cloud, already created to fit more specific industry needs. The live proof of Salesforce’s versatility and adequacy to a wide range of sectors are all the customers spread across a variety of industries and company sizes who use Salesforce to drive success.
4. Salesforce grows with your business
When acquiring technology for your business, you should take into consideration not only your current needs but also your potential future needs that will appear as your business grows. By using Salesforce, the wide range of customization that can be applied to adapt for future needs is not comparable to any other competitor software. The platform is 100% scalable as your business grows in volume, people, and revenue.
5. Real-Time Reporting – Take it or leave it
Salesforce is the CRM you need for reporting purposes. In fact, when it comes to reporting, Salesforce is incomparable to any other. The standard reports are already very complete. Still, if you’d like something more tailor-made, just like any other asset in Salesforce, you can also customize reports to your own business’s needs. For instance, you can create reports with whatever metrics you wish, cross data, match data, select report types, etc. Then, there’s even a functionality on alerts that you can subscribe to report notifications in criteria reach.
To say the least, I must confess that what amazes me the most with Salesforce reports is the fact that they are ALL real-time! That’s right! With Salesforce Lightning, both reports and dashboards are always real-time. I find this quite useful, as it makes sure you are always working with the most recent data, with no need for page refreshing.
6. The AppExchange will be your new Ecosystem
The app ecosystem coined with the term AppExchange is the store where free and paid apps are distributed. All apps in the AppExchange needed to pass a strict approval process that meets the minimum security and functionality standards imposed by Salesforce. So, the AppExchange is a great repository to get to know Salesforce certified partners, tools, consultants (like us), and basically anything you want to know about the CRM.
If you are looking for a specific app, I’ll give you the advice I always give to my clients: check first if your business has any unmet need which a Salesforce app could possibly solve and only then explore the AppExchange. I am only recommending you this because it is really easy to get lost in the AppExchange world, as it has tons of apps available.
On a side note, as you’d expect, all apps at AppExchange fully integrate, so you can centralize all your information into one place. This is a very big plus to Salesforce, as other CRM options struggle much more with integrations and extensions to the main functionalities.
7. Go Salesforce mobile or go home
Everything you can do on a PC, you must also be able to do on your smartphone. Taking it from here, Salesforce was the pioneer in mobile CRM. Thus, it counts with several years of expertise in mobile development and testing, sharping the knife and perfecting this service. This is one of the features that our clients appreciate the most, especially Sales teams. In fact, often sales reps don’t carry around their computers, so being able to manage opportunities, pipelines, and all their negotiations from their phones (in a very optimized manner) is a giant plus!
All in all, Salesforce mobile is a stable environment where you can see, collaborate, and manage everything from anywhere with access to the internet. Give it a try, will you?
8. A Philosophy: Ohana means family
Salesforce goes beyond a simple CRM, a sales system, a hugely integrated data center, you name it. It goes beyond all of that. These days, Salesforce is a family, composed of users, partners, consultants, clients, students, etc. Anyone can be part of this Ohana. In fact, you don’t even need to have Salesforce to be part of the community. You can free of charge create your Salesforce Trailhead account and start learning whatever you want about the CRM, the tools, the company, the values, everything.
Consequently, whenever you have a problem with your Salesforce or you just don’t know how to do something, you can ask for help in the Salesforce community, learn in Trailhead, join user groups, search for answers in Salesforce Help, enroll in Salesforce Webinars or Office Hours, among many other options. Most of the doubts you have and cases you open have likely already happened to someone else, thus the answer is already there. If that’s not the case, you can, fortunately, ask the question for the first time! The community is supportive and savvy and will always try to help you.
9. If it’s not in Salesforce it doesn’t exist
The strategy of Salesforce over the past years has been to become the holistic customer success platform for you to grow your business. They invested heavily in many areas such as Sales, Service, Marketing and now, Analytics, all showing great success. As such, Salesforce can provide all tools needed to support your cash-generating areas with a seamless transition in the same platform. In fact, Salesforce bets heavily on what they call Customer 360º – the possibility to see your customers’ data and interaction history across different company areas (marketing, sales, service, etc), all in the same platform.
At Stellaxius we have had multiple cases of clients who aimed at giving their teams and customers a very integrated experience. So, it happens quite a lot to us, as Salesforce consultants, to start by implementing Sales Cloud, and then be asked to expand our provided services into Marketing Automation solutions (Pardot) or customer support (Service Cloud). This allows our clients to provide a better experience to their customers, ensuring quality and aligning the customer experience from end-to-end.
10. Is it possible to go rich with Salesforce? Hell yeah!
For a start, we have to admit that Salesforce requires a solid initial investment. So, to make a fair judgment of the tool we should look beyond its price, and consider its return and potential revenue, as well as the cost reduction through improved efficiency. Let me explain it all.
First, Salesforce is capable of driving more revenue than any other CRM, since it has tools to increase your customer base, drive more cross-selling and up-selling opportunities from existing customers, get more insights about the marketing campaigns so you can target your potential customers better than before, among others. If your Sales Teams could win one more deal per month and your marketing teams could produce 10% better results from their campaigns how much would you be making in a year?
Secondly, Salesforce is a platform built for the end-users to bring value by allowing the business processes to be automated or simplified, ensuring maximum efficiency. If your Sales teams or marketing teams could save one hour a day in redundant tasks how much would you be saving in a year?
At Stellaxius, we love Salesforce and recommend the platform to our customers. If you would like to know more about it, subscribe to our Knowledge Center or speak directly to us on the comment section! 🙂
