“Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a strategy for managing all your company’s relationships and interactions with your customers and potential customers. It helps you improve your profitability.” ~ Salesforce.com
Salesforce, the cloud computing company that started 16 years ago, reinvented customer relationship management (CRM) in the cloud. The 50-billion-dollar company, which was also once a startup, realized that startups today need an easy-to-use, out-of-the-box CRM solution. With that, they introduced SalesforceIQ, a solution to supercharge a startup’s sales team with relationship intelligence.
Thomas Karemacher, Regional Vice President — Mid-Market and SMB, looks after the startup and small business segment at Salesforce. He shared that 60% of startups at the SydStart event have two priorities:
- Customer acquisition
- Funding
Before delving on how SalesforceIQ can help achieve those two priorities, Thomas presented the CRM challenges most startups are facing today.
The Challenges
Thomas pointed out that there is still a technology gap in many startups today. People are still running their businesses with a lot of spreadsheets and email clients.
“Ninety percent of the world’s data is being created in the last 12 months, which means startups and small businesses have a much bigger seat at the table. They have a much bigger ability to gain mindshare rapidly because, with the right technology, they can ask questions to deliver really good customer experience,” he said.
How do startups and small businesses tap into that data? How do they ask the right questions and actually deliver better customer experience? How do they know what their customers want, when they want it, and how to deliver personal service.
To deliver customer acquisition, it’s important to see the opportunities or the daily information. Unfortunately, 79% of the time, that information is not in the application these businesses are using and that’s a big miss for customer acquisition.
The data that’s really important is the opportunity of the deal information, which, 90% of the time, is not in the system, and that’s also a significant gap. Thomas explained that managers and business owners can’t see the gap, and as a result, 80% of the time they think sales reps can’t keep up because they can’t see the data that they want to make decisions.
Thomas pointed out that the main challenge here is information overload, specifically for sales representatives who spend 28 hours per week reading and responding to emails. This makes a huge dent on their productivity.
He also admitted that the challenge isn’t so much towards startups but more on the technology provider like Salesforce. They need to lower the barriers for startups to come on board. They also have to provide something that’s interactive and easy to use.
CRM Then and Now
CRM then:
- Always logging in information
- Reactive to customer requests
- Delivers a good relationship
CRM now:
- Automated – makes sales rep responses easier
- Proactive – suggests tasks coming up
- Driven by relationship intelligence
SalesforceIQ delivers what startups are asking for by showing them where and what to prioritize. With relationship intelligence, SalesforceIQ does the following for its users:
- Pushes the required response to the sales representative
- Tells them who to email
- Shows them the next step to close the deal
Inside SalesforceIQ
Felipe Ryan, Solution Engineer at Salesforce, demoed how to use SalesforceIQ. He said the software is designed to lower entry barriers. It’s proactive, smart, and has an amazing integration with Gmail so users can log in using their Google credentials.
The home tab shows access to the following:
- Reports
- Feed of different activities
- Tasks
- Meetings
Reports
With SalesforceIQ, there’s no data entry required. All the figures you need are gathered automatically. You can see your revenue, the activities of your team, and how deals move in the pipeline.
Activities
You can see the activities of your team with the information pulled from emails sent. You can easily see what the members of your community/company are doing. It also tells you who are driving the most activities and who brings more leads and conversions.
Tasks
Startup owners have a lot of things on their plate. SalesforceIQ will help you manage your tasks all in one place. You can list what you should do in a day – tasks, emails, and meetings.
Meetings
If you’re setting up a meeting, you can send the attendees an email straight from SalesforceIQ. You also have access to the calendar so you can easily track the important dates and activities in the company.
The Intelligence field pulls information from you and your colleagues. This helps you track the growth of your company and how the whole business is doing in general.
The features mentioned above all contribute to your customer acquisition goals. Its out-of-the-box reporting in particular makes it easy for you to share reports with potential investors to get the funding you need.
“Set up Salesforce IQ in minutes, email, and you’re good to go.”
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