What to do if you implement a costly CRM, and find out it cannot cover all your business processes?
If you are a business owner or executive, you don’t need anyone to explain why to use a CRM. Manual is good, and Excel tables will save the world, but at a certain point in a company's life cycle, digital becomes the only efficient answer to enormous data, growing operational complexity, and related chaos. And the world’s statistics prove this statement: 91% of companies with 10+ employees use a CRM to manage client relationships.
However, a proper CRM is not just a pain killer. With the right business vision and technology strategy, CRM adoption can be the first step toward creating a massive operation advantage in the market. Recent surveys of companies in developing and developed countries (2019-2022) reveal the fantastic outputs a CRM can have:
Sales teams using CRM confirmed that job satisfaction increased by 17%.
When the customer journey is properly embodied into the CRM funnel, the conversion rates may increase up to 300%.
CRM systems enhance customer retention rates, leading to a profit gain ranging from 25% to 85%.
Access to improved data can reduce the sales cycle by 8-14%.
Companies can slash lead costs by 23% by using CRM.
But what is meant by “proper CRM” and “proper adoption”?
On average, businesses use only 50% of all CRM features that they are paying for.
Such insight indicates that no CRM software has the power to cover all needs of a particular business. It happens as CRM platforms are developed to deal with typical cases and support standard industries’ processes. And when it comes to the specific requirements of a particular business, a CRM may lack features. Even choosing the best and the most expensive CRM solutions in the market has nothing to do with this trend.
Salesforce CRM is not an exception. Even being world’s #1 CRM, it has its limitations. Salesforce Sales Cloud is proven to be one of the most efficient solutions for developing companies.
But what if you have implemented Salesforce Sales Cloud but appear to lack a bunch of important features? This is the most common existential question in client management: What must be adopted, CRM software to a company’s sales processes or vice versa?
As for us, we solidly chose to adjust tools to a vision, but never conversely. No matter how good or expensive your software is, it is still a tool chosen to embody and strengthen your approach. An approach to customer management is usually called a magic ingredient or an operational advantage. And its value can hardly be calculated, as it consists of years of experiments, disciplined work, trials, wins, and failures. Your company's processes and approaches are what make it unique, recognizable, and easy to remember. So why should you lose all these advantages due to a lack of tools in your CRM? No way! So here Salesforce Sales Cloud adjustment comes into play. It is also known as customization or configuration because standard solutions are expanded and complemented to cover individual needs.
Salesforce customization mainly cannot be performed by a user. It means you need a Salesforce administrator, a consulter, or even an engineering team. TrustRadius users, in their reviews of Salesforce software, aptly emphasized that implementing significant changes demands engineering skills.
Types of Salesforce Sales Cloud custom configuration
Sales Cloud is an integrated platform that allows the automation of sales processes, accelerating sales productivity, creating a pipeline of leads, and closing deals faster.
However, sales processes are just ways to describe human interactions, and each sales team may develop a unique approach to building connections with customers. This means there is no absolute standard for drivings sales processes.
Fortunately, Salesforce provides an opportunity to tailor its components, features and appearance, so that each enterprise finds it comfortable to cooperate within Sales Cloud. The customizable elements can be divided into UI (user interface), functionality, and integrations. Let’s have a look!
UI customization
Marketing, design and CX experts agree in one thing: perception is everything. And when speaking about software, the first thing that affects the impression is user interface. To allow companies create the best performing and most delightful experiences, most Salesforce products, as well as Sales Cloud, have customizable user interfaces. That means you can represent your brand's identity on Sales Cloud pages in many ways. For example, the simplest UI customization is adding your brand's logo and "painting" pages with the brand colors.
If you feel that such UI customization of Sales Cloud is not enough for you and you have more complex ideas to come true, contact us. Our Salesforce consultants will help you to implement your ideas by applying Visualforce or Lightning Components.
Functionality customization
Imagine Salesforce being a coat. Among Salesforce Sales Cloud functions you can customize are objects, fields, reports, and dashboards. For example, Salesforce offers default fields in Sales Cloud. But sometimes organizations need to collect some specific customers' or leads' data. If your organization is one of them, you can create custom fields for more valuable and efficient data capturing.
Due to customization, you can create custom formulas to use throughout Salesforce Sales Cloud. If you have some specific request in Sales Cloud customization, our consultants are ready to help you meet your needs.
Integrations
Salesforce integration allows users to expand beyond Salesforce, have all needed data about the interaction with the customers and leads, and keep existing apps or third-party systems, but have the most benefits from them in cooperation with Salesforce. Integrating favorite apps with CRM allows bringing the essential data of various systems, like supply chain, ERP, HR, SAP, ORACLE, and more.
Let's unlock the full potential of Salesforce for your business
Our team has successfully implemented and customized Salesforce for many businesses, resulting in increased revenues and greater customer satisfaction. Let's talk about your case!