Using Salesforce to Scale Your Business
Salesforce is a large company, and many large businesses use the Salesforce platform. However, your business doesn’t have to be a multinational conglomerate to benefit from all the tools that Salesforce has to offer. You don’t even have to have an internal team of Salesforce administrators to make the most of a Salesforce account.
Today we’re focusing on the opportunities that Salesforce can provide for mid-size businesses who are looking to grow and scale up. So, if you’re a business looking for new ways to expand or have heard about Salesforce but aren’t sure how it helps companies grow, read on to learn more.
Beyond “Established”
First, what exactly do we mean by a mid-size business? A mid-size business may also be known as a mid-market business or mid-size enterprise. Usually employee numbers are used to dictate what defines a mid-size business. Companies with 100-999 employees are mid-sized. Businesses with fewer than 100 employees are small businesses. Businesses with more than 999 employees are large businesses.
Revenue can also be a classification for business size, though it isn’t used as often as employee counts. Academically speaking, a mid-size enterprise is defined by the Ohio State University’s National Center for the Middle Market as having revenue between $10M and $1B annually (Source: Chron). For the classification purposes of the U.S. government, companies are only defined as small businesses or not, with varying criteria dependent upon the industry, number of employees, and revenue per year.
How to Keep Growing
You probably have a good idea of what size company your business is already. But what if your company’s goals are to continue growing, with the result of becoming a much larger business one day? While there isn’t a secret formula to scaling any business, there are tips for streamlining the sales process and providing great customer service to encourage client retention. Two Salesforce solutions can help with growth: Salesforce Marketing and Salesforce Service.
Salesforce Marketing helps supercharge the capabilities of the Salesforce CRM. Using the marketing tools within the Salesforce ecosystem makes it easy to send your marketing content to segmented lists of grouped recipients. Campaigns are then tracked and monitored with the Salesforce analytics and reports tools so that you can review and improve campaigns with each iteration. This tool makes it easier to work towards better campaign results each time.
Salesforce Service is the central hub for your customer service support team. Managing, logging, and tracking support tickets is easily managed when customer data and support data all exists within Salesforce’s platform. Improve the efficiency and customer satisfaction of your Service team using Salesforce Service’s tools.
Finding Hidden Opportunities
While gaining new customers is an important path to scaling upwards, upselling current customers and finding inefficiencies in your current Sales process is an integral part of improving your sales team and increasing sales opportunities.
Salesforce Sales centralizes your sales process and data, making it simple to pull up forecast pipeline reports. You can also see team overviews and drill down into sales rep performances to better identify coaching opportunities. Keeping your Sales process in one place eliminates the frustration of having CRM data on one platform, service functions on another, and sales documents, pitches, and other content hiding elsewhere. Keep your sales team focused and able to do their job: selling!
Reducing Friction
And finally, after you’ve set up your marketing and service team, and your sales team is hitting the ground running, you want to keep your company growing and rolling along without a lot of friction. Salesforce has tools for evaluating and analyzing how things are going across your Salesforce account.
The Analytics tool sounds self-explanatory as it is just what it says it is: an analytics tool. However, its capabilities far exceed what you may think of at first. Salesforce Analytics can pull data from the CRM, your organization, and the cloud. Dashboards with concise bits of data help to quickly make sense of large amounts of data, while the Salesforce app allows you to view the info you need on-the-go. Evaluating and making improvements within the silos of your company’s operations can lead to breakthroughs in marketing, service, and sales.
Maybe you like the sound of putting everything in Salesforce but aren’t sure about the logistical processes involved in migrating your current systems to Salesforce. Luckily, Salesforce has the capacity to connect with other platforms, services, and software through Integrations. APIs and other integration systems can connect to the Salesforce platform, extending your network and processes in your organization to those outside of your organization, whether it’s your partners, clients, or developers.
Working with Experts
If all of this feels overwhelming or you’re worried about needing to hire an internal team to manage your Salesforce account, luckily you don’t need to be overwhelmed. Salesforce administrators, architects, and certified consultants help manage the day-to-day and bigger projects for your company.
Not sure how to get started? You can request a Salesforce Healthcheck or get in contact with us directly.
