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5 Areas where startups can benefit from Salesforce to drive success
One of the key areas to creating a successful startup is building a cohesive and repeatable sales process to rapidly acquire customers and prove success. In the startup world, the term “Agile startup” has become a more common methodology to building companies versus the traditional, time consuming and costly process of building the product, acquiring customers, proving viability and building the organization.
In product development, an Agile approach is used to describe how customers can be more flexible in defining requirements and how developers can provide their customers with usable products more efficiently. One of the methodologies to build products in an Agile approach is Scrum. Scrum is simply a methodology used to become more agile.
Similarly, in today’s ultra-competitive market, a startup needs to be agile, but it also needs the tools or methodology and a system to help achieve that.
The term SCRUM being applied to Salesforce is one way to describe or remember the key drivers that can enable startups to better leverage the tool to become more agile and ensure success.
SCRUM: “a way of starting play again in which players from each team come together and try to get control of the ball by pushing against each other…”
S – Scale your sales process
C – Customer Service and Support
R – Reporting and Dashboards
U – Understand your business
M – Marketing
- Scale your Sales Process
Create a repeatable sales process that scales. Sales Leads and Sales Opportunities Management was one of the original value propositions of Salesforce over 15 years ago and it remains today.
Developing a process of organizing and converting your Leads to Opportunities and into paying customers or Accounts is a fundamental feature of Salesforce. It institutionalizes your sales process to drive the repeatable and scalable sales function that is absolutely necessary for success.
Additionally, on boarding new sales people and making them productive is easier and more efficient if you have a sales process in place where your team can collaborate and leverage data and resources in a central location.
Sales productivity, team selling and collaboration is more efficient and possible with Salesforce.
- Customer Service and Support
Utilizing Cases and Support functionality in Salesforce helps to automate support. Assign cases from a website, email or phone support to get them to the right people at the right time, with the right solutions. Additionally, records and documentation of the interaction and solutions provided can help the entire team avoid redundant efforts and consistently provide quality service and support.
Hold on to your customers—startups need happy and referenceable customers.
- Reporting and Dashboards
Chances are you need to report on the condition of your company and track Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for the key stakeholders: investors, board members, management and yes, your employees. Proving that you’re on the right path to success in each area of your business and knowing where you stand on any given day is more efficient in Salesforce.
The speed at which you’re nurturing and following up on sales leads, the conversion to sales opportunities, the size and quantity of those opportunities, the time to close and win rate will define your sales velocity. Tracking your products and services that are driving the most revenue can inform sales, marketing or product development. Measuring the success of your marketing campaigns can inform you on the content, methods and branding that your delivering to customers and prospects. Insight into all of these metrics are important and easier to report on and display in Salesforce.
Track your key performance indicators to prove you’re heading in the right direction.
- Understand your business
Reports and Dashboards will help you understand where your business stands at any given time. But, to create a truly holistic view of your business or 360-degree view of your customers and prospects you need to have the data and that data needs to be stored in a central system.
The ease of collecting the data across the company, managing it to improve data quality, and analyzing it is easier in Salesforce. Salesforce helps you make the day to day decisions to answer key questions: which sales prospects to call first, what marketing campaign to launch or what are your customer support times. Providing your team with the tools that help them make the right decisions, at the right time improve your chances of success.
Collect the data, manage it and make better decisions with Salesforce.
- Marketing
Marketing automation can help drive demand for your products and services and is the fuel to drive new sales leads. It defines your company and brand. It’s important stuff and it needs to sit right alongside your Lead management, Sales Opportunities and Customers. Integrated, so that you can see at any given time who is responding to your email campaigns and what campaigns or methods are most effective.
Marketing automation can be built and tracked inside Salesforce. Utilizing apps from the AppExchange to integrate email marketing and automating lead capture from your website or social media can make this happen with greater ease. The leading solutions natively integrated with Salesforce are Pardot and Marketo.
Improve your marketing, automate and drive more sales leads.
