Small business is the backbone of most economies, and the goal of any business is growth—what starts as one person in their garage can expand over time to hire more and more people.
Once a company is large enough, it can become too much for the business owner and their employees to track everything themselves. Eventually, the proprietors may need to invest in the company’s software infrastructure to get to the next level. By investing in quality business enterprise software, a company can harness its employees’ potential by automating what were once tedious manual processes. Salesforce consultants can be one of the paths forward for growing businesses. Today we’ll examine this popular piece of enterprise software to discover how Salesforce is worth it for small businesses.
What Is CRM?
Anyone who has worked in a corporate call center can tell you exactly what CRM software is. CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management. No, we aren’t talking about making sure that you and your customer have a good relationship. In this context, relationship management is the tracking of all interactions between the customer and the business.
CRM allows a company to document every call and email that takes place with a customer. Typically, this is displayed in chronological order, but many types of CRM software offer various ways to organize customer interactions.
How Does Salesforce Help Sales Reps?
Lead Tracking
Most sales departments have managers known as account executives. These managers oversee the overall interactions between the company and major clients. Under each account executive, there may be several sales representatives.
Lead tracking within Salesforce allows the representatives to track each sales lead they have in their pipeline by allowing the representative to select several different milestones such as initial contact, negotiations, contract outstanding, and contract finalized. This unparalleled organization allows a sales team to be far more efficient while allowing account executives to have a top-down view of how each rep is performing with his or her sales leads.
Invoice Generation
One of the fantastic features of Salesforce is not only its ability to manage customer relationships but also its sales and invoice tracking. There are also features that allow a sales rep to automatically generate invoices and email them to the customer for negotiations. Salesforce automatically fills in necessary fields, inputs taxes and associated fees, and automatically adds them to the invoice, and then creates a record that the invoice was sent to the customer and generates an email record. If the representative chooses, they can upgrade the sales lead to the next stage in the process so that the accounting department can finalize the billing.
Email Tracking
Even if they’ve never worked with a corporate email system, everyone can relate to endlessly sifting through emails looking for that one critical message somebody sent three weeks ago. Often, these searches prove fruitless, and even more time is wasted contacting people a second time to obtain the needed information.
With Salesforce, each email sent within the system is automatically attached to the record of the customer it was sent to. This way, any employee who has the proper security access is able to log in, select a customer in the database, and examine their entire email conversation from start to finish.
Stats Tracking
Whether you’re a CEO, district manager, account executive, or a pavement-pounding sales rep, everyone knows it’s the bottom line at the end of the month that determines profitability. Even more importantly for the sales reps, profitability and sales represent how big their commission checks will be.
With the stats tracking offered by Salesforce, individual reps can see how close they are to hitting their sales targets and work extra hours in that final week to hit the next tier of commission money. Upper management can use these same tools to get a top-down view and identify bottlenecks in the process.
In Summary
Salesforce is a powerful tool for any business that wants to track customer relationships and sales within organizations both large and small. With its state-of-the-art tracking and report generation, Salesforce helps businesses of any size become more organized and discover the path to their goals.
If you’re a business looking to transition to an enterprise software environment, freelancer sites such as Guru can help you find the consultants you need to help train you and your employees on Salesforce’s features. They can also make sure the transition process is a smooth one so that you can focus on the things that matter most to your business.
