16 Ways Salesforce CRM Makes it Easier to Improve Sales and Achieve Revenue Goals

A successful business depends on having positive relationships with its clients. Efficiency and effectiveness in processes boost sales productivity.  The best marketing resource a company can have is its customers. Having a strong relationship with your customers is extremely important; simply selling your goods or services is not enough. When compared to underperformers, high-performing sales teams consume up to three times as much technology and equipment. Salesforce is an example of a tool that aids in boosting an organization’s revenue and sales. Efficiency depends on how resources are best allocated, which may be done with the correct kind of effort. 

Every online store today wants to increase traffic and conversion rates. Even after putting together some fundamental plans, deciding which marketing methods to use and which would be most effective for your company can be very difficult. However, once Salesforce is deployed, you will no longer worry about your sales success due to increased productivity. 

In this article, we are going to explore the most effective ways in which Salesforce CRM can help you reach your sales and revenue goals.  

Salesforce CRM- Why do you need it ?  

Customer relationship management (CRM) in the cloud was launched by Salesforce in 1999, making the technology readily available to all.  This platform has made significant progress in delivering cutting-edge solutions for various industries. It advanced to become the top cloud-based CRM platform. 

Customer relations are the center of any business growth. A company’s ability to handle its interactions with its clients will determine how successful it is. As a result, IT systems that particularly address the issues businesses have while working with clients on a daily basis are becoming more and more popular. 

All the more reason why customer service is considered a significant competitive differentiator by 85% of executives with service supervision, according to the Salesforce 2017 State of Service study. In contrast, customers are typically hard to find in areas with poor service. In the same study, It is estimated that 52% of consumers have switched brands in the past year due to poor customer service, and this loss in revenue costs U.S. companies $1.6 trillion each year.  

Salesforce offers software as a service (SaaS) for cloud computing and focuses on customer relationship management (CRM). With the help of Salesforce’s services, organizations can leverage cloud computing to engage with their current and potential clients and partners more effectively. With its ability to track customer activity, market to customers, and provide many other services, the software has emerged as the industry leader in ensuring client success. 

Salesforce CRM platform enables businesses to target various audiences, create scores and alerts depending on the activities of each lead or customer, communicate with contacts in a proactive manner, and uphold connections. The best aspect is that a CRM system can be used across departments to make sure that all teams that interact with customers have access to the correct information to deliver amazing customer experiences.

Also read: Salesforce versus HubSpot CRM   

What’s Your CRM Strategy?    

Having a sound CRM strategy enables organizations to establish a relationship with their clients, which fosters loyalty and client retention. CRM at its core is a management method that boosts a company’s profits since customer loyalty and revenue are two factors that influence a company’s revenue. A CRM tool’s primary function is to build a straightforward user interface for a set of data that enables organizations to identify and interact with consumers in a scalable fashion. 

 Utilizing and maintaining a CRM tool is the foundation for a scalable sales and marketing strategy. Any business will profit from keeping track of the interactions, transactions, and marketing materials that may be linked to leads and clients. According to Gartner CRM software accounted for $26.3 billion in 2015 and is predicted to rise to $50.7 billion by 2018.  

 Customer relationship management is quite straightforward; However, it may be applied in a wide variety of ways, including the incorporation of websites, social media, email, and numerous marketing materials into a CRM solution. The versatility of CRM means that smaller organizations can also benefit from it.  

The Salesforce platform enables you to sell, service, market, analyze and connect with your customers. Bringing together businesses and customers, Salesforce is currently the world’s #1 CRM software programme. All of your departments have access to a single, shared view of each customer thanks to this single, integrated CRM platform.  

16 ways Salesforce CRM can boost sales and achieve revenue goals    

Increasing sales activity and running sales requires a combination of tactics. Sometimes, all it takes is for a business to have implemented a number of strategies to succeed.  Salesforce sales processes have a positive impact on your ROI and your overall experience on the platform. If you take the time to create one, you’ll benefit from the platform in the long run.  

