How Salesforce Helps Small Businesses
Whether you have a big business or a small business you need a customer relationship management (CRM) system to manage your sales pipeline and the relationships with your customers. We can all agree that CRM is a game-changing tool that provides insights to your business that allow you to focus on the right opportunities while collecting critical data to grow your business.
Your Small Business Needs a CRM
One of the key factors to winning in today’s business world is providing yourself with the tools that allow you to not only manage your day-to-day processes but that also give you accurate data to make appropriate business decisions. But if this doesn’t give you enough reason to utilize a CRM then consider this – your competition is beating you with their CRM.
5 Reasons Salesforce is Ideal for the Small Business
Last year I presented at a seminar and discussed our evolution of being a small business and growing into Salesforce. I spoke about how personally I went from Notepad, to Outlook, to Excel and then to Salesforce. The moment we moved to Salesforce I never looked back as it gave me insight into data I’ve never had before while greatly improving our internal processes. So looking back at the past 8 years of utilizing Salesforce here are 5 ways Salesforce can help small businesses.
1. Salesforce Gives Big Business Power to Small Business
Salesforce is a solution that is utilized by many large businesses throughout the globe. But your small business has the same business processes, just on a smaller scale. For example, both large and small businesses have working contracts with their clients. These contracts are tied to an opportunity and an account. In addition, these contracts get reviewed and edited by numerous stakeholders involved in the relationship. Lastly, there is a financial transaction behind each contract. These transactions are tied to the opportunity, the account and the contact at that account. All of this is better stored within Salesforce as opposed to several systems or even worse, a paper trail.
Salesforce objects being utilized: Opportunities, Account, Content and/or Files
Salesforce Features: Workflows and approvals, field validations
2. Mobile Puts Everything is in the Palm of Your Hand
People who work at small businesses wear many hats and oftentimes work around the clock. But they are not always at their desk. But with Salesforce1 small businesses have the power of Salesforce on their smartphone or tablet.
Examples we’ve heard from a few small business users on how they utilize the mobile capabilities of Salesforce:
- submit approvals from the gym
- have information readily available while coaching a basketball game
- make a company announcement from a seminar
- update a contact’s record after seeing them at the grocery store
- create a new task after leaving a prospecting meeting
- close a deal on the spot and submit for approval
3. Send Template Based Emails
One of my favorite features of Salesforce is the ability to send and track template based emails from Salesforce. This is a tool that is oftentimes not utilized enough but has great power. Salesforce offers the ability to send both HTML and text based emails from Salesforce and assign it to a contact, account or opportunity. In addition, Salesforce gives users the ability to create email notifications that are sent based on various triggers within Salesforce. Lastly, within Salesforce you can see how many times a contact has opened that email and when they last viewed it. So if you’re sending out several emails at once to prospects you can determine who has the most interest.
Examples of how small businesses can use template based emails:
- Nudging warm leads with an article of interest
- An auto-response with call-to-actions
- Happy birthday emails
- Welcome aboard emails to new employees
- Thank you emails to clients
- Marketing with HTML emails
- Follow up email to attendees at an event
4. Manage Tasks
With Salesforce not only can you see your assigned tasks but also the assigned tasks of your team. Now you can see what everyone is doing within a Salesforce record. You are able to see what everyone’s upcoming tasks are as well as the completed tasks. No longer would you need to go to someone’s desk and ask them for an update on an opportunity.
5. All Data in One Area
One of the benefits of small businesses is their nimbleness and flexibility. But one of the issues with small businesses is the knowledge and information is oftentimes held by one person. No longer should that happen with Salesforce. With Salesforce all your data and information is in one area. So now everyone has access to data needed to run the business.
