Five More Ways Using Salesforce® Can Help Small and Medium-Sized Businesses (SMBs)
Small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) face unique challenges: individual employees may be spread thin and often perform a wide-range of tasks; sales territories may not be clearly-defined and processes and procedures often remain undocumented, ad-hoc and inefficient.
In our work helping SMBs to use Salesforce effectively, we often see recurring issues (regardless of the industry) which we work identify and address.
The benefits to SMBs of using Salesforce will greatly outweigh the cost and often the cost is not nearly as prohibitive as many SMBs expect. Many of the recommendations listed below can be implemented with Professional Edition (PE) of Salesforce which is less expensive than Enterprise (EE) Edition.
Tip #1- Salespeople Should be Proactive vs. Reactive
The Issue:
Salespeople at many mid-market businesses often primarily react to incoming calls and emails, as opposed to proactively identifying and calling on new and unfamiliar prospects.
How Using Salesforce Can Help:
Salesforce provides a fully relational CRM system to organize their leads and prospects, index and prioritize them in a more robust way than can be done using spreadsheets, or personal contact management systems.
Tip #2- Don’t Let Employees Duplicate the Same Tasks
The Issue:
Employees in different locations are frequently re-creating sales and marketing documents as they work independently in isolation.
How Using Salesforce Can Help:
Standardizing documents as well as saving and leveraging the use of newly created documents using Salesforce templates or libraries will ensure consistency, quality control and efficiency.
Tip #3- Define and Allocate Precise Sales Territories
The Issue:
Mid-market businesses have limited sales resources and important customers and prospects are often assigned to the more experienced sales professionals. Salespeople often have geographic limitations, or industry-specific biases and high potential opportunities which emerge in out-of-the-way locations or unfamiliar industries may be neglected.
How Using Salesforce Can Help:
Using standard Salesforce functionality such as Lead Assignment rules, Account and Opportunity Teams and enhancing the industry indexing will ensure that every prospect is properly assigned and reporting to ensure adequate follow-up can be created.
Tip #4- Align Marketing Activities & Sales Activities
The Issue:
· Mid-market companies frequently outsource their marketing activities to small outside marketing firms who do campaigns on the company behalf on their own marketing systems or export the company data into disconnected point solution email tools.
How Using Salesforce Can Help:
Utilizing the standard Campaign functionality to create campaigns, and learning to manage and create your own marketing activities such as email campaigns and landing pages using Pardot® provide a more integrated approach and track the efforts of these marketing campaigns inside the Salesforce record.
Tip #5- Ensure Company Thinks Globally
The Issue:
Even small companies conduct business globally today. If they don’t have an international sales force directly, they may have a distributor or agent channel in other countries.
How Using Salesforce Can Help:
Salesforce Partner, Portal and Community Licenses allow use of your Salesforce system by various third-party organizations. In addition, multi-language and multi-currency features are part of Salesforce standard functionality and can be leveraged by foreign sales partners.
Disclaimer:
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors. Examples cited in this article are only examples. Salesforce®, Pardot® are trademarks of Salesforce.com, inc.
© 2019 Edgemont CRM, LLC. All Rights Reserved – November 2019
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