How can Salesforce Amplify Your Business Effectively?
Business process and technology are an integral part of each other; when they are integrated, they can form a symbiotic relationship with each other. Today CRMs like Salesforce rely on defined business processes, but at the same time, process-driven CRM platform like Salesforce can help the business organizations in improving their performance.
In this blog, we would discuss how Salesforce can align any of the business operations and regardless of the size and type of business, how it can help in improving business process execution and attain the business goals in pre-specified time.
Whenever any manual process is replaced by an automated process, the overall speed of the process improves up to a great extent. To explain this let us take an example of the fictional sales process, the time when a deal or lead is ready to quote, the sales reps have to write the quote for that, then they have to send it to engineer for approval and after that to the customer. If it is done manually, then it may take lots of time like for emailing forth and back and taking approval from many managerial persons and managing the word documents.
With the help of Salesforce all communication activities can be automated that can save the reps time and customer’s time as well. By saving time, the process can be run smoothly and effectively. As a result, deals can be closed faster, and customer issues can be resolved in a certain period with less effort. It can, therefore, provide more revenue, happier customers and lower cost.
It may initially look paradoxical as accuracy and process speed work against each other. You can get only one at a time, but Salesforce can provide you with the opportunity to boost both. The two most useful features of Salesforce that are its validation rules and approval processes can make sure that the employees are accessing and collecting the right data by following the correct business protocols.
Like if for your business process the sales reps need engineering approval to send the quote to customers with a minimal manual process. Here they can either skip this step or railroad a quote through the most lenient engineer. Through Salesforce the sales reps can be enforced to take specific steps like approvals, where they will have to specify the name and details of involved persons, and if they try to skip this step then cannot move to the next step.
For the core business processes, they should be managed by the shared tools, and if these tools are not being used, then most of the information is stored in personal files. Moreover in such cases managers can only know about any process mistake when it is being noticed by others.
Through shared cloud process of Salesforce, data visibility increases that help multiple employees and teams in managing the processes and activities of other employees.
Like in case if any opportunity is won or a deal has been finalized, then an invoice must be sent to the customer. Finance team can keep and ask sales reps to enter the information of deal, and they can do this with the help of Salesforce. Even the managers can react proactively and ask the sales reps to collect bill details and get them ready even before the finalization of the deal.
Manual process management can result in duplicated or missed work. Like for the same lead your sales and marketing can end up at the same time, or neither follows the possible qualifying lead. The security settings of Salesforce can be used to define responsibilities or handoffs.
In case if the sales team understands that they have qualified the lead, then they can also turn it into opportunity. Through Salesforce they can concentrate on their work and keep their team engaged so that they can accomplish their responsibilities.
Once you have defined and set up the Salesforce processes as per your business operations, you can start measuring their performance. For this you can use key performance indicators, that can not only define the overall success of your business but also can help you in getting consistent success for your overall business journey.
To make it clearer let us take the example of the sales process, here the general key performance indicator is just close or win, but by measuring it alone cannot help you in making it better. So, by tracking intermediary performance metrics like some customer calls made by reps or how the opportunity was created can help you in process and performance improvement.
Through Salesforce KPIs you can know the business issues by resolving which you can improve the business performance. With the help of right performance indicators, you can spot the potential dips as soon as they happen. So you will not have to wait for a major failure of lagging.
For example, for the sales process, you do not notice any change in sales until the revenue figure start declining or you find yourself in trouble. But through Salesforce as soon as you will see a critical number of opportunities, you can start planning your action and quickly respond to any change that can potentially impact the business revenues. Whenever you find any dip in the opportunities, then you can adjust the process to new conditions and change it as per requirement.
Finally, a vast array of Salesforce and its features can fill the business process gaps. Like if you do not have anyone to collect data for marketing research, then you can simply download an app from Salesforce AppExchange and use that app to collect and fetch data in an automated manner. In this, the need to hire an additional employee gets eliminated. Salesforce can cover many of such gaps, for which you may need manual interventions.
Salesforce can make it easy to share the business insights, share documents, contacts and other important pieces of data to make sure that everyone who accesses the data is on the same page. Salesforce app chatter can also allow the users to collaborate with social applications and provide a real-time instant reply to any query. It can also ensure that the information will be delivered to the right person at the right time.
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