Here are some of the most effective ways Salesforce can help you improve your sales process and boost revenue:   

• Utilize integrations to gather all of your client data in one location. 

The sales and marketing teams previously worked in data warehouses. However, we now use “Integrations,” which streamline client communication touchpoints with customer care and support apps. Now that you have customer service software, you can capture and record any interaction you have with a customer in your CRM.   

• Customize your consumer data and benefit from it. 

Your interactions with your customers must have led to the collection of a tonne of information about them. If you control the customer data, Salesforce must already be updated with all of this data. 

Now that you have this, you can take control of the client relationship and use this data to personalize your emails so that they appeal to your customers. This is due to the constant need for clients to feel exceptional.   

• Connect your customer service platform to Salesforce 

We all know that providing excellent customer service is a better way to keep loyal clients, yet research shows that many companies struggle to deliver on this promise. This is primarily due to a gap or connection between customer support and sales, as well as an improper delivery of the CRM’s report file to those who need it. Additionally, the majority of account managers and sales personnel simply struggle ineffectively when issues arise. 

CRM aids in customer retention merely by lengthening the natural pipeline. This is achieved by incorporating new phases into the process that place a focus on assisting the consumer after the sale has been made.   

• Social media to connect with your audience 

You are now forced to continue being responsive on social media if you miss responding to your clients through social channels. So, if customers are asking you questions on Facebook or Twitter, respond to them directly on those platforms. 

To keep track of these exchanges, you can use Twitter as an example and its extensive search function. You can set the feed to refresh every five or ten minutes and do further keyword-based searches. By selecting the “respond” button, you can send an automated response in addition to a quick response to a message. You may easily engage customers in your company if you show enough concern for them and communicate with them in the method that suits them most.   

• Create tracking notifications and alerts 

Your teams should update and assign new leads if there are modifications or additions to your process, and you should make reminders to follow up with contacts. Keep everyone on your team updated. Additionally, you can set up automated email alerts for users that are sparked by certain events.   

Make a selection or a search for email alerts on the settings screen. From this point, you can select an email template from a table and configure the recipients for these automated email alerts. You must set up a procedure so that an email is delivered to the sales team each time a new lead is produced. 

• Permissions 

You can grant access to all staff members who have user accounts using Salesforce. Additionally, you have the choice to assign various users different rights because you might not want all users to have access to the same information. 

Following the setup option’s instructions to the permission sets section, where you can specify restrictions for user groups’ access to particular settings and applications. You can also set permissions for users who meet certain requirements via session activation.   

• Examine and comprehend the AppExchange. 

Salesforce’s prowess at incorporating dozens of applications into its user interface and modular design are two examples. Several examples of well-known programmes include MailChimp, DocuSign, and Data.com add-ons. 

Your CRM’s capabilities can be expanded via apps, which can also improve efficiency. There are many tools available that are dedicated to keeping your database correct and clean by removing duplicates produced by mass imports. Your reporting can be strengthened by adding extra apps, which can offer things like geometric data for leads and opportunities.   

• Customer interaction data 

If a customer hasn’t contacted you in more than six months and isn’t likely to make a purchase, you risk losing them. 

By searching for the date fields in Salesforce and organizing the contacts by the date of their last interaction, you can keep track of customer interactions. This procedure should be automated such that it alerts you to it once a week or once a month. Check with your customers next, and provide them an offer based on your previous encounters with them. 

Customers with a minimum of six months since their last engagement can easily publish reports using Salesforce.   

• Identify the Core Object Architecture 

The most performing sales organizations fully utilize Salesforce’s standard object architecture, which includes Contacts, Leads, Accounts, and Opportunities. 

 People who are not a good fit or have lost interest in your services and goods are created as records under the Lead object according to the authorized Salesforce sales process. The lead changes from a Lead to a Qualified Lead as it is qualified into a Contact associated with an Account and maybe an Opportunity. When discussing sales stages, the significance of the Salesforce Leads object is sometimes underappreciated and neglected.   

