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increases internal awareness and collaboration on the business issues that matter the most to you, so you’re always up to date and never caught unawares.

       Working as a team

      How many times have you thought that your own co-workers got in the way of selling? Oftentimes, the challenge isn’t the people, or even the technology, but standardizing processes and clarifying roles and responsibilities. A CRM system will let you define teams and processes for sales, marketing, and customer service so that the left hand knows what the right hand is doing. It should also be flexible enough to change all those team members the next time a reorg happens. Although a CRM system doesn’t solve corporate alignment issues, the tool should drive and manage better team collaboration.

       Extending your sales force with partners

      In many industries, selling directly is a thing of the past. To gain leverage and cover more territory, many companies work through partners. CRM systems should let your channel team track and associate partners’ deals and get better insight about who their top partners are. Partners now can strengthen their relationships with their vendors by collaborating more easily on joint sales and marketing efforts.

       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 your archenemy? If you know who you’re up against, you can probably better position yourself to win the opportunity. CRM systems let you and your teams track competition on deals, collect competitive intelligence, and develop action plans to wear down your foes.

       Improving the customer experience

      As a salesperson, have you ever walked into a customer’s office expecting a bed of roses 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 trying to identify the customers and reviewing the context of previous support interactions? A CRM system should let you efficiently capture, manage, and resolve a high volume of customer issues that come in from a variety of communication channels. The customer relationship doesn’t end once they’ve bought your product – that’s just the beginning. A CRM system should allow sales reps to have visibility into the health of their accounts, and service can stay well informed of sales and account activity.

       Measuring the business

      How can you improve what you can’t measure? Simple, huh? If you use your CRM system 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. A CRM system’s reporting and dashboards should provide easy-to-use tools to measure and analyze your business.

Selecting Salesforce as Your Customer Relationship Management System

      Salesforce wasn’t the first CRM system to hit the market, but it’s dramatically different from the other CRM systems you may have used (spreadsheets and sticky notes count as a system, too!). Unlike traditional CRM software, Salesforce is the first successful business application offered as an Internet service. You sign up and log in through a browser, and it’s immediately available. We currently call this cloud computing, where the customers access “the cloud” (that is, the Internet) for their business needs, and are not required to install any traditional software on, presumably, Earth. As long as you have an Internet connection, you can be anywhere in the world and have access to the clouds.

      You may already be at a company that uses cloud-based applications, as Salesforce.com’s success has spawned a whole new marketplace full of business applications done “in the cloud.” Or you may just be entering the workforce, but you’re very familiar with the use of Internet-applications in your personal life (think Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook). If this is your first foray into cloud computing, you may be taking a first step by yourself or with the rest of your company. Don’t worry – your company made the right choice by picking Salesforce.

      Salesforce customers typically say that it’s unique for three major reasons:

      ❯❯ It’s fast. When you sign on the dotted line, you want your CRM system up and running yesterday. Traditional CRM software can take more than a year to deploy; compare that to months or even weeks with Salesforce.

      ❯❯ It’s easy. End user adoption is critical to any application, and Salesforce wins the ease-of-use category hands down. You can spend more time putting it to use and less time figuring it out.

      ❯❯ It’s 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.

      Salesforce’s success has empowered a whole new generation of managers and administrators to become business operations gurus. Cloud computing’s generally lower licensing costs, its ability to allow system configuration to happen with no prior programming experience, and its ability to make modifications quickly to the system mean that newer businesses can compete with slower, older, bigger competitors, but at a fraction of the cost.

      In the next chapter, we cover more specifics about Salesforce.com’s products.

      Chapter 2

      Discovering Salesforce.com’s Products

      IN THIS CHAPTER

      Selling effectively with Sales Cloud

      Enhancing leads with Marketing Cloud

      Improving customer service with Service Cloud

      Deciding what Salesforce size fits you

      Now that you have a general idea about what Salesforce is, let’s delve into the various products that Salesforce.com offers. Generally speaking, the products we cover here fall into the three major categories or departments traditionally used to understand customer relationship management (CRM): sales, marketing, and service.

      You may not have thought about it yet, but if you think about the basic structure of CRM, it follows the customer journey from pre-sales to sales and finally post-sales. In other words, marketing departments market the business to spark interest in a customer base and attract potential leads for your sales teams. When those leads are good and qualified, the lead is handed off to sales to close a deal. After the sale, the customer interacts with customer support for service, questions, or feedback about the product sold.

      When you step back and look at the big picture, this entire life cycle centers around the customer. As you can see, we’re trying to sufficiently hammer home the fact that Salesforce.com and its products are all about enhancing the relationship between your business and your customer. Although it’s important to see this big picture, Salesforce.com also recognizes that the devil is in the details, especially from your customers’ perspective. Salesforce.com encourages its users to capture customer details and use them to improve this customer relationship.

      In this chapter, we discuss three of Salesforce.com’s products and show you how they can transform a relationship between an organization and its customer base. First, we show you how you can improve your selling with Sales Cloud. Then we talk about Marketing Cloud – how it improves lead quality and automates important marketing tasks. Then we look at customer support and the features of Service Cloud that streamline it. Finally, we wrap up the chapter by helping you decide which Salesforce edition is right for you.

Using Sales Cloud to Win More Deals

      Sales Cloud helps companies increase their sales success in a number of ways that we describe in the next few pages. But first, it’s important to note that any system you use is only as good as the data entered in it. This is an important point that cannot be emphasized enough throughout this book. If your data is stale and outdated or just plain incorrect, the entire infrastructure built around it is essentially worthless. And that’s why user adoption is so important. With Salesforce, it’s easy to put in place a number of guardrails to ensure that the integrity of your data isn’t compromised. Assuming that data is up to date and

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