“Sell smarter and faster with the world’s #1 CRM.”
That is the first thing you see on Salesforce’s website. They’re an all-in-one, cloud-based leader in CRM software for small businesses. Built 100% in the cloud, their CRM solutions help connect customers, employees, partners, and even products with incredible ease. There are a lot of CRM solutions that claim to be easy to use and powerful, but here’s how Salesforce gets to claim the number one spot.
Ease of Use
When you log into Salesforce, you get a dashboard that gives you a bird’s eye view of how your business is doing. It’s filled with a wide range of report widgets and is fully customizable to show you everything from quotas and pipelines to key opportunities, leaderboards, team summaries, sales data, and many others.
Navigating through the software was easy with their simple navigation bar found at the top of the window. You’ll find tabs for categories like Home, Contacts, Accounts, Leads, Campaigns, Opportunities, Forecasts Files, and more. You get to where you want to go with a click of a button. There is quite a few CRM software that doesn’t give you the same ease. You can also reorganize and add tabs to truly make it your own. Speaking of organization, each tab was displayed well with simple lists, links to each contact, and shortcut widgets.
Customer Success Platform
Salesforce comes with all the basics that a small business would need to grow using a sales and insight driven approach. Their process is efficient and designed to provide all the data you need to run better, streamlined marketing campaigns.
Sales Cloud
They’ve come up with Salesforce Einstein, artificial intelligence that makes your sales process smarter. You get predictive lead scoring and recommendations on the next best steps to take in order to close deals faster. It’s an ideal solution to making your sales reps sell smarter; which is a huge part of why Salesforce came to be. With this, you can accelerate productivity, make insightful decisions, get more leads, and close more deals. Here are some features from Sales Cloud alone.
- Content Management – get a complete view of your customers, their activity history, key contacts, customer communications, and internal account discussions. You can also gain insights from popular social networks.
- Opportunity Management – stay connected to your sales team and get all the details on their deals.
- Salesforce Engage – understand how your prospects are engaging with your personalized sales campaigns and use real-time alerts to close deals at the best time.
- Sales Collaboration – get resources from your company’s social network with Chatter to find experts, access competitive information, and track deals.
- Sales Performance Management – set goals, give notes, provide feedback and real-time recognition and rewards to drive team performance .
- Lead Management – track your leads as you optimize your campaigns and make smarter, informed, decisions on where to invest your marketing budget .
- Marketing Automation – create, launch, and manage online campaigns with Pardot Marketing Automation .
- Sales Data – increase sales and productivity with accurate sales data at the right time with Data.com
- Partner Management – Partner Community connects you with channel partners to share goals and empower your network in a secure and branded location.
- Salesforce1 Mobile App – transform your phone into a portable sales office. Do work no matter where you are.
- Visual Workflow – design any business process fast with their simple drag and drop interface.
- Email Integration – use the email applications you’ve become accustomed to. Don’t lose time adjusting to a new platform.
- Files Sync and Share – share, publish and track your files and content among your team members in real time.
- Reports and Dashboards – access or easily create your detailed reports. You can find them easily on your real-time dashboards from anywhere.
- Sales Forecasting – stay on top of your business with a real- time view into your sales team’s forecasts.
Service Cloud
This feature is dedicated to helping you keep your customers happy, and keeping them loyal to your business. Their customer service tools let you bring all your support inquiries together in one console. With user communities and branded self- service sites, you can reduce support costs and help customers get the solutions they need easily. But Salesforce also makes sure that if your clients are going to need help, you’re going to be there. No matter what channel they use. Agents will get customer history and a knowledge base to make sure they’re giving the right answers, the right way. This is great for small businesses, and if you start growing, the Service Cloud will grow with you with upgrades and additional solutions to your needs.
Marketing Cloud
Say goodbye to cold calling with access to millions of complete and accurate business leads. This service will provide you with lead- generation and marketing automation tools to help get your business’ name out there, capture solid leads, and so much more. Pardot from Salesforce lets anyone from your team create dynamic emails which you can A/B test to discover the most effective content you can use. Here, you won’t need HTML knowledge to capture leads. Build high-end landing pages and forms that come with notification triggers and lead assigning. Automatically score, prioritize, and assign your leads. Use automated nurture tracks that turn cold leads into prospects so you can free up your resources for other tasks. You can carefully track your team’s performance, your prospects, and ROI by connecting Google AdWords to your account.
Pricing (billed annually)
With Salesforce offering so many features and so much flexibility, you can expect an extensive pricing scheme. While it can be overwhelming, it’s great that they’re trying to cover everything and cater to each business’ unique needs. Click here to see their Price Plans.
