How Can Salesforce Help a Small Business? 8 Essential Ways

You’ve probably heard about Salesforce, but you might think it’s for bigger businesses than yours. That isn’t the case; Salesforce can help even the smallest businesses in a large number of ways. Read on to discover how Salesforce can help your small business.

Why Your Small Business Needs Salesforce

Salesforce is s customer relationship management (CRM) platform. It helps your sales, marketing, and support staff do their jobs better – and better understand your customers.

The many services offered by Salesforce.

One of the challenges of running a small business is that you and your staff have to wear many different hats. Salesforce research reveals that two-thirds of small business owners personally handle at least three important company areas.

Wouldn’t it be nice to offload some of those responsibilities – and, at the same time, find new ways to grow your business? That’s what Salesforce does. By automating and tracking all of your customer interactions, Salesforce can gather an incredible amount of information about your customers. Not only does Salesforce take some of the tedious busywork off your plate, but it also provides you with a deeper understanding of who your customers are and how you can better serve them. This is especially important as your business grows and you can’t speak face to face with every customer yourself.

The following video details just what Salesforce is and what it does.

How Salesforce Can Help a Small Business: 8 Ways

How can Salesforce help your small business? Here are eight important ways.

1. Provides a Deeper Understanding of Your Customers

Salesforce collects a wealth of data about your customers. All of this data is essential to obtaining a deeper understanding of your customers – who they are, what they need, what they purchase, and more. If you know about your customers, you can serve them better – and you can better predict what they want in the future.

2. Enables Better Customer Service

Being smarter about your customers helps you provide more effective and efficient customer service. Because Salesforce tracks every customer interaction, you know when they contacted you last and why. When a customer contacts you about an issue, you know exactly what they discussed on the previous call, so they don’t waste time re-explaining things. That helps you resolve customer issues more quickly – and, for 90% of customers contacting your company, issue resolution is what matters most.

3. Builds Stronger Customer Relationships

Building stronger customer relationships is important, and Salesforce helps you do that. The detailed customer information collected by Salesforce helps your sales reps better anticipate and meet customer needs, which helps to build that trust. With Salesforce, no customer is a stranger.

Why building strong customer relationships is important.

All of this works to improve customer satisfaction and customer retention. Customers who’ve established a personal relationship with your business are more likely to remain customers over the long term. With a better experience offered comes more loyal customers who will stay for life.

4. Identifies the Highest Quality Leads

When it comes to finding new customers, many small businesses find that Salesforce helps them better identify and develop high-quality leads. Instead of the traditional shotgun approach to finding new customers, Salesforce is like a rifle shot in identifying new leads. Salesforce analyzes your existing customer base to build detailed profiles of your ideal prospects. By focusing on the highest potential leads, you don’t waste valuable time pursuing low-quality prospects. Your sales reps spend more time on quality leads and experience a higher close rate.

5. Reduces Sales Costs

By prioritizing the highest-quality leads, your salespeople spend less time on less productive activities. You spend less money acquiring new customers and retaining more existing customers, which is a winning combination for growing your business and reducing your sales costs. In addition, your salespeople reduce their time-to-close with better leads, which lets them pursue even more leads that can lead to more business. With Salesforce, there’s no more costly cold calling.

6. Automates Marketing Activities

Salesforce isn’t just for sales. Many small businesses use Salesforce to better target their marketing activities based on all the data collected about their customer base. Salesforce lets you better understand the customer journey and market more effectively at each stage of the process. You take a lot of guesswork from the marketing process and automate many activities, improving your productivity by up to 20%.

7. Increases Productivity

Speaking of productivity, Salesforce CRM can increase productivity across your entire business. By automating many of your sales processes, you eliminate costly and time-consuming manual data entry. This reduces your back-office costs and frees up your salespeople for more productive work. With Salesforce, your small business will run more smoothly across the board – with far less tedious busywork.

8. Helps You Make Better Decisions

Salesforce helps small business people like you make better decisions. You have more data at your fingertips, which helps you develop a more informed long-term strategy and better manage your business on a day-to-day basis. That alone makes Salesforce worth the investment.

Let Rainmaker Help You Use Salesforce in Your Business

Salesforce helps you better manage and grow your business, while Rainmaker helps you implement Salesforce. Our experienced Salesforce experts can help you plan and execute a successful Salesforce integration, so you get all the benefits of Salesforce with zero hassle. After you’re set up, we can provide a wide variety of Salesforce Managed Services to help you get even more out of the Salesforce platform. We’ve helped hundreds of businesses just like yours get the most out of Salesforce.

Contact Rainmaker today to learn more about using Salesforce in your small business.

Related Resources