What Is The Salesforce CRM and How It Enhances FinTech Industry

How Salesforce Sales Cloud can be a boon to FinTech industry?

Sales Cloud is part of the CRM system that Salesforce is offering. Sales Cloud is a complete drag and drop product that brings all the customer information together in a platform that incorporates everything about sales. Sales Cloud is made especially for sales reps. it’s a bestseller product of Salesforce. In the blog, we will be taking a lot of examples from the FinTech industry, which is primarily involved in providing financial services like loans. They vary from small to giant, but here we will take into consideration a larger one named FinTech Industry.

Sales reps generally have to call potential customers and ask them about their loan requirements in the FinTech industry. They may write the customer details on sticky notes, notepads, spreadsheets, digital notes, or anywhere. The company can’t fully track the business in this way. Salesforce sales cloud helps to keep the information in one place instead of those old conventions.

Risk of missing critical information

When customer data is in different places (name and address were placed in sticky notes and email id was placed in excel due to situation), or just in reps' heads, important details can be missing and integration breaks down. Sales Cloud helps save critical information.

Scaling in advance

With a fortune, sales reps were able to crack 200% more loan customers this month than the previous two months. With this increasing database, manual processes conducted by the team will need to be converted to automatic. Sales Cloud can help you do that as Salesforce maintains scaling from start. No need to worry about it at last. Without Salesforce sales cloud, it might be difficult.

Creating reports

is like putting a thread into a needle. You want to analyze your sales team's monthly progress against its quota, but who has the time to do it manually? Sales Cloud offers all these in few clicks, just like the needle automatically pulls the thread into it!

Desktop and mobile sync

Sales reps have to be available all time across the day and hence have to sit in front of a laptop all day around. Wait, it's not 1999? Mobile is a must-have, not a nice-to-have. Sales Cloud takes care of everything on mobile so that you may never miss anything when not on the desktop.

Campaigning and tracking

Salespeople undergo a lot of campaigns on various events or festivals. These campaigns may be easy to record but become a mess at the latter part which it comes to tracking. Tracking involves associates campaign members, possible lead creation, opportunity creation, quote generation, and the complete sales cycle. This thing can be refurbished easily in Salesforce CRM instead of the old conventions.

Consider a campaign where FinTech Industry announced a reduced interest rate on personal loans for the campaign members. A total of 10k people took part in the campaign and are eligible for the reduced rates. One customer called after 7 days of the campaign claiming to be the campaign member and wants to opt for personal loans. Here, Sales Cloud can quickly search in seconds if the email id of the customer exists in the campaign or not. If so, a lead can be created and a quote can be sent.

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Decision-making process

Making decisions in business is tough. With Sales Cloud, you can get a view into seconds about your team’s performance and respective forecasts. You’ll be able to see top performers and allocate human resources more efficiently by giving the best prospects to the most efficient sales reps. With predictive analytics, you can always be sure that your business is on the right track and adjust the course based on the actionable data.

Consider a situation where I have to reject or accept the customer request for waiving off the overdue amount on the loan as the customer was not able to make the payment on time. The customer has paid one day late and asking to waive off this over dues since he forgot to pay and may never repeat the same. If the customer request is rejected, there is a high possibility that the customer may go for a balance transfer to another institute. Here, Sales Cloud can help you view previous payment tracks of loans and the loyalty points. So that it becomes easy and handy for a sales rep to decide if it’s a mistake once in a year and loyalty points are also greater than the threshold, customer requests can be accepted and dues can be waived off.

Smooth lead conversion

Sales Cloud is a feature-rich software solution that enhances lead generation and track leads from the moment you acquire them to the second they sign on the dotted line. It also takes care of the right information to be seen by various levels of a sales rep Salesforce CRM offers valuable insight and oversight of the lead, but it is also efficient and results-driven. Sales Cloud can improve your lead acquisition and ROI on your marketing campaigns. For smooth conversion, a standard sales cycle is described below for making the best use of.

Consider RTI sales rep collected all the information about the applicant and co-applicant and stored it in lead. Since this information is too much, converting a lead to opportunity may require the sales rep to either manually copy paste information in opportunities and accounts. With the Salesforce sales cloud, lead conversion is automatic with a one-time setup. All the applicant and co-applicant details will be transferred as desired by the sales rep on conversion.

Security and Sharing

The whole concept of security and sharing in Salesforce is vivid and the best of many other CRMs available. The whole concept of security can be visualized as 3 gates before you reach the treasury box. Like you have to cross all the gates to reach the treasure, the same way you have to cross paths with 3 levels of configuration to achieve successful security on data. You can consider the 3 gates as metadata accesses to achieve access to actual data.

