What’s the deal with Salesforce? It seems like every big business out there is touting Salesforce as the go-to CRM solution. It’s renowned for its customer management capabilities, its sales pipeline management, and its automation abilities. However, when you start researching the tool, it’s challenging to figure out what this giant platform actually does.
What is Salesforce? What kinds of capabilities does it have? Is it worth the investment? How difficult is it to set up?
What’s Salesforce?
At its core, Salesforce is a CRM or customer relationship management platform. It currently has more than 150,000 paying customers and over 3.75 million users. Salesforce owns a considerable share of the CRM market, holding 20% of the entire market. Moreover, around 83% of Fortune 500 companies utilize some components of Salesforce.
CRM is a simplification of Salesforce’s features. It has a nearly limitless number of upgrades, personalization options, and services. It’s known for bringing all spokes of the company together in one place. From marketing, sales, service, and commerce, the Salesforce platform brings all departments together to see a single view of the customer pipeline and experience.
Typically, the sales department will have their own system. Marketing has its own software solutions. The product team has their backend tech. Ultimately, this leads to an unorganized web of miscommunication. Salesforce bridges that gap by allowing entire teams to see the company’s customers from the same point of view.
So, what kinds of things can Salesforce do?
What Can You Do with Salesforce?
As we already mentioned, Salesforce can do several tasks, but here are a few of the benefits and capabilities that Salesforce offers:
- Gain Deep Understanding of Each Customer Immediately
- Locate and Identify High-Value Leads and Prospects
- Track Every Customer Interaction
- See the Entire Sales Pipeline
- Predict Customer Trends
- Personalize Marketing Campaigns
- Build Apps, Websites, and Communities
- Log Activities and Tasks to Oversee and Improve Time Management
- Integrate Other Applications
- Create and Send Quotes to Customers
- Collaborate with Your Entire Team Within Salesforce
- And So Much More
It’s nearly impossible to go into all the features Salesforce offers. They have different tools with different capabilities. The easiest way to think about Salesforce is that if you can think about it, Salesforce can probably do it. It’s automating entire processes for companies, while ultimately creating a more organized backend process.
Is It Worth the Investment?
So, this is where it gets tricky. It all depends on how much you prioritize simplification, automation, and communication inside of your business. From small businesses to giant enterprises, Salesforce has different price structures to match nearly every company. However, many services cost additional fees, so the price can add up quickly if you aren’t careful.
It’s important to know what exactly you hope to accomplish with Salesforce and work your way backward. If you have a decent budget and you want the best possible solution, then, one hundred percent, Salesforce is worth the investment. However, if you have limited funds and won’t be able to harness all the capabilities, it might not be the most financially feasible solution.
If you go in understanding what you’re after and how much you can spend, there is likely a Salesforce solution that is worth your investment. The great thing about Salesforce is that every company’s platform is unique to their organization’s needs.
However, knowing what you need and how to accomplish it can be a hurdle in and of itself.
How Difficult Is It to Set Up?
Just like Salesforce is known for its world-class capabilities, it’s also known for being one of the most complicated systems to master and set up. When you start with Salesforce, you will have to have some salesforce consulting. Unless you have someone inside of your organization who understands the intricacies of the Salesforce coding languages and the complexities of their software, you can’t set your system up without an expert.
Trying to do it yourself will cost your company much more money than it would to hire an expert from the beginning. The good news is that if it’s set up correctly, once you’re set up and trained, it’s very user-friendly. You can reap all the benefits that the Fortune 500 companies are seeing. Just don’t underthink the set-up process.
Salesforce is The Best Tool You Aren’t Using
So, to sum it up, Salesforce is pretty amazing if you know what you’re looking for and what you’re doing. Millions of users are already enjoying the countless benefits. Jumping on the Salesforce bandwagon could be the best decision you ever made for your business. Just make sure that you know your budget going in, and that you hire an expert from the beginning.
