Salesforce Sales Cloud

SalesForce is among the most well-known CRM software. Most of our salespeople had an experience working with SalesForce before and hence, the learning curve was very little. SalesForce is powerful and functionally rich. It is a complete end-to-end customer relationship management. It works directly from lead to potential to upsell and cross-sell. One tool and all your customer relationship management needs are met. The Salesforce has capabilities that include, sales management, marketing automation, partner relationship management and customer service. These help organizations manage customer accounts, track sales leads, conduct and monitor marketing campaigns and provide service post sale. We used it primarily for converting and tracking leads. However, it can easily do more and has the power to do very complex workflow and analytics when/if needed. Since it is a hosted solution, you can get started almost immediately. Just sign up for an account, fill your information and that is it. You are done! Salesforce has a plugin/ sync with Outlook that allows you to synchronize contacts, calendars, emails and tasks in both places to reduce double entry. This ability is delivered via the cloud, and hence, can be synced regardless of whether the activity was performed at home or during the commute or in office.

Although, SalesForce is intuitive and easy to administer, for a new user it can be slightly overwhelming to use and learn the first time around. It has plenty of options and slightly difficult workflows. A lot of manual work is required to keep the data and corresponding reports clean. Hence, it is quite a work for sales administrators. Some of this can be automated and improved with cleaner UX/ UI experience. Although you can use a good feature rich solution if you are a small business, the enterprise solution is the one which has powerful scheduling, call script specification and business workflow, setup approval and automation.

SalesForce is a great customer relationship management tool and covers all the aspects of a customer lifecycle. It works fantastic for lead and sales pipeline. However, it also is fantastic for other aspects like upselling, cross-selling, support and marketing. The great inbuilt reports and analytics can be used either in standard format or the custom format. In addition, the wide variety of pricing options makes it great for small as well as big merchants.