Streamlining sales processes is essential to maintain consistently high conversion rates. Marketing and sales managers usually have a lot on their plate – converting a website or social media visitors to leads, scheduling meetings, closing deals, and keeping in touch with recurring clients. Routine tasks like filling in spreadsheets and writing follow-ups get in the way of client communication – not to mention that sales managers are not excited to deal with documentation either.
A high customer service staffing optimization demand made sales managers consider using CRMs instead of expanding teams.
Customer relationship management tools automate most monotonous tasks – checking inboxes, updating the client profile, or tracking marketing campaigns. Salesforce – cloud-based CRM solution – is a leader in the industry for a few consecutive years. What is Salesforce, what are its advantages and applications in sales departments? Should you hire salesforce developer teams? Let’s take a closer look at the glorified system.
What Is Salesforce?
Salesforce was the first cloud-based CRM in the market. Despite its name, the company’s software doesn’t improve sales alone – there are solutions like Salesforce Marketing, Service, Analytics, Data, IoT, and more. The platform covers all major facets of client and business management – from salesforce software development to customer support.
Why Companies Use Salesforce?
In 2018, Salesforce had over 150 000 active users. Sales managers use the platform predominantly to handle customer communication – though it’s not Salesforce’s only application.
Here’s why companies use the Salesforce CRM:
- It improves sales reps assessment. Companies often lack conclusive data to determine the quota salespeople need to achieve as proof of excellence. That’s why it’s hard to determine if a rep is underperforming. Salesforce has a leaderboard that concisely shows how all team members of the team performed during a chosen period. By comparing the leaderboards over a long-time frame, you will be able to tell if a manager progresses or has burnt out and helped those who are not happy at work.
- For better communication with prospects. Salesforce cloud technologies are a suite of research tools – you will be able to parse Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, and other social media to get data on a lead. Each prospect has a profile on Salesforce, with the essential data – contact information, interests, and so forth. The platform takes personalization to the next level by sending automated targeted emails to every single lead.
- It makes creating proposals management easier. It takes a lot of time to submit a draft, so sales managers are discouraged from being proactive and bringing changes forth. Salesforce solves the problem by offering dozens of pre-built templates. Using the CRM, it takes minutes to create a good-looking sales proposal.
- To bring unity to the department. Without a CRM, it’s hard to include all sales managers in the decision-making process. Salesforce allows company owners to give everyone on the sales team access to product data and pricing, quotas, marketing campaigns statistics, and so on. This way, sales managers get a full view of the company and are well-prepared for client meetings.
Salesforce helps businesses raise the bar in transparency, decision-making efficiency, and client communication. With the CRM, company managers from BizOp, store all the data in one place, have free access to it from all devices and automate routine tasks – email marketing, campaign monitoring, reporting.
Salesforce Cons For Businesses
Despite its numerous advantages, business managers are often challenged when using Salesforce. Here are a few drawbacks salespeople noticed about the CRM.
- Hidden fees
While Salesforce is a highly functional platform, its most impressive features come with implicit costs. For instance, a business manager needs to be ready to pay extra for a sandbox for app testing and platform customization.
As it is, Salesforce often comes across as heavy on the pocket – so SME owners often can’t afford web APIs and other extra perks.
- The constant need for customization
The Salesforce customer success platform has hundreds of features, some of which your company will never benefit from. To de-clutter the CRM, managers have to hire developers that will improve and customize the platform. On the one hand, a possibility to fully reshape the platform so that it tailors the team’s needs is priceless. On the other, companies that don’t have enough IT workforce will end up with a challenging-to-use platform.
There’s a risk of long employee on boarding and wasting productive man-hours on familiarizing the team with the system.
- Not enough data centers to maintain an extensive user base
Most of Salesforce’s data centers are located in the US and Canada – things are not going so well on the international front. In 2017, the company started opening European data centers – yet, the coverage is a shy cry from extensive. The lack of data centers results in high odds of server downtime, performance errors, system interruptions, and customer service issues.
7 Reasons to Hire Salesforce Developers
Hiring a salesforce solutions developer to maintain the company’s Salesforce environment is a sensible choice from many points of view. For one thing, navigating such a complex system efficiently requires tremendous tech skills and expertise that most sales teams lack. Also, you will be able to redesign the platform so that it corresponds to the company’s vision. According to Mobilunity, there is a great solution to solve this objective, as hiring a dedicated development team of salesforce developers.
Here are seven reasons for how astonishing them salesforce development role in project building is.
- Custom integrations. An experienced team of developers can connect Salesforce to other tools the team uses daily. This shortens the learning curve and creates a one-stop-shop environment for sales management.
- Developing APIs from scratch. Developers help you create a reliable connection between the platform and the company’s database. As it has been mentioned above, Salesforce offers a range of APIs for an extra fee. Instead of investing in a solution that does not fully cater to the business, consider hiring a developer who’ll create a set of proprietary APIs.
- Processes automation. Hire developers to automate tasks like filling in the database, monitoring the team’s performance, tracking marketing campaigns. A dedicated Salesforce team will build a framework that would adjust and navigate the system with no human supervision.
- Support. Tech specialists can help sales teams during on boarding. It is extremely helpful to have a team on standby that’ll consult the team in case of security emergencies or other issues.
- Developing Salesforce-based apps. Instead of having to invest hours in learning to navigate the Salesforce sandbox, let a professional software engineer handle it. At the end of the day, you will have a functional app for team and customer management that’s fully connected to the CRM.
- No need to learn Apex. Hiring a developer who’s fluent in the Salesforce’s proprietary programming languages, you will be able to benefit from complex transactions and workforce. Creating an Apex-based page with no programming prerequisites is nearly impossible – the language is a mix of Java, JS, and C#.
- System administration. A good salesforce developer is often equally well-versed in system administration. Any company that uses Salesforce would benefit a great deal from someone who would monitor the system’s compliance with assignment rules, check and eliminate duplicates, etc.
Conclusion
Salesforce is a CRM that’s powerful like no other. Thanks to a wide range of features and cloud-based access, the platform is leading the way in the CRM industry. However, if you want to leverage its potential to the fullest extent, be sure to hire a Salesforce developer.
This way, a professional will constantly monitor the performance of the system, develop apps and APIs that will further streamline and automate sales processes, and facilitate employee on boarding. The sales team will not have to meddle in tech-related aspects of the system, focusing on efficient lead generation and meeting quotas.
Nicola Holder 