ROI Part 1: 4 Reasons You Should be Using Salesforce as Your CRM

What does Salesforce do, and how do I use it?

Salesforce is a powerful CRM system that, in a nutshell, brings companies and customers together by marrying marketing, sales, commerce, service and IT. These features offer a clear shared view of the customers on one integrated platform.

Salesforce operates on cloud-based software – allowing companies to track live data, view community discussions and manage analytics from anywhere. The data is updated in real time, so businesses always have access to the most accurate and up-to-date information regarding their clients.

Here are four key reasons businesses opt to use Salesforce as their CRM system.

1. Salesforce enables companies to provide a better customer experience

Modern-day customers become loyal to companies that can predict, meet and exceed their needs and expectations. Companies use Salesforce to understand their customers better and connect with them across their lifecycle.

The platform also helps businesses expand their customer base. It has the capability to attract buyers through personalized marketing, an excellent shopping experience, and personalized customer support. With Salesforce, businesses are able to engage with their prospective customers and existing customers, watch their activity as they engage with your brand, complete customer orders and deal with their inquiries in an effective and cost-efficient manner.

2. Salesforce automates business processes in a powerful way

Salesforce enables merchants to easily tailor all the platform capabilities – including analytics, integration and workforce training – to their specific business needs. It also automates time-consuming tasks by allowing its users to build custom apps, dashboards, reports and workflows, making it easier for your team to quickly react to the customer needs.

3. Salesforce objects make it easy to stay organized

Salesforce contains many standard – or native – objects. The platform also allows users to create custom objects to fit their individual needs.

As an example:

A Lead is one of the native Salesforce objects that holds all the metadata for your potential customer who has expressed interest in your business through some channel (email, your website, met at the conference, etc.)

As you bring that person closer to a sale, that Lead becomes an Account (the company that individual works for), a Contact (the personal record for the individual), and an Opportunity (a potential sale, or maybe even an abandoned shopping cart on your website).

There are many more native objects that are available out of the box, and all are there for you to leverage. Every object in Salesforce has standard fields and may also have custom fields, which gives you the flexibility to organize your data in a way that makes sense for your business.

4. You can easily track the progress of your efforts

Salesforce tracks data and puts all that data at your fingertips. A built-in Report Builder allows for data compilations to be created through a point-and-click interface. A report is a list of records from a single object or across multiple objects that meet the criteria you specify.

In addition to the reports, you can create custom dashboards for you and your team based on various features you use in Salesforce. This brings all the summary and key data into a single page.

Dashboards help you visually understand changing business conditions so you can make informed decisions based on the real-time data you have gathered with source reports.

There is a single underlying report for each dashboard component. However, you can add multiple components to a single dashboard (e.g., a pie chart of your sales income and a dollar amount for the same data). Multiple dashboard components can be shown together on a single dashboard page layout, creating a powerful visual display of multiple common themed reports, like sales performance, customer support, etc.

Learn more about using Magento-Salesforce integration to increase your ROI in the next posts. Part two will discuss how salesforce compares to other CRMs, and part three will take an in-depth look at how to choose the Magento and Salesforce system integration based on your needs to increase your business performance.