6 steps to improving your business performance with Salesforce

When it comes to achieving success, business performance is king. If your organisation isn't performing to your or your clients' expectations, then few other victories will matter. After all, business is like a strong river current; if you aren't actively pushing yourself forward, then you are automatically being carried downstream to failure and obscurity. Salesforce provides your organisation with the tools it needs to improve your performance, boost your revenue, and increase your overall ROI in the process.

Salesforce CRM tools are designed with the customer in mind, empowering your organisation to assist customers, address concerns, find solutions, and provide value. Basically, Salesforce makes it possible for you to put customer success first, and in the process, focus on your own business performance improvement. Here's how:

• Improved customer visibility. In order to give your clients the level of personal attention that they crave, you need to be able to quickly access accounts, contracts, tasks, events, and any relevant personal data. Salesforce provides a convenient platform for managing all of your customer-related information, making it possible for you to treat every customer as though he or she were your only customer. Additionally, by better understanding your customers, you'll be in a position to better forecast their future actions. Salesforce CRM improves forecast accuracy by as much as 42%.

• Superior time management. There are only so many hours in a day, and when you are fielding many different responsibilities those hours start to feel shorter and shorter. Salesforce combines all of your agents' calendars, schedules, activities, and more, and helps make those appointments better serve customers. This means less downtime, and significantly fewer deadline-related stress headaches.

• More efficient sales pipeline. Finding the right leads can be a full-time job, to say nothing of guiding those leads through the sales pipeline toward full commitment. Salesforce allows for easy tracking of individual prospects, including their pain points, expectations, and any other information that might be useful in helping a potential customer along the path to the sale. As such, you'll always be able to see exactly where a lead is in your pipeline, as well as know what their next step should be. The end result is that Salesforce applications have been shown to increase company sales by up to 29%.

• Enhanced collaboration. Having a cloud-based, cross-department platform means that any and every authorised individual can work together to ensure customer success. By simply logging in to your company's database from any internet-enabled device, your various teams can access relevant data, communicate, and collaborate together to provide a seamless customer-service experience that won't get hung up on interdepartmental miscommunication.

• Better support. A tool is only as good as it is functional. Salesforce provides superior support, so in the event that issues arise, steps are immediately taken to ensure that everything gets brought quickly back to full functionality. Perhaps best of all, with the entire platform based in the cloud, maintenance can be done without having to bring technicians into the office, and without having to pay expensive maintenance costs.

• Increased efficiency and productivity. Between automating time-consuming tasks, inspiring better collaboration, and eliminating the need for managerial micromanagement, Salesforce trims away at wasteful processes and redundant effort, leaving a hyper efficient system that will give your organisation and your customers real value for every action taken. As a result, company productivity increases. In fact, the adoption of Salesforce has been shown to increase sales productivity by as much as 34%.

• By offering the most-comprehensive CRM solutions

• By providing unparalleled data security

• By allowing for personalised customisation options

• By providing the best CRM apps available

• By creating innovative business solutions

• By maintaining a competitive cost

Businesses that use Salesforce recognise this effectiveness, with 64% of current Salesforce customers planning to increase their Salesforce budgets during 2016.

In the river of business, you're either pushing yourself forward, or you're getting pulled under. And with help from Salesforce, your organisation will be able to beat that current for years to come.

With so many advantages offered by Salesforce, it's just not possible to list them all. But for businesses that want a clear advantage over their competitors, Salesforce provides the most-complete CRM solutions, the best security, the most-effective customisation options, the highest-quality apps, and the most-innovative business systems, all at a cost that won't break the bank.