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Customer relationship management (CRM) systems make it easier to manage all the interactions that occur between employees and customers. They also give you more insight into the inner workings of your sales and marketing teams, maximizing productivity and enhancing collaboration to deliver personalized customer experiences.
For best results, your chosen CRM system should be capable of adapting to your company’s processes and providing long-term efficiency. Salesforce offers a tremendous amount of value, making it one of the top CRM solutions on the market. Keep reading to learn how to optimize the value of Salesforce for your business to increase ROI.
What Is the Value of a CRM System?
Manual processes take up time that could be better spent building customer relationships or helping your sales team develop new skills. Salesforce and other CRM systems automate many cumbersome processes, leaving more time available for revenue-generating activities. These are just a few examples of activities that Salesforce can automate:
- Follow-up emails
- Intelligence gathering
- Order tracking
- Status updates
- Forecasting
- Purchase approvals
Customer Data Tracking
Imagine how much time you’d waste if you still had to use telephone books and postal mail to generate leads and communicate with customers. Email and other digital tools have made it much easier to connect with your target audience, but you still need a place to store information and retrieve it quickly. Enter the CRM. Salesforce and other CRM systems make it possible to store all types of customer contact data and put that data at employees’ fingertips when they need it most.
As a bonus, Salesforce makes it easy to personalize each interaction, resulting in higher conversion rates and greater levels of customer satisfaction. This personalization can occur at any stage of the sales cycle, not just when you’re presenting a product or working to overcome objections. For example, if an existing customer calls for product support, one of your service team members can easily view their purchase history and make recommendations for accessories or maintenance services. That translates into additional revenue for your business outcomes.
Data-Driven Decision Making
When team members don’t have to spend time on manual processes, they can focus on more important activities. Therefore, Salesforce value also comes from the ability to use the data in your CRM to make critical business decisions. With Salesforce and other CRM tools, it’s possible to answer the following questions about your business:
- What is your average amount of revenue generated per customer?
- What is the average size (in dollar value) of an order?
- How many units of each product do you sell during a specific period?
- How many outbound calls is your sales team making each month?
- What is your sales conversion rate?
- What percentage of your prospects turn into qualified leads?
- Which employees generate the most revenue each month?
- Which employees generate the lowest amount of revenue each month?
- How long, on average, does each sales call last?
Answering these questions simply, using a CRM system, makes it much easier to make decisions related to staffing, resource allocation and training. For example, if you think the average call time is too long, you might hire a consultant to help team members handle calls more efficiently. If it’s time to give merit raises, data related to the amount of revenue a salesperson generates can help you make fair compensation decisions.
The data stored in your CRM system can also help you gain valuable insights into customers’ needs and determine how your company can do a better job fulfilling those needs throughout each sales stage. For example, if you notice that 80% of your sales come from one product, you might want to introduce more accessories for that product or explore the feasibility of offering a related subscription service.
Efficiency Improvements
By making it easier to track customer data and make data-driven decisions, collaboration platforms like Salesforce increase efficiency. Business experts define efficiency in several ways, but it generally means the ability to achieve your company’s goals with as little waste as possible. That could mean less time wasted on manual processes, less money wasted on initiatives that don’t produce results or less effort spent developing products that your customers don’t want.
How Does Salesforce CRM Provide That Value?
If you’re using Salesforce, one way to measure its value is to make sure it’s helping you achieve the benefits outlined above. Ask yourself the following questions:
- Has efficiency increased since we implemented Salesforce?
- Are we spending less time on manual processes that take team members away from more important activities?
- Do employees use the data in Salesforce to personalize their interactions with leads and customers?
- Are we using the data in Salesforce to make better decisions?
If you’re not quite sure whether you’re maximizing the value of Salesforce, dig a little deeper. Answering these questions can help you determine if you need to provide additional user training, hire a Salesforce consultant or offer incentives for each department to adopt Salesforce.
- Do team members use Salesforce regularly?
- Are team members using Salesforce to locate customer data, or are they still relying on address books, printed contact lists and other outdated organizational tools?
- Are you using Salesforce in every department?
- Do team members understand the CRM’s full capabilities?
- Have you provided an adequate amount of training to help team members transition to Salesforce?
- If you just adopted Salesforce in your sales department, do you plan to expand it to additional departments soon?
With the right strategic approach, a CRM should check all these boxes. If it doesn’t, it’s time to think about Salesforce optimization.
Why Should You Optimize Your Salesforce CRM Software?
You might not be getting the maximum amount of value out of Salesforce if any of the following is true for your business processes:
- You still don’t have a clear picture of what your customers need.
- You’re not using the data stored in Salesforce to make data-driven decisions.
- You don’t understand how to use Salesforce to make business decisions.
- Employees are hesitant to adopt Salesforce in their departments.
- Team members have expressed reservations about the value of Salesforce.
- You haven’t adapted your use of Salesforce to match your most current processes, leaving members struggling to work with an outdated tool.
A customer relationship management system is a tremendously helpful tool, but only if you know how to use it correctly. Salesforce integrations can help you increase the value of your CRM and increase efficiency at the same time, making them a critical component of an effective Salesforce strategy. These integrations make it possible to optimize Salesforce based on current business conditions and adapt quickly to changes in the market. Integrating these features with your software ensures your company is well-positioned to overcome challenges as they arise.
Improve Your Salesforce Strategy With LinkPoint360
LinkPoint Connect for Salesforce is one of the most helpful Salesforce integrations on the market, as it offers seamless email integration that works with any platform. Featuring one-click email recording, secure client-side deployment and custom Salesforce object and field detection, LinkPoint Connect for Salesforce offers the following.
Increased Productivity
LinkPoint Connect for Salesforce increases productivity by reducing the amount of time your team members spend on communication and scheduling activities. This gives them more time to focus on making sales or coming up with your next marketing campaign. LinkPoint Connect for Salesforce offers the following features:
- Record: It takes just one click to record an email to Salesforce, ensuring that team members have access to a complete record of all the contacts between your company and its clients.
- View: Personalize customer interactions by allowing team members to view real-time Salesforce data right from their email accounts.
- Create: With LinkPoint Connect, it’s possible to create new Salesforce records from email signatures, saving time and effort.
- Recap: Easily document each meeting to ensure all team members have access to critical information about the business.
- Track: LinkPoint Connect even makes it possible to track email opens, giving you insight into whether your current marketing strategy is effective.
Enhanced Collaboration
LinkPoint Connect and other Salesforce integrations enhance collaboration by ensuring that all team members are on the same page. If Brad from Sales has a conversation with a customer in May, Tina from Customer Service can access the notes from that conversation in September. This makes it easier to personalize the interaction and ensure the customer’s satisfaction. Having access to a complete record of interactions also cuts down on confusion and ensures that your team members deliver a consistent customer experience.
Best-in-Class Security
We designed LinkPoint Connect for Salesforce with security in mind. Although LinkPoint Connect transmits data from Salesforce to your email platform, it doesn’t store any of that data, giving you extra peace of mind as you work to maximize efficiency. We also offer several deployment methods to suit your needs and ensure that you feel comfortable integrating Salesforce with LinkPoint Connect.
Ongoing Support
As one of the most trusted Salesforce partners, LinkPoint360 has extensive experience advising business owners on how to maximize the value of this CRM. We’re so committed to your success that we’ll assign you a customer success manager to walk you through the implementation process and make sure your team members understand how to use LinkPoint to maximize efficiency.
To explore the benefits of LinkPoint Connect for Salesforce, sign up for a 14-day trial. You’ll gain access to every feature of LinkPoint Connect, making it easy to determine how the software can help you maximize the value of Salesforce for your business.
