Any Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution can seem like a significant investment for a small-to-medium business. When you’re considering an industry-leading solution for your business, like Salesforce, the idea of adoption can be intimidating. 

It is undoubtedly worth the time investment to evaluate if Salesforce is the right CRM for your business. Nucleus Research, which assesses products based on usability, functionality, and overall value, continues to put Salesforce as the leader in the CRM market as of their 2020 report. More importantly, however, Nucleus Research reports that the ROI of owning a CRM is impressive and growing. The average return for a CRM is $8.71 for every dollar spent.

So, the question isn’t so much the value of a CRM, but if Salesforce is the right one for you. To determine that, there are three (3) vital points that every SMB should consider before leaping into Salesforce to ensure the investment is the right one for you.

Evaluating Salesforce for your SMB: 3 Critical Criteria to Consider

When you’re investing in a crucial solution like Salesforce, you want to ensure that it will be helpful for your business and that your business is ready for the value that the platform will bring. The following criteria offer a framework for you to begin that evaluation, while the scenarios provide examples of how you might leverage each of the criteria.

As you look at each scenario, consider if your company is ready for the advantages that each can offer to guide you in defining the best use cases of the platform for your organization. Remember, if you feel you’re most of the way there, you don’t have to go it alone. An expert Salesforce consulting firm can help you define the right processes and configurations to get the most out of your Salesforce investments.

Criteria #1: Efficiency

Streamlining sales processes, communication, and customer-related activities are key elements to get the most value out of your CRM. Salesforce can provide this in spades, assuming that your business has the need and maturity to take advantage of its wealth of features (hint: Salesforce offers so many opportunities for efficiency, it would be hard not to find ways where it would help your business).

Here are just a few ways that Salesforce can increase your SMB’s efficiency:

Cloud Access: Because Salesforce is a cloud-based Software as a Service (SaaS) platform, it’s available from anywhere your team is, whether traveling or working remotely. Plus, your IT team has no additional burden to keep up with patches and updates to keep the application running and secure.

Intuitive: A CRM won’t be beneficial for your company if no one uses it. Salesforce’s functionality is relatively straightforward, and there are extensive resources available online to guide users and for training.

Mobile access: Salesforce’s mobile application is a feature-rich solution that offers all of the functionality that your teams need right in the palm of their hands. That extends from sales team members entering a sale into the system while still at the client site to a field service technician registering their location so that customers can be alerted to arrival times and ensuring highly accurate billing.

Criteria #2: Automation

Automation is another key feature that your business should be ready to take advantage of if you implement Salesforce within your organization. Automation can prevent your team from performing the same tedious tasks over and over, can speed communications and approvals, and prevent mistakes caused by human error.

Lead management and routing: Lead management and routing can be quick wins for automation within an organization. For instance, simply pulling leads in from a web form or a social media ad and putting them directly into your Salesforce instance can eliminate delays and remove a task from admins or ASRs, who can then turn to more value-added tasks. Taking that process a step further, Salesforce can be configured to automate lead assignment. Given various criteria - from region to round-robin assignment to industry and more - incoming leads can be automatically assigned to sales team members without delays for manual assignment.

Reporting: Growth in an SMB comes from understanding both your position and your trajectory. Suppose you are unaware of how you are performing against your goals. In that case, it’s impossible to make the adjustments necessary to reach them - or if you do, it was simply serendipity that you can’t replicate. However, Salesforce can take data from within the platform and even from other business systems and produce clear reports and dashboards. The creation of those reports and their delivery can be automated so that the information needed to drive decisions is available in a timely and regular manner - without the overhead of manual creation and distribution.

Approvals: Approvals are another place where Salesforce can automate a task that is slowing down your business. Suppose your business requires approvals from managers or other leaders for discounts or sales, but those approvals can be streamlined below a specific threshold. In that case, Salesforce can quickly route that information from input to order fulfillment without intervention from a sales manager, creating a better customer experience in the process.

Criteria #3: Customer Experience

The result of greater efficiency and streamlined processes through automation is an overall improved customer experience (CX), so it’s no surprise that this is one of the criteria. If your business is searching for ways to improve customer communication and support, accelerate order fulfillment, and elevate customer satisfaction, Salesforce is a means to that end.

Improved Customer Support: It’s challenging to delight a customer when you don’t have all of the information that you need at hand or need to switch between multiple screens and systems to view orders, shipping, billing, and so forth. Salesforce offers the ability for customer success teams to have a single window pane into an account, making it easier to get customers the answers and help they need quickly.

Accelerated ordering processing and visibility: We’ve already discussed that access from anywhere, and the Salesforce mobile application can help speed order placement. This increased access can also give sales teams the ability to update customers about inventory and order times, better setting expectations. Beyond that, Salesforce can help optimize customer needs and experiences across channels, ensuring that they get a seamless and consistent experience from your business at every point of contact.

Conclusion

Not every business is ready for Salesforce, and not every company needs a sophisticated CRM to help manage their customers. But when your business is prepared to take efficiency, automation, and customer experience to the next level, Salesforce can provide you with enterprise-grade functionality tailored to your small to medium business. Even better, Salesforce is set to scale with you and handle your growth and expanded needs as they happen.

Are you thinking about adding Salesforce to your business? Six Consulting can help you determine if it’s the right fit for you and help you to design an implementation plan that gets you up and productive quickly. We’ve helped organizations of all sizes to realize the value of their Salesforce investment quickly and experience significant ROI in no time. Contact us today to learn more about how we can help your business grow.