73% of Salesforce.com CRM users are only using 50% of the functionality.*
- It’s like paying for a full dinner, but eating ½ a plate.
- It’s like paying for a whole tank of gas, but only getting ½ a tank.
- It’s like buying a 2-storey home and never going upstairs.
- It’s like…throwing away the other Twix finger.
You get the picture. If you paid for 100% of the system, then get your money’s worth and use 100% of the system. Let us help you.
Here’s 5 Benefits to using the marketing functionality that come with Salesforce CRM system.
1. Give Sales Instant Access to Captured Leads.
Marketing looks for leads from word searches in Google, the business website, the business social media accounts, tradeshows and other source. Salesforce.com offers a web form that captures prospect information and dumps it into the system real time. It can be the contact form on your website, a tab or a link on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn or other social media accounts, it can show up in search results, when using Google Ad Words, you can even have it on a screen in your booth at tradeshows – forget expensive and cumbersome scanners!
Sales Managers, you can chose how these leads are routed – individual sales reps, territories, round-robin queues or however matches your current lead assignment process. Sales reps get instant notification about new leads – so hot leads stay hot.
2. Segmented messaging for Leads
Now that you’ve captured your prospects in Salesforce, you can prioritize sales contact. Each lead can be automatically reviewed by the system and given a “lead score” – which typically is made up of likelihood to close, value to the business, predicted retention rate. The lead score formula is customizable to reflect your business definition of what makes a client valuable. The score can be used to classify hot, warm and cold leads and route them to different teams.
This segmentation helps to keep Sales working on short-term prospects without neglecting long-term prospects. For example, route “hot” leads to Sales, while “warm and cold” leads are put into a marketing contact cycle keep them warm. Once their score improves and they fall into the “hot” category, the prospect is automatically routed to Sales. Sales can have access to all the accounts, but the hot leads are prioritized in their queue. Now Sales can spend the majority of their time with leads that are going to close and are of high value.
3. Know What Marketing is Saying To Your Accounts, and When They’re Saying It.
Professional license and higher
Marketing can create and send emails from Salesforce.com to prospect and customer Accounts using the Mass Email functionality. These mass emails can also be set up under Campaigns. Campaigns simply mark the purpose a group of emails and track the results. For example, you can setup a “60-Day New Product Launch Special” campaign and send info about your new product to a select group of Accounts. The system will keep track of the number of Accounts who received the offer, who responded, who bought and the ROI.
All marketing campaigns show up on theOpportunity, as well as the Account and Contact, so Sales knows which clients have received which promo offers. Very handy to know before you walk into an account to pitch that very product.
If your marketing department is using ExactTarget of other select vendors as their current mass email system, Salesforce.com integration provides access to Sales to the actual copy of the email sent to each Contact. You’ll be able to see any personalized data points in email as well. Very handy to have should clients have questions when you go to visit. If your customer service team is on Salesforce.com, they’ll be able to see these emails too.
4. Professional Email Templates for You
There is also the ability for Sales to email Accounts yourselves directly from Salesforce.com. Marketing can setup branded, written templates that you can customize for your needs – appointment reminders, post-sale thank you, birthdays and more. Now your emails will look as professional as the ones sent from corporate! Plus a record of your email is stored against the Account and Contact. If you prefer your corporate Outlook account, integration is available.
5. Up-To-Date Collateral.
The latest copies of collateral can be stored in the Salesforce.com Libraries. You can store PDFs, PowerPoints, Word and Excel documents, videos, images, and links to external data. Users can subscribe to content and will get an update when the latest version is posted. To get the latest collateral, the user can download it themselves. It’s fast, it’s easy and you don’t have to worry about presenting out-of-date information again. Like the content of a collateral piece or would like to make a suggestion? You can score the collateral (out of 5 stars) and leave comments for the creator. Nice.
Collateral can also be emailed directly from Salesforce to any Contact in the system with an email address. Don’t worry; any document can be excluded from the functionality, so that you’re not sending confidential or internal information to the outside. Salesforce.com also keeps track of when the Contact has viewed your content, making it easier to know when to follow up. You can put an expiry date on the content, after which, it can no longer be viewed, say for a limited time offer.
Plus Salesforce.com offers a plethora of reports to track the effectiveness of your emails, lead sources and more. These reports help refine your marketing efforts to bring in higher quality leads, help sale improve selling cycles, and help your to business grow. Check out this video to watch how these marketing tools work.
Authored by Yvette Montague, Director of Salesforce.com Training at SFTC.
SalesForce Training & Consulting is a Salesforce.com training and Salesforce Management consulting firm based in Toronto, with training centers in Boston and Chicago, helping sales teams get the most out of Salesforce.com.
*Source: Focus.com
by
