You might not realize it yet, but every time you log in to salesforce.com you're accessing an extremely powerful lever of change for you, your group, and your company.
Sounds like a tall order but consider this: What value do you put on your customer relationships? If you're a sales rep, it's your livelihood. And if you're in management, you have fewer assets more valuable than your existing customer base. What if you had a tool that could truly help you manage your customers?
Salesforce.com isn't the first customer relationship management (CRM) system to hit the market, but it's dramatically different. Unlike traditional CRM software, salesforce.com is an Internet service. You sign up, log in through a browser, and it's immediately available. (Salesforce.com and other companies call this new computing model an on demand model.) Salesforce.com customers typically say that it's different for three major reasons:
Effective: Because it's easy to use and can be customized quickly to meet business needs, customers have proven that it has improved their bottom lines.
With salesforce.com, you now have a full suite of services to manage the lifecycle of your customer. This includes tools to pursue leads, manage accounts, track opportunities, resolve cases, and more. Depending on your team's objectives, you might use all salesforce.com tools from day one or just the functionality to address the priorities at hand.
The more you and your team adopt salesforce.com into your work, the more information you'll have at your fingertips to deepen customer relationships and improve your overall business.
In this chapter, I let you in on the many the great things that you can do with salesforce.com. Then, I describe how you can extend salesforce.com to work with many of the common applications that you already use. Finally, I help you decide which salesforce.com edition is right for you just in case you're still evaluating your options.
Using Salesforce.com to Solve Critical Business Challenges
I could write another book telling you all the great things you can do with salesforce.com, but you can get the big picture from this chapter. So instead, I focus this section on the most common business challenges that I hear from sales and marketing executives - and how salesforce.com can overcome them.
Understanding your customer
How can you sell and retain a customer if you don't understand their needs, people, and what account activities and transactions have taken place? With salesforce.com, you can track all your important customer data in one place so that you and your teams can develop solutions that deliver real value to your customers.
Centralizing contacts under one roof
How much time have you ever wasted tracking down a customer contact, an organizational chart, or even an address that you know exists within the walls of your company? With salesforce.com, you can quickly centralize and organize your accounts and contacts so that you can capitalize on that information when you need to.
Expanding the funnel
Inputs and outputs, right? The more leads you generate and pursue, the greater the chance that your revenue will grow. So the big question is, "How do I make the machine work?" With salesforce.com, you can plan, manage, measure, and improve lead generation, qualification, and conversion. You can see how much business is generated, sources, and who internally is making it happen.
Consolidating your pipeline
Pipeline reports are reports that give companies insight into future sales, and forecast reports let them confidently predict what accounts will close in a period. Yet I've worked with companies where generating the weekly pipeline or forecast could take a day of guess work. Reps waste time updating spreadsheets. Managers waste time chasing reps and scrubbing data. Bosses waste time tearing their hair out. With salesforce.com, you can shorten or eliminate that wasted exercise. As long as reps manage opportunities in salesforce.com, managers can generate updated pipeline and forecast reports with the click of a button.
Working as a team
How many times have you thought that your own co-workers got in the way of selling? Nine out of ten times, the challenge isn't people, but standardizing processes and clarifying roles and responsibilities. With salesforce.com, you can define teams and processes for sales, marketing, and customer service, so the left hand knows what the right hand is doing. Although salesforce.com doesn't solve corporate alignment issues, you now have the tool that can drive and manage better team collaboration.
Collaborating with your partners
In many industries, selling directly is a thing of the past. To gain leverage and cover more territory, many companies work through partners. With salesforce.com, your channel reps can track and associate partners and end customers at the same time. With a tool that allows you to target and manage your partner relationships, you can build more mindshare and grow the channel business.
Beating the competition
How much money have you lost to competitors? How many times did you lose a deal only to discover, after the fact, that it went to a competitor? If you know who you're up against, you can probably better position yourself to win the opportunity. With salesforce.com, you and your teams can track competition on deals, collect competitive intelligence, and develop action plans to wear down your foes.
Improving customer service
As a sales person, have you ever walked into a customer's office expecting a renewal only to be hit with a landmine because of an unresolved customer issue? And if you work in customer support, how much time do you waste on an inquiry trying to identify the customer and their entitlements? With salesforce. com, you can efficiently capture, manage, and resolve customer issues. By managing cases in salesforce.com, sales reps get visibility into the health of their accounts, and service is better informed of sales and account activity.