The twist is all the gates are required to be crossed sequentially as they reside one in another. Without crossing the outermost gate, you can’t reach the middle one and without crossing the middle, you can’t reach the innermost. Even if you manage to reach the innermost without crossing the outer ones, it’s a fail as you can’t get the treasure without every other being opened too.

This prebuilt model is beneficial and gracious. Consider a simple example. Global sales head in FinTech Industry wants to provide lead access to its specific region reps only. That means Italy reps should not be able to view India reps data and vice versa. This thing can be easily achieved in Salesforce CRM without many hurdles.

Sales Cycle and complete understanding

The sales cycle is a process of initiating a sale of a product and performing specific actions followed to close a new customer. The diagram below shows the complete cycle.

Let me give you an overview of the cycle and how this can be accomplished in Salesforce CRM. Salesforce Sales Cloud has many objects to accommodate various sales needs. The story starts with the Campaign. A company that is willing to sell a product will probably launch a campaign and offer discounts to campaign members for a limited period. Interested campaign members are converted to leads and relevant information is captured to further process it. All the details like the discount on offer are captured on the lead.  Quotes are generated and sent to leads during this negotiation stage. All quotes reside on the lead. Once the quote is accepted, the process of contracts and legal documents are conducted. After verbal and written confirmation from the customer, leads are converted into accounts, contacts, and opportunities. Here various Salesforce standard objects like the campaign, lead, quote, contract, account, contact, opportunity, opportunity product comes into the picture. We understood the process here through birds view, let’s deep dive into it with more examples. The sales cycle can vary as per the business, can be modified or customized as per needs. Sometimes, the creation of opportunity is a part of initial prospect activity and sometimes, the creation of opportunity is a final call to the deal. So, you can tweak your sales process based on your requirement.

Campaign and members

A campaign is an object or a table in Salesforce Sales Cloud which plans, manages, and tracks the complete campaign running outside of Salesforce. These campaigns can be digital or onsite. Limited day’s offers on the website or a table at information expo are the types of digital or onsite campaigns respectively. Salesforce tracks the campaign influence to check the effectiveness of the campaign and the number of members obtained from them. Campaign members are only the participants of the campaign who may or may not be interested in the products.

Consider FinTech Industry hosts an offline campaign in an IT Expo where they are trying to outsource all its new products for new home buyers. Salesforce or FinTech Industry can create a new campaign record in Salesforce with complete data filled. IT Expo management team will also offer the list of possible participants to FinTech Industry as a part of the process which can be feed to campaign members by FinTech Industry in Salesforce. Now, these probable participants must be chased and interested participants should be categorized.

Lead

The categorization of interested participants from the campaign is done as a part of the post-campaign activity. Such interested participants are called leads. In the lead collecting process, a lot of information about the lead is captured which is necessary to provide a sophisticated deal. Salesforce CRM has many lead stages that can best describe the current behavior of the lead.

By default, Salesforce offers the following lead tracking stages:

• New;
• Working;
• Nurturing;
• Unqualified;
• Qualified.

A qualified lead represents the customer is ready to opt for the loan and other formalities can be made possible.

All the interested participants of FinTech Industry in the IT Expo are feed into the Salesforce lead object. FinTech Industry offered a reduced ROI by 0.25% on applicable ROI rates to each leads as a part of the campaign. Since such a field doesn’t exist on Salesforce and capturing this information is critical, a new field named “Reduce ROI by rate” can be created and added into lead mapping.

Quotes and Price books

Once the leads have been created, it is crucial to provide them with the actual quotation for their loan product. Salesforce has Quotes which manages everything related to quotations. Quotes may consist of some useful information like applicable ROI, loan tenure, processing fees, applicable taxes, and others. Further, the quotes are derived based on the product chosen by the customer. The price book consists of information about all the products.

Price books are available in two categories i.e. – standard price books and custom price books. A price book is an object in Salesforce which is similar to a book of product and its prices. In industrial terms, it is also known as catalog. These catalogs serve the opportunities with the product in which the account is interested in.

Setting up a Standard Price book is easy. Just follow the process:

1. Select a product.
2. On the product detail page, click Add from the Standard Price related list. If you’ve already added a standard price, click Edit to change it or Edit All to edit all standard prices in other currencies.
3. Enter the standard price.
4. Select Active to make this price available to products on opportunities, quotes, or other custom price books.
5. Save your changes. The standard price is automatically associated with the product in your standard price book.

Consider FinTech company have a price book object with 3 different products. All 3 products have different applicable ROI. Based on the selection of products by customers, quotes can be generated and presented to the customer. The generated quote can be sent to customers via email using a manual click or automatic approach. Moreover, you can also configure the format of email which should be received by the customer and tweak it as per your desire.