• Determine Account Types 

A lead must now be associated with an account after it has been transformed into a contact. All contacts at a company are covered by an account, which causes all of those contacts to take on the features of the account and be saved in the same location. 

Most Salesforce users are familiar with the many “categories” of accounts that are detailed there. Depending on what you need to save in the Salesforce, these could be Customer Accounts, Prospect Accounts, Partner Accounts, media, rivals, or a variety of other categories. We advise you to use the standard “Type” field to simply identify different account kinds while using values that are tailored to your company’s needs.  

• Establish Opportunity Stages 

For sales teams, describing Opportunity phases is typically a simpler and more comfortable procedure than describing Lead stages. The recommendation in this instance is to reverse the engineer closed-won possibilities and the explicit steps sales practiced closing the sale or contract. Considering probability when describing staging is useful, and some further pointers are as follows: 

• Keep reporting stages straightforward and plainly defined. 
• Use Key Fields to improve the information gathered throughout the Opportunity at each level. 
• Use the Success Path in Opportunities instructions to make it crystal obvious to reps what these important entry/exit criteria are for each level. 
• Use campaigns to track sales efforts and connect them to relevant objectives.

• Establish goals for sales activities. 

One of the most important reports that sales managers had to do was to illustrate the sales activities of the sales representative over the course of an appropriate reporting period, such as weekly or monthly. 

It’s crucial to set expectations for how many and what kind of actions sales should document when creating a sales process in Salesforce. This can assist you in comprehending the process irregularities that might be hurting performance and possible training needs. 

Or patterns in sales performance that call for adjustments to operational procedures, pricing schemes, offerings, or other aspects that could affect sales.  

• Check for duplicate lead records 

The sooner you begin cleaning up your lead records, the lower the likelihood that your contact list will end up in disarray. Salesforce may encounter repetitive leads for a number of reasons: 

Multiple marketing campaigns may have elicited responses from the same lead. On your website, the same person can have owned numerous different activities. A sales representative might have also replied to an email if they had attended the conference. Therefore, be certain that you won’t create a clone or duplicate before creating a new lead.  

• Prioritize leads and transfer them to sales representatives.

You can now take advantage of lead queues that store pools of leads organized by business function, territory, and other extra attributes if your sales force handles lead on a first-come-first-served basis. 

You can use assignment rules to direct leads to the proper sales queues or reps if your company generates a lot of leads or you simply need to automate the lead distribution process.  

• Maintain your lead

Sales professionals should pursue lead nurturing if a lead is currently unable to purchase your goods or services, which is typically a challenging endeavor. Lead nurturing is a lot more than merely phoning a lead every two weeks or sending them an email once a month to see whether they’re finally prepared to buy.  

By giving leads advice, market research, how-to articles, and other helpful materials, a sales representative may start meaningful conversations with prospects and establish their company as a trustworthy business partner. You can use Salesforce Pardot’s drip drives, which let you manage different nurturing chores, to enhance this process.  

• Ensure your leads move toward conversion 

Each sales representative’s ultimate objective is to turn a lead into an event or to exclude it if they aren’t currently interested in your offer. To avoid these remaining leads for an extended period of time, it is a recommended practice in Salesforce lead management to assign a follow-up assignment. 

The ‘freshest’ leads for urgent follow-up will simply be in the queue when done correctly. The user is advised to adhere to a simple rule to achieve this goal: If a lead isn’t qualified or removed from the list of active leads, it should be converted within two weeks.  

 Bottom Line

Marketers nowadays are knowledgeable about how to manage the data’s potential for individualized consumer experiences, pay attention to client needs, and provide value. It takes careful planning and approval from your Salesforce admin, oversight team, and sales team to build a Salesforce sales process that enhances your sales process and increases revenue. Because there is so much competition, clients don’t have to stick with you if something better and more suitable comes along. 

Only with clearly defined sales phases, data validation at every stage, unambiguous sales expectations, and strong overall acceptance, can companies ensure to reach their sales targets and maximize revenue. Salesforce CRM enables you to increase your sales and revenue prospects with customizable, connected, and automated sales processes. 

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