It’s no secret that Salesforce is a reputable giant in the CRM industry. With all of its capabilities in marketing, sales, IT, and more, Salesforce can be an excellent tool for your company that allows for a substantial return on investment.
Today, almost a quarter of the world’s companies utilize Salesforce for their customer relationship management needs, and the percentage continues to grow. It’s clear that the platform has some serious potential, but how can you ensure that your business is achieving effective Salesforce implementation?
In today’s article, we’ll be going over some Salesforce ROI strategies that are useful in implementing Salesforce effectively for your company. For small or medium-sized businesses, efficiency is crucial, including with the CRM you use. These five pieces of advice will help you learn how to maximize Salesforce ROI.
Overview:
- Provide Training
- Utilize Automation
- Organize Your Data
- Customize and Integrate
- Keep Learning
Provide Training
There’s no way around this one: if your staff is not adequately trained in using Salesforce, your business will not be able to use the platform to its full potential. Thankfully, this problem can be solved with Salesforce-specific training, an especially critical aspect of Salesforce ROI best practices.
You have a few options for providing Salesforce training to your team.
- Use Trailhead or Pathfinder, two of Salesforce’s official training programs
- Hiring external Salesforce trainers to assist your team with user adoption
- Contacting Salesforce’s customer support team for individualized help
Enabling each of your staff members to use Salesforce effectively is one of the best ways you can boost your Salesforce ROI. It may take some time, but it’ll be well worth the effort when the benefits start to roll in.
[RELATED: Best Salesforce Certifications for Developers in 2023.]
Utilize Automation
Salesforce as a company is an industry leader in automation and artificial intelligence. And that means your company will be at an advantage point if you can effectively utilize their CRM platform to automate processes.
You can automate Salesforce’s capabilities in a number of ways. For example, if you’re looking to improve the efficiency of your sales workflows, you might automate the customer segmentation process or lead qualification.
We also found an official guide to the basics of Salesforce automation here.
Automation is an essential time-saving tool, and it’s a big part of what the tech industry is working toward for the future. Using it effectively will boost your Salesforce ROI and propel your company into what’s next in tech.
Organize Your Data
As with any facet of an effectively run business, organization is key. This applies to the data within your CRM platform just as much as anything else – if not more so. Ensuring that your data in Salesforce is updated and accurate will make using the software so much easier.
Salesforce has some internal functions that will automatically assist you with keeping information organized, but that doesn’t mean it can do all of the hard work for you. Thus, you will need to determine how you’d like to organize your CRM data and then implement it company-wide.
The recommended way to accomplish this is to standardize the way that you enter, manage, and maintain your company’s data in Salesforce. Putting into place an intentional system for organizing data will not only increase your Salesforce ROI but also reduce the everyday headaches that can come with managing large amounts of data.
Customize and Integrate
Salesforce is notably customizable in terms of adapting the platform to your company’s specific needs. Its wide array of features and capability to customize those features make it very intuitive for organizations with specialized needs.
Tailoring your Salesforce implementation to simplify individual business processes will help you maximize your Salesforce ROI. One way you can do this is by integrating Salesforce with other compatible platforms that you already use. A few examples of platforms that can be integrated into Salesforce are:
- Slack
- Google Suite
- DocuSign
- Dropbox
Though Salesforce is an impressively comprehensive CRM platform, it’s still a good idea to integrate your other platforms, such as those for file-sharing or general communication. That’s why this feature is offered; integration will help you establish effective Salesforce implementation while still utilizing any external platforms that streamline your work.
Keep Learning
This might seem self-explanatory, but it’s important to try to use each feature that Salesforce offers to its full capacity. Performing extensive research and completing the necessary training are your first steps to mastering Salesforce. But as you continue to use the platform, it’s crucial to keep an open mind to new developments that are bound to come. Understanding software updates as well as really digging into the nitty-gritty of Salesforce’s capabilities will help you maximize ROI in the long run.
In short, you want to ensure that you get what you’re paying for. You may get into the habit of only utilizing the parts of Salesforce that are immediately useful or that make the most sense to your team. Determining what features will benefit your business the most is a great starting place, but dedicating time to figuring out how to make Salesforce work for you long-term needs to be an ongoing commitment.
One handy tool that Salesforce offers is a community forum called Trailblazer Community where fellow users can connect online and support each other. Anyone can browse posts on this free online forum that provides some extremely valuable Salesforce implementation tips.
Conclusion
Salesforce is unquestionably an excellent platform for businesses today. However, you should still be prepared for a continuous learning process when using the software.
Like most aspects of the tech industry, CRM technology is in a state of constant change. But with an intentional focus on mastering and maintaining the use of platforms like Salesforce, you can ensure increased productivity and profitability at your company. Read more about the Salesforce optimization services we offer here.
We hope that today’s Salesforce client guide is a helpful resource for your business when thinking about how to begin maximizing Salesforce ROI.
– Carly Helm
(Contributor)
