Salesforce for Small Business – An Overview
With your business growing at an exponential rate are you still keeping track of your customers manually? In this post “Salesforce for Small Business”, we cover how Salesforce and a small business CRM can help you improve your customers experience and grow your profits. Manual tracking of customer database and related interactions has major limitations and is a very time-consuming process.
With the evolvement of business in modern times, the perfect automated solution to manage your client base and their interactions is using a system called CRM or Customer Relationship Management.
CRM is a technology for both small and large businesses to organize, manage and synchronize various facet of interaction with their clients. It can be used for sales & marketing, customer service & support. The purpose of using CRM is to improve the relationship with existing clients, to streamline various processes, to increase employee productivity and all this leads to an increase in the company’s profitability.
How does A CRM work? Salesforce for Small Business
CRM uses data analysis of your customer’s history with the company. The prime focus is to retain the customer by giving excellent support & service. The data is compiled from various channels like your website, email & telephone interaction and social media. You can also gather more information about your target audience and cater to their needs specifically. Thus new leads are created which boosts the company’s sales.
Many companies offer CRM services in the U.S. So how should you choose the best CRM for your business? The solution is to scout and identify valuable features of the software and how it will add value to your business.
What are the Features of Salesforce?
Salesforce is the leader in CRM software solutions. Salesforce is a renowned cloud-based processing company known for its CRM software. This software can be customized as per the size of the business. Salesforce helps in task and lead management. It also helps in email marketing and customer service.
Salesforce is excellent to manage existing as well as new clients for a small business. It is a cloud-based application. Small businesses need not invest in installing new softwares. The user needs to simply log in to the cloud to get real-time information on customer data. It is supported on all popular browsers like Explorer, Chrome, and Opera.
It is beneficial for businesses to track their sales & marketing team’s productivity. It gives records of the number of tasks completed, calls made to customers and email sent on a day-to-day basis.
It also provides services of social media networking. Online marketing can be managed more efficiently. New customers can be sourced using various tools provided by the software. The customer service aspect can be managed efficiently and the customer satisfaction index is high for businesses using this software.
The revenue of Salesforce has grown over 30% over the last 5 years. This indicates its popularity and ease of use among various businesses. Salesforce for Small Business.
What are the Plans Salesforce offers?
Salesforce has 4 monthly plans. You can avail a free trial for 15 days for all plans. All the plans are billed annually.
The basic Sales Essentials starts at $25 per user. This is best for lead management. It can be started instantly without any major setup. This is best for newly set-up small businesses as it supports up to 10 users.
Professional is the plan for any team size and it gives complete CRM support. Campaign management is its best feature. The fees are $75 per user. Enterprise is the most popular plan as it provides complete customization as per your business needs with features like advanced reporting. This plan will cost you $150 per user. Unlimited as the name suggests gives unlimited CRM support for businesses for $300 per user.
Should A Small Business Use Salesforce?
Over 100,000 businesses use Salesforce as per recent data. Most of the businesses are based in US.
Salesforce is best suited for companies having 10-50 employees and revenue in around 1 to 10 million dollars.
16% of software companies use Salesforce for CRM. The other industries where Salesforce has gained momentum are Information technology and services, Financial Services, Hospitals and Health Care, Marketing & Advertising, NGO, Management Consulting, Staffing and Recruiting, Computer Hardware and last but not the least Retail sector.
In terms of company size, 44% are small companies. Such companies have a staff size of less than 50 people. 40% are medium sized companies and 17% are large having a staff size above 1000. In terms of revenue, the majority are small businesses having less than $50 million turnover.
Few companies using Salesforce includes giants like Google, Vodafone, American Express, Toyota and Adidas.
In short Salesforce CRM can give you targeted accounts as per the size and industry type of the company basis location.
Conclusion – Salesforce for Small Business
Salesforce is best suited for small businesses for sales and support. Since it is cloud-based the setup cost is zero. The company can choose any one of 4 monthly plans available. The plans cater to the needs of small, medium and large businesses.
Salesforce helps in lead generation and management, provides excellent customer management and email management, and gives sales insight on a real-time basis. It is the best software to check your team productivity. It helps you track employee’s tasks assigned and completed, the number of calls made and emails sent on a day-to-day basis. This software has cross-sell and up-sell tools that are of great help to the sales team interacting with the customer. It gives accurate sales forecasts. It creates quotes. Salesforces also gives customized dashboards and reports in line with your business needs.
This is one of the best software to manage your current customer base and to boost sales through lead management. It can be easily integrated with other platforms providing a seamless experience. It can be easily accessed through the Saleforce app.
It is user-friendly and Salesforce offers a free training tutorial named Trailhead. In today’s highly competitive market providing customer the ‘Wow factor’ is essential because everything trickles down to ‘how’ and not ‘what’ you deliver to the customer. Salesforce helps you to anticipate your customers need and provide the “Wow Factor”.
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