As a blogger, I want to know what my readers want, based on which I always strive to give them the best content quality.
When I started, one of the options I thought about was customer relationship management software, but I realized early on that not all of them are the same. In this article, I will talk about one of the CRM services.
Salesforce is one of the most talked-about customer relationship management services and rightly so because of the many features it offers. In this article, I will talk about the services Salesforce offers and what exactly Salesforce does.
Before we go on, take a moment to watch this video to give you an overview of Salesforce.
What is Salesforce?
Based on the Salesforce website, Salesforce is a cloud-based customer relationship management service that brings customers and companies together.
Salesforce is one of the world’s largest and most popular cloud platform providers.
Since Salesforce is cloud-based, it can be operated from anywhere across devices, reducing work limitations.
Salesforce is a software that has evolved into service because of the lack of constraint in its use.
What is customer relationship management?
Customer relationship management or CRM manages a company’s customer interaction with both current customers and potential customers.
Customer relationship management analyzes customer and company business history to improve their business relationships with a focus on customer retention and to drive sales growth.
A beneficial part of customer relationship management is its multisource data compilation network. CRM gets data from a company’s website, live chat, social media (more recently), email, marketing materials, and telephone.
CRM businesses, approaches, and facilitating systems learn a lot about their target audience and the best ways to cater to them.
There are five types of customer relationship management.
- Collaborative CRM
- Operational CRM—this is the type of CRM used by Salesforce
- Analytical CRM
- Strategic CRM
- Customer data platform
Relevant: A guide to relationship marketing
What does Salesforce do?
Salesforce is essentially the one-stop cloud software for businesses and companies to maintain, manage, grow, and communicate with their customer base and revenue streams.
They make cloud-based customer relationship management service that is designed to keep customers happy. Salesforce is used by companies to understand their customers better and connect with them on different levels while helping these companies grow their customer base.
It has numerous cloud-based programs designed to improve sales and productivity: the cloud-based software tracks customer’s analysis, customer complaints, and customer’s success and reports.
Companies that use the Salesforce software see an average increase in customer satisfaction, lead conversion, sales revenue, and faster deployment.
Salesforce has a diverse variety of clouds that help users with marketing, performance analysis, data analyses, sales tracking, communication maintenance, spending, sales strategy implementation, and other services.
Salesforce has been implementing artificial intelligence into their Einstein program to help simplify analytics and workflow to produce more accurate forecasting and other benefits.
Cloud-based software
Salesforce is a cloud-based software that uses data storage and accessibility to draw a customer base from anywhere with any device.
Salesforce operates by using a cloud-based computing and software distribution model that hosts applications and makes them available online.
By 2020, some of the Salesforce cloud platforms include:
- Marketing cloud
- Analytics cloud
- Service cloud
- App cloud
- IoT cloud
- Heroku engagement cloud
- Health cloud
- Commerce cloud
- Community cloud
- Chatter cloud
Sales cloud
Sales Cloud provides the information needed to close deals, manage contacts, collaborate, and track opportunities from the start of relationships until the closing of business deals.
Their sales cloud helps companies track contacts, manage teams, and opportunities to increase sales.
Service cloud
Service cloud permits companies to deliver premium customer service and connect with customers by showing customer activity and resolving issues.
Marketing cloud
The marketing cloud helps companies track the journey of their customers and provides many marketing channel campaigns.
Community cloud
A community cloud is like an open forum that allows companies to interact with their customers and lets customers communicate with each other.
Analytics cloud
The analytics cloud helps in making quick and smart decisions. It enables you to turn a large volume of data into an advantage by uncovering insights and taking instant action across devices.
App cloud
App cloud helps you build engaging customer-employee apps within a secure and mobile site.
IoT cloud
IoT cloud helps you connect data from the internet with the rest of Salesforce for better insights and real customer action.
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Salesforce CRM software
In this section, I will give you a run-through of the structure of the Salesforce application.
Home screen
Its home screen is designed to look like a social media news feed, which gives the user a glance at company and customer updates. The updates are a means of communication that offers a glimpse at which team members and clients are working together.
The home screen also has a dashboard that shows a summary of the sales pipeline and goals. It shows both open and closed cases and case types in legible charts.
The dashboard can be customized and shared with other users.
Contacts
This tab is an essential Salesforce app tab because it shows reports, recent contacts, and tools at a glance. Users can click contact links and view their information.
The contact tab shows contacts social media, campaign, and activity history. It can link to specific accounts and offers essential customer and company information.
Opportunity
It tracks information about deals, and this tab also shows activity history. Users can add quotes and notes and attachments here, to track meetings and interactions.
Campaign
This tab contains features that assist users in marketing. It also shows up to date contact information.
It also opens opportunities to track campaigns across various channels, even social media. It has a feature that helps you track campaign progress and make smart investment decisions.
