What is Salesforce?
Salesforce is a type of software called CRM (or Customer Relationship Management). How much revenue does each customer bring in? How many of your customers found you via your facebook page? Is the expense of your SEO efforts providing a profit? Salesforce was designed to help answer all of these questions and more.
Any business that has recurring customers, clients, or patients, needs a way to track and manage this list. And leveraging an accurate list of customers allow a business to more accurately allocate their budget for marketing in the future. This last is the primary reason a small business should begin using Salesforce when they were not previously. Continue reading below to understand the basics of how a business can best leverage Salesforce with a basic example. Or, follow the link here to see directly what Salesforce has to say about CRM software.
It's all about scaling
No matter what the nature of your business is, if you want to continue growing you will someday need to embrace the necessity of a CRM software. CRM allows a business to track customers, the revenue earned, and all interactions your company has with any customer in detail and across multiple touchpoints.
When a business begins spending money on marketing or grows to a scale that has multiple employees, the importance of utilizing CRM grows exponentially. Tracking and documentations increases in importance with every layer of complexity added a to a business. In this case, adding a layer of complexity includes things such as hiring a new receptionist or adding a new customer support line. Each time someone related to your business interacts with a customer, it is important to document it. Especially when multiple employees are involved who need to be kept reprised of up-to-date activities.
So then why Salesforce?
The short answer is that compared to any CRM competitors, Salesforce is the biggest and most developed version. There is just no direct competitor that offers as many options with as much flexibility as Salesforce does. Because of it's popularity, the software has been tested in real-world scenarios over and over again. It has been proven that Salesforce works and it works well. However this also comes with a downside.
Because of how big Salesforce is, a lot of complexity and capabilities have been added to the software. Sometimes without fully integrating every capability.
(For example- Pardot was acquired by Salesforce in 2012. At that time, it was an add-on that enhanced Salesforce's marketing automation capabilities. In 2022 after a decade of integrating the tool, Pardot was renamed to "Marketing Cloud Account Engagement". Even still, the remnants of Pardot can be found today and there is still reliance on tools like the Salesforce-Pardot connector)
Salesforce's growth and its need to provide value to a wide range of industries and businesses can make it hard to utilize the tool correctly. Even so, the benefits of Salesforce often outweigh its cost. Once a business's employees are trained in how to utilize the tool, the benefits of Salesforce are immense.