Is Salesforce good for small businesses?

No matter your business size, you need a system for targeting new customers, reaching out to them with compelling and customized information, winning their business, and keeping them happy with your service. Therefore, companies should consider investing in a Customer Relationship Management(CRM) software. Small companies can benefit from a CRM since employees often must take on multiple roles.

Why Should a Small Business Consider Salesforce?

Salesforce is the most popular CRM on the market and offers many options for small business owners.

Here are some ways that Salesforce’s CRM can help small businesses manage their sales:

Store your customer and order info in one location

Do you have a single place to store all of your customer information?

Many small businesses store customer information and order data in multiple locations. Others use various platforms to communicate with customers (social media accounts, emails, etc.). 

Salesforce CRM can help you:

• Connect all of your customer data in a single place, regardless of whether it came from your company website, a social media page, an email, a phone call, etc.
• Store all crucial information about a contact (including name, title and email address, video conferencing handle; the date when you last talked and what you discussed; sources of leads and their lead scores; history of their orders; their recent website visits or other engagements with your company; personal data you need to keep the relationship friendly; etc.)
• Allow you to customize your database to fit your company’s needs
• Salesforce customer data platform (CDP) ties together databases that otherwise would not share data (including marketing clouds, service software, and eCommerce engines.

Increase your small business’s visibility

Do you know how your customers are connecting with employees?

Do you know what your salespeople are doing?

Or, if you manage your contracts and sales, do you know where every customer is in the sales process?

Using Salesforce’s CRM, you can:

• Identify the information you need to assess the status of a potential opportunity,
• plan for the appropriate next step, and build a reliable pipeline/case list based on that data.
• Visualize every customer’s  “engagement” with your organization; track their activities; assign the appropriate resource for timely, professional follow-up.
• Automate specific messages to go out to customers who ask similar questions.

Easily Generate and Share Reports

Do you regularly generate reports?

Small business owners and sales managers know that it is crucial to create reports of your monthly sales and track progress against quotas. But, too often, creating reports manually just takes too much time, and tracking gets put on the back burner.

A CRM like Salesforce can help you:

• Create custom reports that meet your specific requirements.
• Access many pre-built reports that you can run automatically or customize to fit your needs.
• The Salesforce Report Builder allows you to add filters and define the fields to display.

Manage Sales On-the-Go

Do you have a mobile solution for tracking sales?

Often, the sales representatives for small businesses will meet prospects in the field. If you don’t have an app you can access from anywhere, you may store vital information on handwritten notes or documents on personal computers or phones.

Salesforce offers: 

• A mobile app that allows you to log calls, track customer data, respond to leads and check dashboards from anywhere
• The app automatically knows where you left off and loads to the screen you were last working on.
• Push notifications appear on your mobile device. For example, if you receive an approval request, you will receive a push notification on your phone or tablet.

Take Advantage of Resale/upsell Opportunities

Do you target new prospects based on their value to your small business?

Some small businesses get overwhelmed and send the same messages or offers to different prospects. All sales teams need to ensure they customize the information they send to potential customers.

Salesforce helps small businesses: 

• Create campaign messages to send single or multi-touch engagements to Contacts, Leads, and Person Accounts.
• You can use Salesforce’s “Segmented Send” to personalize and send messages to smaller groups (segments) of your entire target audience. Segments can contain up to 500 recipients.
• With more limited personalization options, you can use Salesforce’s “Segmented Send” Bulk Send to personalize and send messages to up to 25,000 recipients at once.

Develop a Plan to Scale

Do you have a plan for changing your sales processes as your small business grows into a more significant business?

Can you maintain productivity while you scale up?

A CRM system like Salesforce can provide:

• Analytical tools allow small businesses to gather data for key performance indicators.
• Data collection and accurate sales forecasts.
• Improved customer relations.

How Much Does Salesforce Cost?

Salesforce offers new users a free trial. Small business packages are not the least expensive on the market but are still affordable, starting at $25 per user/month.

What Should a Small Business Do Before Investing in Salesforce?

Every small business should consider investing in a CRM. Salesforce is only one of many excellent CRM options on the market.

Before you purchase any CRM, you should determine how you want to use your CRM and what you want your CRM to do. Then, research your options. Test out multiple CRMs, and consider which solution best fits your needs.

However, since Salesforce is the CRM industry leaderand does offer many services that more niche companies do not. Therefore, all small businesses should consider using one of Salesforce’s products.

Contact us to know more about our products.