Accessing anytime, anywhere
Companies are more mobile than ever before. People work from home or on the road. Offices are spread out. You expect to get access to information from multiple devices, easily and reliably. With salesforce.com, you can access and manage your critical customer information, at 3 p.m. or 3 a.m., online or offline, in multiple languages, and from multiple devices.
Measuring the business
How can you improve what you can't measure? Simple, huh, and yet how many companies have you worked for that couldn't accurately or reliably measuring the business? If you and your teams use salesforce.com correctly and regularly to manage customers, you have data to make informed decisions. That benefits everyone. If you're a rep, you know what you need to do to get the rewards you want. If you're a manager, you can pinpoint where to get involved to drive your numbers. And with salesforce.com's reporting and dashboards, you have easy-to- use tools to measure and analyze your business.
Extending the Value Chain
Salesforce.com understands that most companies already rely on existing tools for parts of their businesses. Such tools might include your e-mail, Office tools, your public Web site, and your intranet. Salesforce.com isn't naive enough to think people will stop using common productivity tools. In fact, you can readily integrate salesforce.com with many of the tools you use today to interact with your customers.
Synchronizing with Outlook
If you work for a company, you probably use Microsoft Outlook every day for common tasks, such as maintaining your address book, managing your calendar, and jotting down your to do list. With Intellisync for salesforce.com, you can synchronize that information bi-directionally at your discretion. So you can continue to work with your familiar tools, and even if you're not online, you can still get access to important contact information.
Working with Outlook e-mail
E-mail is a standard way in which businesses communicate today. Not every e-mail you send or receive needs to be in salesforce.com, but you might want to retain the important customer e-mail threads. By doing this, you and your team can stay up to date on e-mail discussions. With Outlook Edition for salesforce. com, you can still continue to send and receive e-mail with Outlook, but you can easily capture those e-mails on your records in salesforce.com. You can also create a case directly from an e-mail. In fact, with Outlook Edition, you never have to leave Outlook to access salesforce.com.
Working with Word and Excel
If you're like me, you can't live without Microsoft Word or Excel. With Office Edition for salesforce.com, you can log in to salesforce.com from both Word and Excel. What that means to you, productivity-wise, is potentially dramatic. With Word, you can use salesforce.com to automatically generate personalized quote forms, proposals, and agreements. With Excel, you can construct a complex report and update it with data from salesforce.com with the click of a button.
Integrating with your Web site
For many companies, the public Web site is a primary way to communicate information to their customers. You might use your Web site as a channel for visitors to request information or log customer service issues. With salesforce. com, you can capture leads and cases directly from your Web site and route them directly into salesforce.com and assign them to the right reps. And with salesforce.com's assignment rules, you can make sure that incoming leads or cases get to the right reps in a timely manner. With minimal effort, you can even offer self-service options in the form of a public knowledge base or a private portal, enabling customers to help themselves.
Connecting to other Web sites
As part of your job, you might regularly use public or private Web sites for tasks like researching potential customers, driving directions, and getting the inside scoop on your competition. With the help of your system administrator and creativity, your company can build Web integration links in salesforce. com that can connect you directly with the relevant pages of important sites. Accessing your intranet; populating a Web form to provision a demo; creating and propagating a salesforce.com record - all these are within reach. And all this means time saved for you.
Integrating with other applications
Your company might have other applications with critical customer data - financial and enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications are just a few examples. Many applications provide unique and indispensable value to your organization. Your company isn't going to retire them just because you're using salesforce.com. But based on company objectives, those applications might need to integrate with salesforce.com. With salesforce.com's open architecture, your company can make this happen with the right technical assistance.
Building your own tabs
When you log in to salesforce.com, you see several tabs. Salesforce.com prioritized the development of each of those tabs based on core sales, marketing, and customer service functions. But depending on your business needs, you might require other tabs with different functionality. Order entry, expenses, and benefits are just a few examples. With salesforce.com's CustomForce (its customization toolkit), sforce (its development platform), and your existing development tools, your company can easily build custom tabs with unique hosted applications to fit your specific business needs.
Deciding Which Edition Is Best for You
If you already use salesforce.com, this topic might be a moot point. At the very least, you'll know which version of salesforce.com you have.
Salesforce.com has five versions of its award-winning Internet service. All versions have the same consistent look and feel, but each varies by feature, functionality, and pricing. (If you're considering using salesforce.com for your CRM needs, you should consult with an account executive for more details.)