How to Leverage the Salesforce CRM to Grow Your Business

Not many companies have the brand recognition that Salesforce does. That’s because they’ve sold and maintained the world’s #1 CRM platform for years

Sales and marketing teams love Salesforce for a number of reasons. It’s scalable and customizable. It includes a multi-tenant architecture that can support teams of all sizes, even global enterprise teams. It has a robust partner ecosystem that grants you access to countless tools, and the company continues to enhance the product based on customer input year after year.

Of course, stepping into Salesforce for the first time and making it work for your business isn’t always easy, even though the CRM is built to be intuitive. If you’re ready to leverage the power of Salesforce to grow your business, here’s what you need to know.

Obtain, Analyze, and Share Customer Data

If you want your business to grow, your teams and departments can’t work in data silos. Customer data must be shared between your sales, marketing, and customer service units so each can create a completely personalized and consistent customer experience. Thankfully, Salesforce and other SaaS companies have been working for years to address the silo problem.

Even if your marketing team uses a different platform to do their work (like HubSpot, for example), Salesforce integrates with hundreds of applications to make sharing customer data easy. Most importantly, it lets you establish a single source of truth for all your customer data, and you can access that data from a single location.

This is especially important for growing businesses. Many small businesses can succeed with siloed systems for a time. Some even do fine by storing customer information on a spreadsheet.

But this method just isn’t sustainable—you must use and share customer data between your teams in order to retain existing customers, obtain new customers, and grow. Reducing customer churn by just 5% can increase your profits by 25% to 125%.

Create More Efficient Cross-Platform Processes

In addition to sharing data across your integrated platforms, and by extension across your departments, Salesforce can also facilitate workflows and other processes across your integrated ecosystem. Call updates, permissions, tasks, calendars, and approvals, instead of being limited to specific platforms, can be centralized. This frees up your team leaders from micromanaging projects, so they can focus your resources on growth and avoid waste.

But perhaps the most essential component of the platform is Salesforce’s capability to automate. You can set up automated sales processes, workflows, reminders, and tasks through Salesforce. And with some integrations, you can create automated processes that span the entire customer journey, even if you use multiple platforms for sales, marketing, etc.

This type of automation is essential not just for growth, but also for scaling your business. Without it, you’d have to hire additional employees and take on additional overhead to compensate for any increase in business.

Get More Accurate Analytics Insights with “Einstein”

Salesforce has long been praised for its ability to provide transparency throughout the entire sales process and beyond. In the past, it accomplished this with its own analytics platform, but also through its integrations with tools like Google Analytics, HubSpot, Databox, and other tools.

If you prefer to rely on a separate analytics tool, chances are Salesforce can integrate with it. But Salesforce now provides a new, AI-driven analytics technology for its users, called Einstein Analytics.

Einstein Analytics allows Salesforce users to take advantage of algorithms to analyze data within Salesforce. You can use it to automate analytics reports, measure the effectiveness of your teams, and identify roadblocks in your workflows.

This tool isn’t just important because it provides accurate analytics. It’s important because it provides you with accurate analyses of your data by conducting thousands of statistic checks to not only identify trends but also confirm that they are valid.

This addresses a common challenge for growing businesses. Plenty of companies can collect data, but not many know how to use it, to the point that up to 73% of company data goes unused.

Scale Up As You Grow

Salesforce is by no means the only platform available to help you scale. But as the world’s most popular CRM and one of the industry’s most successful companies, it’s definitely worth investigating if your existing tools and processes are holding you back.

Re-platforming is always a challenge. But with the right partner, you’ll start seeing results on day one. With a wealth of technical and strategic experience building custom applications into Salesforce and integrating the platform with various other sales and marketing systems, Aptitude 8 is your trusted partner in Salesforce-enabled growth.

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