Salesforce is one of the biggest names in the CRM solutions market, and for good reason. However, buying a CRM is an investment so you want to make sure you will get a good return on your spend. In this post we will look at what problems a good CRM addresses, and consider if the Salesforce CRM is the right fit for your small business.
Quick recap: what is a CRM?
A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system is used predominantly by sales teams to help track sales and manage pipeline.
In very simplistic terms, the sales cycle looks like this: sales people will typically start off by creating a long list of people they want to target – we’ll call them “Leads”. They will try and connect with as many of these people as possible by phone calls, emails or social media – we’ll call these connection attempts “Activities”. From the initial long list of Leads and many Activities, the sales person will have a smaller number of decent conversations around potential business – we’ll call these “Opportunities”. Some of those Opportunities might lead to negotiating terms, where some will become clients (“Won Opportunities”) and some will fall through (“Lost Opportunities”).
If you can track all these interactions you’ll be able to start to see patterns of sales activity: what types of leads tend to pay off, how many leads you need to hit to win a certain amount of business, etc. You’ll start to be able to alter the behaviour of your sales team in order to help them to hit certain sales targets more quickly and easily. This is a very simplified and general view of what the sales team does, but it gives a flavour of how people use CRM systems.
Do I really need a CRM to track sales activity?
Why don’t we just create some lists on our computers, make a to-do list of activity and then record any half-decent conversations in a spreadsheet which we give to the sales manager at the end of the week? Well, there’s several limitations with this approach:
Your colleagues may also be targeting the same person, it would be a bit weird for a potential customer to start getting bombarded with connection requests or emails from multiple people that work for the same company.
Someone else in your company may already know somebody at your target company, and you could leverage that connection.
There’s no easy way to automatically calculate how many activities you’ve noted down and thus spot patterns in what worked and what didn’t to convert Leads into Opportunities.
The sales manager is unfortunately stuck with the manual task of collating each person’s spreadsheet to create the sales figures and forecast for the rest of the leadership team.
The leadership team now has the task of collating those forecast and actual sales figures from the sales manager and trying to set budgets and strategy accordingly. All a bit frustrating and manual.
How does a CRM resolve these problems?
There are lots of CRM vendors and solutions out there – free and paid. All have their own features and abilities which appeal to different parts of the market. The truth is, they all follow very similar principles and that is the structure which I was describing before: Leads, Accounts, Contacts, Opportunities and Activities. Different systems may have different terminology, but the underlying logic remains the same.
Most CRMs will allow staff to access a single system and common record information, so everyone can benefit from transparency rather than information living in a person’s brain or on their individual computer. A good CRM will also allow staff to share records and data for the benefit of driving deals forward, and have some reporting functionality to make calculations and dashboards from the data so leadership can track performance.
So why pay for a CRM if I can get one for free?
As there are CRMs that are free to use, and I have just told you they all have basically the same logic, you are probably wondering why so many people pay for access to systems like Salesforce. I believe the answer is around both usability and functionality – because there are actually a lot of technical things to think about when implementing a CRM. Salesforce takes many of these pain points away which is one of the main reasons why so many people opt to become customers. Some examples include:
Database storage. In most CRMs you have to set up a database (for example a SQL database) as well as the security around it. You’ll need to add your own columns to the database and it’s not always quick to add a new one and then allow users to enter information into it from the front-end. It’s all possible with most systems, but it’s just not super easy, especially if you’re not technical. Salesforce takes all of those technical hurdles away by providing simple User Interfaces. Admins can then configure what your company’s specific users should see on screen.
Hosting. Many free CRMs are not automatically hosted anywhere. For example you don’t just go to a URL or click on a computer app – they need to be implemented somewhere and this can be technically tricky too. Remember the key is giving everyone the right access to the CRM so they can drive that sales pipeline forward. Salesforce makes this easy, you simply go to the URL and login, as with any website. No installations needed and no fuss. Your staff just log in and start doing their job.
Automation & Reporting. Sales teams will usually have operational tasks during their jobs for example: calculating a sales price, adding up total sales, sending quotes to customers, reporting numbers back to managers. Salesforce makes all of this possible by providing point-and-click tools to create these automation rules and reports.
Another benefit is availability of resources. As a market leading tool, there is plenty of support available in the form of certified Salesforce experts to help you and your users make the most of the platform. As your company grows and you need to build out capability, there are qualified people who can help build out and customise your Salesforce environment: freelance experts like myself and also large consultancies.
Finally, pricing is set up so that you pay per user. Thus, if you’re a small business with only a few sales staff you only pay for those few users, but they get the same great benefits as a large blue chip firm with thousands of users. Your sales pipeline should look healthier overall, which means more opportunities and deals won, and in turn results in you investing in more sales staff and CRM licenses. The price therefore scales as you gain more benefit and business.
Conclusion
This post has hopefully given you a simple overview of some of the ways the Salesforce CRM goes above and beyond other CRM offerings. There are many more complex, specific and advanced features of Salesforce than those I’ve covered here, but the basics are the reason why so many small companies tend to opt for it, not just the large enterprises. Salesforce effectively addresses a huge amount of manual overhead in a simple, attractive and very customisable tool which scales with you.
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