Wondering what Salesforce is? Or what you can do with Salesforce? This one’s for you.
We hear this surprisingly often: “Yeah Salesforce, I know you Salesforce. You do …”. This is where people falter. Because they do know us, but they’re struggling to put their finger on it, to name it.
“You do that thing. Don’t you? For salespeople?”. We sure do! We do that thing for salespeople, customer service people, marketing people, small businesses, big businesses, government, financial services — should we go on?
But hang on, what’s ‘that thing’? ‘That thing’ is a cloud-based CRM (the world’s #1 CRM!). But we think, number one or not, that just doesn’t cut it — a CRM is at the heart of what we do, but we do more. And we also kind of think ‘we do more’ is why we get the vague ‘that thing’ comments – people know it’s not just a CRM, but not really what else it is.
We call ourselves a ‘customer success platform’. ‘That thing’, to us, is helping our customers connect to their customers in ways they never have before — to drive exceptional customer experience. Okay, that’s slightly less vague. But let’s get specific: here are 10 ways we help our customers connect to their customers — 10 ways Salesforce will change the way you work.
1. Know every customer’s story immediately
Salesforce centralises every customer interaction into the one system, meaning each individual’s history with your company is immediately available to everybody in the business.
If a customer contacts you, staff can see which product they own, when they purchased it, reasons for their last call and much more. Imagine how pleasant that makes the interaction for the customer, as opposed to having to explain themselves, just like they did last time.
2. Find more high-value leads
Salesforce analyses your current and past customers, and builds lookalike profiles, meaning you can easily identify and market to potential customers. You can easily see who they are, what they’re interested in and their preferred social media platforms.
Deals can be closed faster and marketing campaigns are more effective, because you’re throwing a scattergun approach out the window and replacing it with highly targeted communications with people who closely resemble your current customer group.
3. Know what a customer wants before they do
Great online brands make a user feel as if the brand knows them intimately, but this smart personalisation need not be unique to major Silicon Valley startups. Salesforce’s artificial intelligence, Einstein, is built right into every part of the platform. It helps you use data to individualise customer experience to the extent that you may know of a sales or service need before the customer even does. Contact the customer in advance of that need and you delightfully disrupt their expectations. 
4. Make every marketing campaign one-to-one
Gone are the days of a single marketing campaign communicating effectively to a large group. Today’s marketing is all about personalisation and respecting specific customers’ journeys. The Salesforce Marketing Cloud allows you to shape and plan those journeys, then takes care of the hard work.
5. Build apps in 20 minutes
So much business today is conducted on the fly. Managers and staff constantly steal small moments to look after important business issues. Imagine how much more efficient this process would become with mobile apps custom-built for their needs. Salesforce App Cloud is a single ecosystem where anybody in the business can explore, discover and easily build their own apps for their unique purposes – with clicks, not code.
6. Build communities
Encourage communities to develop around your products and services, along the way personalising the experience for each individual member. The Salesforce Community Cloud helps you build an easily customised online community, where customers can go to ask for answers, discuss products and share ideas.
This means customers can look after each other and can find their own answers to queries, and that service reps are freed up to concentrate on difficult cases, while the business can mine these discussions to find out what customers really care about.
7. Feel small
The digital world, and particularly the massive influence of the mobile internet, has completely levelled the playing field for businesses. Major corporates are expected to offer personalised service, just as small businesses traditionally did.
Salesforce makes this possible through automation, data analysis, interactive systems and artificial intelligence. And it doesn’t require an IT team.
8. Look big
The reverse of the above is just as true – SMBs are expected to offer systems and technology to make customers’ lives easier, just as the big end of town always did.
Whatever the size of a business, Salesforce introduces the single most powerful competitive advantage — a delightful and consistent customer experience.
9. Control the chaos
Salesforce lets you leave behind a shared customer service inbox. An integrated, out-of-the-box solution makes it simple to manage cases and help customers at lightning speed, and data and insights at your fingertips mean faster, better decisions. Imagine taking a customer service query, and already knowing what the customer bought from you and even why they bought it — what challenge they were hoping to overcome when they first came to your company.
On top of the ease of customer service, self-service sites help those customers who want to find their own answers, while customer insights make scaling frictionless.
10. Connect with your customers in a whole new way
Did we mention there’s too much to talk about here? Suffice to say, everything you can do with Salesforce is designed with one goal in mind — to help you connect with your customers in ways that keep up with and exceed their changing expectations, delight them at every turn, and turn them into advocates for your business.
Of course, the short answer is still ‘we help you connect with your customers’. To find out more about how you can simplify your sales cycle so you can focus on connecting to your customers and generate more business than ever before, download our ebook ‘How to Simplify the Modern Sales Cycle’.
