What’s the big deal with Salesforce?
By: Mariana Fonseca
Tags: Sales, Cloud, Technology, CRM, Salesforce

What’s the big deal with Salesforce?

CRM — what a buzz! Don’t be ashamed if you are still confused about it. We’ll tell you about CRM in general and Salesforce in particular! Mariana Fonseca Follow Sep 23, 2019 · 6 min read

What is CRM?

KISS Definition…

If you want to better understand what a CRM system does, and what is Salesforce and how it exceeds on the CRM market, you’ve come to the right place. While I believe at this point you may have heard about customer relationship management here and then, it’s always a good idea to start from the beginning and make some concepts crystal clear. So, let’s first define what is CRM!

Keeping it simple, a CRM system allows businesses to manage business relationships and the data and information associated with them. And data these days can be endless, but here are some of the info you may found stored in a CRM system:

Contact information

Sales opportunities

Service issues

Marketing campaigns

All that data and much more just to give you a 360-degree view of your customers, all in one place!

Some Data…

For those of you who are still skeptical about the power of having a CRM tool in your company, let us enlighten you with something all business people love: numbers! So, fun fact…

Did you know the global CRM applications market grew 11.85% in 2017 to approach nearly $27.2 billion? Rapidly expanding, isn’t it?

Did you have any clue that the CRM market potential is projected to be $82 billion by 2025 and growing at 12% annually? Wow, right?!

Isn’t it rather curious that in 2018, 87% of CRM systems were powered by the Cloud? You’ll see how interesting this is in just a few minutes!

Why betting on CRM?

But, why are businesses betting on CRM? What’s in it to be won? Many believe CRM will:

Improve customer service

Improve customer satisfaction

Increase customer retention

Increase sales

Generate new business

Enable to share and distribute data

Improve the market of products and services

Improve market intelligence

Manage customer renewals

Reduce costs

What is Salesforce?

Some history on Salesforce…

You’ve probably guessed it right by the title of the article, but yes, Salesforce really is the #1 CRM platform, the market leader. The company was founded in 1999 and at the very beginning what really made it special was the fact that it was the first cloud CRM. Remember the statistics shown above: 87% of CRM systems were powered by the Cloud in 2018? Well, meet the pioneers of such idea — Salesforce! The no-software moto allowed Salesforce to be fire starter in the market! In fact, this company was the first making all the information accessible by many, in real time, anywhere. In practical terms, it means every user can be working off of the same information, all the time, automatically synced with others!

The clouds:

These days, in which almost 90% of the CRM is powered by the cloud, what also makes Salesforce stand out, besides its expertise, legacy, and super cool visual workflow, is the fact that it combines multiple services, presenting quite a complete offering. It couples lead management, marketing automation, customer service management, e-commerce, partner management features, all to simplify your lead-to-conversion approach. Besides, Salesforce offers a vast panoply of clouds, so that ultimately you can run even the most complex business all in Salesforce! Let’s take a quick look at all the clouds Salesforce makes available:

Sales:

Designed for sales reps to fill pipeline with solid leads & score more wins, selling faster and smarter. Salesforce products help you increasing your team’s productivity by spending less time doing non-selling activities.

Service:

Salesforce Service Cloud helps you improve customer satisfaction across channels, by giving agents a deeper understanding of customers, and boost efficiency by making it easier for them to follow support cases. This cloud helps you measure your support team performance with analytics and reduce case volume with a branded self-service portal with peer-shared knowledge.

Marketing:

Marketing Cloud help you integrate all touchpoints to build 1-to-1 customer journeys and use AI to discover segments and drive engagement. This Cloud assures you nurture your leads with intelligent automation, target your messages with dynamic contents, and can act on insights and measure revenue and ROI.

Commerce:

Build better and faster customer experiences and crush conversion rates, ultimately unifying the shopper experience. It delivers continuous innovation to help differentiate your brand and grow revenue across channels. With Commerce Cloud clients are part of an engaged community.

Engagement:

Engagement allows you to provide each member a personal score for active members in the community. It enables badging for users who contribute and take initiative, highlighting top contributors. Also, thanks to public leaderboards, you can easily thank the expert members. With Engagement, you build engaging and long-lasting experiences.

Platform and Ecosystem:

Build, connect and integrate apps created by both the business and IT team together. As part of Salesforce’s ecosystem you may find: customers, partners, developers and the so-claimed app store itself. Salesforce AppExchange is the #1 enterprise app marketplace, featuring several thousand apps. Coupling to that, Salesforce has the largest partner ecosystem when compared to any other tech company in the world.

Integration:

Connect any app, data, or device in the cloud or on-premises. Thanks to Salesforce Integration Cloud, you can map and manage all your systems, receiving a 360-degree view of your data, devices, and apps, regardless of the channel or touchpoint the info comes from. All in all, you can easily surface data from anywhere.

Analytics:

Make more intelligent, data-driven decisions with artificial intelligence. Analytics is intelligent enough to learn what happened, why it happened, and predict what will happen thanks to AI models. Also, you can tailor the data you want to analyze, personalizing analytics to your business. The icing on the cake: all your analytics on a one single screen, investing on your next data-driven steps.

Industries:

Deliever tailor-made solutions designed to meet the specific needs of industries. Aiming at becoming as versatile as can be Salesforce created solutions for a vast panoply of industries: Banking, Communications, Consumer Goods, Government, Health Care, Insurance, Life Sciences, Manufacturing, Media, Nonprofit, Retail, Travel & Hospitality, and Wealth Management.

Communities:

Salesforce Communities allow you to build CRM-powered experiences, enabling solutions for customers & partners. They are the way to bring to the table key people to your business processes, such as: customers, partners, and employees. Communities may interact in many environments: portals, forums, support sites, HR centrals, wherever.

Enablement:

Sales Enablement helps your sales team learning about your products, how to sell them and how to achieve a solid competitive advantage. It’s all about enabling customers to buy through sales reps full of credibility. Also, with myTrailhead, Salesforce allows anyone to learn this CRM, absolutely for free.

Collaboration:

Sync real-time chat and Salesforce data into documents, spreadsheets, and slides. Keeping up with projects, topics, and teams is now easy, so your sales can work together on opportunities, capture organization knowledge and drive progress anywhere.

The secret ingredient of your digital strategy these days really is multi-clouding! And for that, who else than Salesforce? When facing your business, check which clouds you need, which one would be useful, and then, just like Pokéballs, you gotta catch’em all!

Some Data…

But, again, if you are still unconvinced with the value of Salesforce, check out these numbers:

Today, over 150,000 companies use Salesforce CRM

Salesforce revenue in 2018 got to US $ 10.48 billion

In 2018, Salesforce market share was 20% (more than twice that of its next biggest competitor)

Salesforce recently announced they are looking to achieve $60 billion in revenue by the year 2034

We hope this article has been useful for you to better understand what is CRM, why you should care for it, what is Salesforce, and why is it the #1 CRM in the world! To say the least, not only is Salesforce the pioneer of CRM in the cloud, but it also is the most holistic and complete CRM solution! Give it a try, will ya? You can start learning about its uses and potential, today, for free, with Trailhead!

Originally published at https://stellaxius.com on April 18, 2019.