Salesforce has cemented itself as the gold standard for CRM solutions but if you think that’s all there is to it, you may be in for a surprise. It offers a rich array of features that, when fully utilized, can take almost every part of your business up a notch – from handling leads to running reports. But what exactly are those features capable of and where does the limit to their capabilities lie?
In this article, we’ll be answering that question and more – we’ll not only explore the top 10 features of Salesforce, but also what nuanced benefits you should expect from a successful Salesforce integration.
What Is Salesforce?
Salesforce is an incredibly powerful cloud-based CRM platform that integrates sales, marketing, customer service, analytics, and even AI-based features – all in one piece of software. One of its greatest strengths is the flexibility it offers, as Salesforce can be made to fit businesses of virtually any size or industry.
What’s more, Salesforce’s core architecture is built on a multi-tenant cloud platform, meaning that updates and new features are always delivered without much disruption. And the AppExchange, a marketplace for third-party apps, extends the Salesforce features and benefits even further, allowing teams to set up the most complex and specialized environments.
Top 10 Salesforce Features
And what can Salesforce do exactly? Let’s dig into the top 10 features of Salesforce that you should pay attention to when adopting the platform yourself.
Contact and Account Management
Salesforce’s Contact and Account Management gives your sales and service teams a complete view of your customers and accounts, which includes pretty much everything, from deal history to support cases.
The feature lets you see every part of the customer journey: what products they’ve bought, past interactions, and much more. It can even produce certain insights about what they might need next with the help of its AI-powered tools, like Salesforce Einstein.
Lead and Opportunity Management
With Einstein Lead Scoring, Salesforce can also easily assess which leads are most likely to convert, saving your sales team time by pointing them in the right direction. On top of that, the system allows you to create custom pipelines and stages – if your sales team works with different rules for different product lines or regions, you can build the perfect sales funnel to reflect those.
The Opportunity Splits function is another interesting feature that allows multiple team members to share credit for a sale.
Quote Management
Salesforce’s Quote Management tool automates much of the headache that comes from dealing with complex quotes. Your sales team will be able to generate quotes with accurate, up-to-date pricing and product info directly from the opportunity record, without the risk of manual errors.
What’s more, Salesforce can handle multi-currency quoting, making it indispensable for businesses with a global presence.
Workflow and Approvals Automation
The Workflow and Approvals Automation feature lets you automate many types of tedious tasks like approvals, sending follow-up emails, or triggering task assignments. It also offers Process Builder and Flow, which allow even non-technical users to create their own, quite complex, automations.
Activity Management
Salesforce’s Activity Management helps you track your calls, emails, meetings – and it links each of these activities directly to the relevant records (lead, contact, opportunity). And Einstein Activity Capture takes this even a step further by automatically syncing emails and calendar events with Salesforce. This cuts down on data entry and helps avoid the risk of someone forgetting to log an important meeting or email thread.
Sales Collaboration
Salesforce makes it easy for your teams to work together directly within the CRM – the built-in social network called Chatter will allow your employees to have discussions, share files, and even link conversations directly to relevant records.
The platform also lets you extend this functionality to your partners and customers through Communities, should you wish to do so. With Communities, you will be able to share relevant data with external stakeholders in a very controlled environment without compromising your security.
Sales Forecasting
Sales Forecasting is amazing at giving you a holistic view of your sales pipeline and forecast revenue based on that pipeline. And the forecasting is very customizable too – you can break down your forecasts by territory or on individual product lines all the same. And with historical trend reporting, you can compare all these forecasts against actual performance.
Pipeline Management
One of the best features of Salesforce, Pipeline Management will enable you to take full control over your sales process – you could create your own, custom stages that mirror the specific steps your team goes through. The visual Kanban view is especially handy, as it lets you see where each deal is in the pipeline and move them from one stage to another with a simple drag-and-drop interface.
Moreover, Salesforce’s pipeline tools let you monitor how long deals are staying in each stage, helping you see where exactly you are experiencing delays and take action to speed things up.
Campaign Management
Campaign Management allows you to build and track all of your marketing efforts – targeted email series, event organizing, managing ads, you name it. You can track how specific campaigns contribute to your revenue so that your marketing team has a clear picture of what’s working and what isn’t.
And for more advanced marketing teams, Salesforce also can smoothly integrate with Pardot and Marketing Cloud, allowing for even more automated and personalized marketing.
Reports and Dashboards
Salesforce’s Reports and Dashboards will give you real-time, customizable dashboards that reflect all your key metrics from sales performance to customer service trends. On top of that, the reporting engine can help you to create complex, multi-object reports, which can combine data from different sources for a more in-depth analysis.
Benefits of Salesforce for Your Business
We’ve already touched upon the very specific areas that above features can improve for your business; now let’s take a look at the broader picture and break down the general benefits of using Salesforce:
Platform Customization & Scalability
Salesforce’s modular design will allow you to easily scale up by adding new features, apps, or integrations as you need. The beauty of Salesforce lies in its flexibility: whether you need custom objects, complex approval workflows, or specialized reporting, Salesforce adapts to your business rather than forcing your business to adapt to it.
Strong Security
Data privacy concerns have always been there, and Salesforce features respond to those with enterprise-grade security features for any sensitive information. From two-factor authentication to field-level encryption, it offers all the tools for you to define security rules for different users – only authorized personnel have access to your critical data.
Centralized Data Storage & Management
Salesforce can serve as a central repository for all your customer data, making it easier to manage information, whether it’s sales, customer service, or marketing. This kind of info centralization tends to make you more efficient as a business and improve the accuracy of your reporting.
Collaboration & Data Sharing
Tools like Chatter help your real-time comms between all the departments, allowing them to share insights, documents, and customer records without leaving the platform. Additionally, shared data can create an integrated workflow where all teams can contribute to your customer engagement.
Real-Time Analytics & Reporting
The real-time nature of Salesforce’s analytics allows you to make decisions based on only the most up-to-date information. What’s more, the platform’s analytics tools can go much deeper than basic reporting, meaning that you can find even the most complex correlations and dependencies within the most specific performance metrics.
Integration with Many Purpose-Built Salesforce Products
Salesforce can become an entire ecosystem; products like Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, and Commerce Cloud can integrate with each other, which will allow you to expand the Salesforce CRM features and benefits.
Access to Certified Partner Community
The vast ecosystem of Certified Salesforce Partners allows you to tap into expert guidance at any time. Whether it’s configuring custom solutions, adding integrations, or training staff, the Salesforce partner community provides trusted, experienced consultants who can help you use the platform to its highest potential.
Free Learning Resources
Salesforce has invested heavily in free educational resources like Trailhead, an online learning platform with interactive courses for users of all skill levels. This can massively help you in team training, without the added cost of formal education programs.
Extensive Community
Salesforce boasts one of the largest and most active communities in the tech world that includes everything from local user groups to massive global events like Dreamforce. The value of this extensive network cannot be overstated – whether you’re troubleshooting an issue or looking for ways to improve your Salesforce, someone is always ready to help.
Conclusion
Automated workflows, great customization options, robust security, AI-powered insights – these are only surface-level Salesforce CRM features and benefits. It’s a truly multi-dimensional tool designed to help small businesses and large enterprises to grow and prosper.
At the same time, a successful implementation of Salesforce is far from easy. While you can perform it yourself, you may get more benefits of using Salesforce from collaborating with a certified Salesforce implementation services provider like OMI. We boast almost three decades of experience under our belt – and we will make all the theoretical Salesforce features and benefits become reality.