Account and Contacts

As soon as the customer accepts the quotation, you can start the documentation process and convert the lead. Lead conversion is a process of closing the lead and forming account, contact, and opportunity based on the lead.  The lead conversion process is simple in Salesforce. You can select which lead field will correspond to which field on account, contact, or opportunity and mark them in conversion setup to appear after conversion. All the fields related to person will be captured on account object and fields related to the contact information of the person will be captured on contact.

Account and contact management is the heart of Salesforce CRM. Since the account consists of personal details of the customer and contacts consist of customers’ communication details, it is imperative to record the data in Salesforce and set its visibility wisely. An account is generally the parent of all the objects and hence all the objects are directly or indirectly related to an account. Person accounts and company accounts are categories of accounts in Salesforce.

For example, Fields like age, weight, existing loans, net monthly income, and others will be captured on accounts, and fields like email id, mobile number, residential details, etc. will be captured on contact.

Opportunities and Products

Opportunity is also created when the lead is converted. Accounts, contacts, and opportunities are created together. The opportunity consists of complete loan-related details. Fields like discounted ROI, applicable ROI, tenure, insurance opted, and product name, and others will be captured on an opportunity as a part of lead conversion. However, an opportunity is also divided into various stages to get the exact idea of what is the current status of the deal. The opportunity stages are self-explanatory and don’t need much description to be understood.

Various opportunity stages are as mentioned below:

• Prospecting
• Qualification
• Needs Analysis
• Value Proposition
• Decision Makers
• Perception Analysis
• Proposal/Price Quote
• Negotiation/Review
• Closed Won
• Closed Lost

Once the opportunity is Closed Won, it’s time to party as the customer finally accepts the product. Here, opportunity products are a child object to an opportunity that manages the count and information of product chosen for the opportunity. In this case, the opportunity product will be one as the customer has chosen one home loan. In the future, if the customer opts for the personal loan also, the product records for that opportunity or account rises to two.

Check out another amazing blog by Sergii Grushai here: Salesforce Duplicate Management Became Easier

Contracts

After all the hard work in the process, it’s time to finally document the deal so that both parties stay on the words they had during the deal. It’s time to get the documents from the customer and provide them too. Contracts are the object in Salesforce which stores all the important documents in the org with high security. Each contract can be related to an opportunity. FinTech Industry company can store much important information like duly filled and signed application form, home registration documents, applicant income proofs, and so on. The documents like sanction letter, loan repayment schedule, interest certificate can be also be saved in contracts which general Salesforce users opt to save an attachment or file objects. It depends on the org admin to standardize the process and convey it to reps.

Guide to implement Sales Cloud

Now you might be having complete information on how the sales cycle works and how you can tweak it as per your needs. But it’s still the business aspect; you might be still confused about how to implement all those things in Salesforce from the technical perspective. Since this blog is targeted for business users in terms of the mass audience, we won’t be able to write much on the technical implementation of Salesforce CRM but yes, we can at least let you know how to know of the product.

Prerequisites to implement sales cloud

For implementing Salesforce CRM, you must be a member of the Salesforce family. You can go to the Salesforce website and chose your desired Sales Cloud license. You can select the desired license based on necessity ranging from essentials to unlimited. Each license applies to one user. So, don’t forget to decide the number of users who will be using the system and buy only that much amount of licenses wisely. After you have selected the license and the number of users, it’s time to know a few more things.

• Before you leap of faith blindly, you must be prepared for using Salesforce Sales Cloud in many terms. Let me elaborate on terms for you, and you should be asking things to yourself (in case you are the owner) or your business for the actual answer.
• Users: As discussed in the previous section, we have to decide the number of users in advance.
• Plan: Why are you doing Salesforce sales cloud, what aim you want to achieve, what is the scope of your objective and so many others. Identify and prioritize your business.
• Implement: Implement your complete process technology with the help of a Salesforce Sales Cloud consultant for the best result.
• Customize: Salesforce Sales Cloud is free to customize the tool. If some part of Salesforce Sales Cloud is not suiting your business, you can always opt to customize it yourself. You can change almost everything with the help of the Salesforce platform developer. But remember to buy at least an enterprise license if you are planning to customize things.
• User Training: Trained users are a gift to business. You can hire trained reps or can train desired reps; the Salesforce community is always there to help. You will find a huge pool of trained professionals or various programs to train a new person.

Setup

Now since you know every in and out of Salesforce sales cloud, you might have firmly decided to go with it. At this point, you can open up the below Salesforce knowledge article to download the user guide for you. You can implement this tool yourself by going step by step mentioned in the article or hire a Sales Cloud consultant to help you in the setup. I hope your sales boost to a huge extent!