How Salesforce CRM Can Improve Business Performance?

During the early days of the dot com bubble, top corporate powerhouses spent millions of dollars to keep track of Management Information and Customer Relationship Software but none of it came fruitful. Companies like Oracle and SAP were selling these systems to corporations which were required to be installed, updated, and managed on-premise. These systems were built in modules promised to keep track of all the MIS Reports and build better customer relationships but during 1999 to 2003 the sales of CRM Softwares dropped nearly 28%. Most skeptics were seeing the eventual merger of the CRM into the Enterprise Resource Planning Softwares but that didn’t happen.

Salesforce then built the entire CRM as Software as a Service and then things started to change around the corporations. But How Salesforce CRM can Improve business performance? Let’s take a look.

Don't forget to check out: How A Salesforce CRM Call Center Can Be Setup And Call Center Users Can Be Managed?

1. Centralized Data Management

With Salesforce CRM, Users can easily maintain their data from a single place. It helps you to organize all the Leads, Accounts, Contacts and other sales data from a single centralized place making it easier for the reps to maintain and regularly update the data, it also helps in making informed decisions, acts faster, and better on a lead or status change. Since all the data is centralized in one place, it helps in making regular reports for both analysis and marketing perspectives. The Great thing about Salesforce CRM is the ability to restrict access to the data required for each role on the platform. It decreases the chance of mismatch or entering the wrong fields or information on the platform.

2. Sales Cost Reduction

Sales cost is a mix of several costs into one including acquiring new customers which are expensive tasks, wasting time on cold calling leads with less chance to convert, seeing customer engagement with the brand, and the time for closing the deal. With Salesforce CRM, Reps are shown which leads are hot and to make, leads which are most engaged having a high probability of converting, and managing schedules so that the lead conversion time takes as less as possible allowing the Rep to move with better efficiency.

3. Increased Customer Retention

Retaining a customer is always better than acquiring new customers because it is an expensive process. According to a study published by the Harvard Business Review, “Acquiring a new customer is anywhere from five to 25 times more expensive than retaining an existing one.” The same research also published and said that if a company increases its retention rate by just 5%, profits can jump from anywhere between 25% to 95%”. Salesforce helps in customer retention by providing better visibility to the accounts. Reps can easily take better-informed actions on at-risk accounts or can provide the existing customers with better and new opportunities or products according to their needs. 

4. Better Coordination and Work Efficiency

With the latest Salesforce Lightning UI, The work efficiency of the customer has improved a lot. According to the Salesforce 2017 Lightning Adoption Survey, “the conversion rates are up to 44%, user productivity has increased up to 41%, and there is a 23% decrease in the deal closing time”. For every company, improving business productivity in the sales team is considered to be the top priority. With the latest, Salesforce tools managers and teams can easily identify the bottlenecks they are facing and can work to improve those.

5. Better Targeted Campaign

Creating and managing new Leads is one of the main goals for any business as this only shows the growth of the company. But without the CRM 79% of all the leads are never converted to sales so strategic actions to improve performance are necessary. Salesforce CRM helps in making better-targeted campaigns by visualizing the products or types of customers with the highest engagement rates. The Ability to personalize communication, better customer life-cycle including advocacy allows companies to use Salesforce CRM for better marketing and targeted campaigns.

6. Better Customer Service

Customer Service has always been a major pain point of companies. Do you know that according to research done by NewVoiceMedia, “US Companies lose around $62 Billion dollars each year due to bad customer service”. It clearly shows that the companies are required to provide better customer service and Salesforce helps achieve this goal by providing some very effective tools. Tools like a Knowledge Base, Self Service Portals, and better customer support or call center teams with an efficient tree structure help in increasing efficiency and increased customer satisfaction. Now, this not only remains in-house support, but Salesforce also provides tools for on-field servicing as well. Real-time scheduling, order management modules are to name a few which are some of the major requirements for companies working extensively in real estate and property management which is more field than inside.

7. Reporting and Forecasting  

Reports are an important part of any organization as it can easily depict customer experience, accountability, general trends, KPI’s, and other things that need to be monitored regularly. With Salesforce CRM Report Builder managers can easily build and manage live reporting dashboards and periodical reports both automatically and manually.  As Salesforce Suggests, “Ask questions and start at the top. When designing reports and dashboards, first define what your executives, your CEO; the VPs of Sales, Marketing, Support; and your channels need to know to run their business. What are their key metrics? What behaviors do they want to encourage?”. Reports and the live data in Salesforce are powerful and easy enough to help not only corporations but can also help in sales forecasting based on previous trends helping in better business growth strategies for small businesses as well.

Check out an amazing video about Salesforce CRM here: What is Salesforce | Salesforce CRM Tutorial For Beginners | Salesforce Training

Key Takeaways

Salesforce as a platform provides a lot of things, but utilizing it according to the business needs is an art that should be taken seriously because an optimized platform can do wonders for a company in many ways. With Salesforce releases every Spring, Summer, and Winter, the platform grows in various ways with new features and improvements helping companies in making better decisions, and with the involvement of Artificial Intelligence in the platform, it is predicted to be better than ever before. Salesforce is not only good for big corporations but is also a good CRM for small businesses.

"You can have data without information, but you cannot have information without data." – Daniel Keys Moran

With the major focus on improving data collection, data segmentation, and reporting, Salesforce CRM has proved to be a major milestone in the journey of the CRM Tool. Today, Salesforce owns 19% of the share of the total CRM market making it a leader in the field but this comes at repeated performance tests and years of work.