How to Improve Your Sales Pipeline Using Salesforce

Unless you are living under a rock, you must have heard of Salesforce.

Salesforce started as Software as a Service (SaaS) CRM company. Today, it is known for an application which is powerful enough to handle all kinds of business needs. It understands your requirements or problems and provides you with cloud-based solutions.

Here, you don’t need your own infrastructure or get involved in hefty installations since everything is governed by Salesforce. Having a B2B model, it is used by leading companies like Apple, Facebook, Google, etc. With the Salesforce application, one would be able to find a Customer Insight with a reasonable comprehension of their needs and treat every customer according to those needs.

Some of the comprehensive range of cloud services offered by Salesforce are:

Sales cloud– It is a CRM tool to help the sales team to find more customers and enhance the overall sales process.

Service cloud– It is known for is 24/7 responsive services. It provides seamless customer support and instant connectivity.

Marketing cloud– It helps marketers to create and manage marketing relationships and campaigns with customers.

Community cloud– It is an online platform for organizations to connect customers, partners, vendors, and employees with each other.

Commerce cloud– It is used to create a personalized eCommerce experience.

Now that we know what salesforce is about so let’s go ahead and discuss about how to improve your sales pipeline by using it.

What is a Sales Pipeline?

The sales pipeline is a visual approach to selling a product or service. It covers every phase of your sales process helping you discover new opportunities as you move further.

But how can you increase your sales pipeline using Salesforce? Let’s find out.

1. Work as a team

To be able to create a great sales pipeline, the marketing and sales team should be able to work together towards the same goal, i.e. generating business.

The sales team needs to be in constant touch with the marketing team and inform them about the kind of leads they are looking for. They will give a thorough idea of what a quality lead would look like.

The marketing team, on the other hand, use the following methods to generate quality and desirable needs:

Website
Search engine optimization
Email marketing
Content marketing

Keeping harmony between the sales and marketing departments will be beneficial for the business to boost sales and increase revenue.

2. Make use of Sales Executive Dashboard

You can see above the sales metrics and track how the sales have been going. Your sales team can generate reports to see what is in your pipeline or forecast sales. With this information, you can make adjustments to your sales goals and change the plans along the path.

3. Sales Automation

Automating your sales pipeline will improve your sales and will be an effective step for your business.

Contact Management– It helps to keep track of all the customer information like phone numbers, emails, and discussions.
Opportunity Management– It works in real-time and helps to change the deals and quotes according to the sales interaction.
Lead Management– more leads will be converted into sales if it is assigned to the right people.
Sales Performance Management– It will create performance summaries and will help create a link between sales data and sales goals.
Sales Forecasting– Having an accurate forecast helps make timely adjustments in real-time.
Files sync and share– It makes sharing and syncing of files with anyone and anywhere in the team easy.
Workflow and approvals– It helps to simplify the approval process and automate any business by just using drag and drop interface.

4. Marketing Automation

It will help your business to target the customers easily. It will do so by sending automated messages across web, social, email, and text.

Marketing and sales make use of marketing automation to carry out various campaigns to generate leads to maximize efficiency. The marketing automation saves time and resources and also increases revenue.

5. Service Automation

It mainly revolves around helping customers and providing support to them.

Automating it makes it easier and faster to provide a service, and each customer can get individual attention.

When an issue has been identified, an action is taken to resolve it quickly. Following are the goals achieved by Service Cloud-

24*7 availability- Always-on-service.

Personalized service- Gives each customer individual attention and unique solution to their problems.

Multi-channel based- Connection is made on customers preferred channel like phone, email, text, etc.

6. Community Cloud

It helps the companies to create a connection between customers, partners, and employees which is important for a business ecosystem.

It provides them the records and data they need to make them work efficiently. Here, you can customize and create various communities depending upon your business needs.

7. Einstein Analytics

It makes use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology that helps the salespeople to analyze the company’s data and automate reports.

It will not only help to improve the sales pipeline, but it will also help in making complex sales forecasting decisions. It will do so by understanding the company’s data, spotting past patterns, identifying trends, sharing insights and taking actions.

What did we learn?

Salesforce is a cloud-based CRM, and its ease of use has made it a leader in this space. Salespeople have a better knowledge of their accounts, opportunities, contacts, all from a single place. This consolidated view helps them to focus on their current deals and make adjustments accordingly.

The generation of reports makes it easier for the salespeople to forecast their sales, track their performance and change their plan according to the sales goals.

And finally, the various automation processes make it easier for them to carry out major tasks in no time and using fewer resources. It helps to manage their accounts, contacts, having a track of potential leads, recognizing opportunities, sharing and syncing of files, etc.

Marketing automation helps to automate the digital marketing strategies. The marketing team doesn’t have to send individual emails or texts to all the customers, a marketing campaign is set up which takes up less time and increases the chances of generating leads.

Service automation makes the business looks a loyal one in front of its customers. When a customer is being reached out on time and is being provided with enough attention and solution, they tend to trust it more and community cloud is there for the company to create interaction between the employers, partners and customers.

Lastly, analytics has always played an important role in every kind of business to improve the sales and to help make the decisions. Sales reps use it to identify older patterns and to draw a conclusion out of it, it could also be used to analyse a situation to make forecasting easier.

Improving sales pipeline through salesforce will be a combination of all these factors and implementing these to your business can help you grow effectively and efficiently.

Let us know what methods you use to improve your sales pipeline by using Salesforce in the comments section.

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