What is Salesforce?
Growing a business is not easy. It requires boosting sales but it is not merely selling the product or service to existing and prospective customers. A business is successful only if it has a systematic and efficient way of gathering leads so that they can be converted to sales and ultimately loyal customers. After so much research and analysis on the various customer relationship management software’s, Salesforce is recommended as the best CRM software for businesses as it offers everything needed to make it faster and easier to close sales for a business. Here are some convincing reasons as to why it is the best CRM software in the market.
On-Premise vs Cloud based CRM
CRM software solutions were offered in an ‘on-premise’ delivery model 15 years ago. Companies installed the software on their servers and maintained it in-house. However, with the on-premise CRM, IT companies had to take on the technical responsibilities which include system design, infrastructure and server management. This paved way for a novel kind of CRM – the Cloud based CRM. In any cloud based CRM, applications are hosted by the vendor and organizations can gain access to data through the web without having to worry about any technical aspects of managing it. Cloud CRM has become popular over time upsetting the concept of the on-premise CRM model because there was no software licensing fee involved, the organization did not need dedicated IT staff or infrastructure. This has in turn reduced the cost of monthly services and eased the set up process.
What is Salesforce CRM?
Organizations were in need of a cloud CRM to deal with all sorts of customer concerns varying from marketing and sales to customer service – to streamline the enterprise and help in saving valuable resources and time. Salesforce was founded in 1999 by former Oracle executive Marc Benioff, Parker Harris, Dave Moellenhoff, and Frank Dominguez – with a vision to reinvent the Cloud CRM model and now, Salesforce defines the new era of cloud computing.
What does Salesforce do?
Salesforce is cloud based CRM software, developed to make organizations function efficiently and profitably by reducing the cost of managing hardware infrastructure. Salesforce offers a wide range of features in all the functional areas of a company:
Salesforce in Marketing Team
Salesforce professional edition helps the marketing team of a company create and track various marketing campaigns to measure the success rate and automatically provide leads to the sales team of the company.
Salesforce in Customer Support Team
Salesforce also keeps a track of various customer issues and tracks them for resolution based on various escalation rules such as the importance of the client and elapsed time. This improves customer satisfaction levels as the issues do not fall through loopholes and are directly escalated to the next level.
Salesforce in Management
With visual dashboards and extensive reporting features, Salesforce provides the management of a company with visibility on what is happening in different teams.
Salesforce in Training
Salesforce has very robust training and support features that are above industry standards. Salesforce users can easily find answers to their questions from the extensive online help manual and the video walk facility.
Salesforce in Application Integration
Salesforce can be integrated with other systems to extend its functionality through the Salesforce business app store – the AppExchange. Salesforce CRM was awarded as the World’s Most Innovative Company by Forbes Innovators for 4 continuous years (2011-2014). Salesforce also featured in FORTUNE’s 100 Best Companies to work for in 2012-2014. With over 2 million customers (amassed in a short while) which include popular data giants namely Fujitsu, Facebook, Coca-Cola, L’Oreal, Sony, and Vodafone – Salesforce CRM is truly the undisputed market leader in the CRM Software market . Integrator Bluewolf interviewed close to 450 client companies and concluded that 84% of the enterprises believe in customer engagement as the primary key element for future growth of the enterprise. Buyers perceive Salesforce as the platform integral for rendering qualitative customer engagement experience. Tien Tzuo, the present CEO of Zuora and ex-CMO of Salesforce said that “CRM Software is an entry point. What we (Salesforce) are planning to be is the business web. That means that we want to be the platform for all business apps. When a business starts its day, they open up their apps on us and all day, all their apps are running on our foundation.