Reports and dashboards
These tabs help you create reports with ease and helps in setting dashboards for any member of the company. Deal types show reports from expected revenue to the stage of the deal.
App exchange
App exchange is a marketplace for business applications and consulting partners. It offers a wide range of CRM and other apps and gives room for app delivery and marketing by users for users.
It provides room to integrate various apps like Excel, Gmail, and more.
Leads
Leads are unqualified business prospects or potential customers. Leads can be converted to accounts, opportunities, or contacts once verified, and then you can track their deals from the sales cycle.
The Salesforce software also has other vital tabs like accounts, forecasts, chatter, files, and others.
In a nutshell, Salesforce drives sales and motivates behavior in the following ways.
- It helps you get leads through opportunity management.
- Accelerates productivity through its innovative lead management system (LMS)
- It closes sales through a holistic contact management system.
Salesforce’s business and revenue model
The key to the Salesforce′s business model is its value-added based on rapidly deployed, easily configured and easily integrated services. Salesforce created a CRM service that is easy to use and maintain as opposed to regular CRM software.
Salesforce delivers its services in two significant ways.
- Through dominant internet browsers and mobile devices;
- Via direct sales efforts and indirect sales efforts from partners
Salesforce’s revenue model is subscription-based. Over $7.75 billion comes from sales of their cloud services.
Their annual subscriptions generate 93% of their revenue, and 7% of the income is from their professional services.
Subscription-based revenue model
The subscription-based revenue model is a business model where customers pay a recurring price at regular intervals to access products; it is used to lower an upfront cost.
It provides room to pay for subscription increments after signing membership instead of a large upfront payment.
Subscription-based payment plans “hooks” customers for a long-term stay, improving customer relationships.
Benefits and limitations of Salesforce
Any useful application comes with benefits and limitations; that is why there is always room for improvements and upgrades.
Benefits of Salesforce
In no particular order, the benefits of Salesforce are as follows.
- Team collaboration
- Customer information
- Time management
- Accessibility
- Account planning
Team collaboration
Salesforce helps you communicate with your team members easily. The software has a “Chatter” feature that lets you share work-related information with individuals and groups.
The chatter tab allows you to add team members to accounts and opportunities that need special attention, which helps teams schedule and prioritize tasks giving you more time to work with leads.
Chatter helps you keep your team focused on the need of the hour each day and, in turn, improves team productivity.
Customer information
Salesforce retrieves both qualitative and quantitative information, which is one of its most significant advantages. Salesforce organizes the accounts, events, opportunities, tasks, and contacts of individuals accessible for you to approach them as potential customers.
Salesforce lets you track information that helps you keep customer’s profiles organized with ease.
Even if your client or potential client is assigned to another representative, you can have all their information in a convenient location, offering a complete business growth and management approach.
It eliminates gaps in customer support due to the cloud computing nature that lets you connect with customers irrespective of location.
This benefit helps you and your employees enjoy vacations without worries about who needs to replace anyone out of the office and recruit potential customers.
Its digital design is an upgrade from physical documents and multiple excel folders.
Time management
The planning option of Salesforce, along with detailed customer information, helps with time management. Time management is essential because you have client information that enables you to prioritize the client’s needs while organizing tasks.
It has a built-in calendar to help you visualize your schedule on a daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly basis.
Accessibility
Since Salesforce is a cloud-based service, it is available on any smart device with internet access. You can also use Salesforce’s app to stay in touch with your team at all hours.
The application is a perfect hands-on program that assists business owners to stay in touch with their team always.
Salesforce makes your data accessible irrespective of physical location and device. It also helps your team keep constant contact and offer timeless customer service.
Account planning
Salesforce makes all your customer information readily available to you and your sales reps to make independent account plans. It helps you and your sales reps make strategic plans by providing tools to connect with clients.
Salesforce provides a to-do list and reminder options for you and your reps to stay organized and on top of your game. This option also helps you keep track of customer and management appointments and follow-ups.
Lastly, its organization option helps you keep track of the time spent on accounts to keep track of client’s payments and time spent on cases.
Limitations
Salesforce has few limitations currently due to constant improvement. Some of the current limitations are:
- It has a large variety of features that may eventually get overwhelming overtime if your CRM need is basic.
- They charge for new features, which will add up and quickly become expensive.
- The target of Salesforce is larger companies, so it is quite expensive.
Summary
Salesforce is one of the few customer relationship management services that keeps your data organized while giving you unlimited renewable possibilities. With an understanding of what Salesforce does, I hope you can pick the best CRM that works for you.
Meanwhile, here is a comparison of different customer relationship management services by forbes.
Tell me in the comment section below which CRM platforms you have heard of or used and which ones you prefer. Remember to share this article in case someone needs it.
Check these articles to learn more about the revenue models of different companies.