19 excellent benefits of Salesforce for your business

When you’re walking around in a crowded city, you have to be aware of your surroundings. Cars are whizzing by, bikers are making turns, and fellow pedestrians are all around you.

Business is no different. Operating efficiently means taking constant inventory of your company and exploring all the different avenues and resources available to give you and your team a leg up.

Salesforce is one of the best resources to ensure your business’s efficiency. With Salesforce, you can communicate easily, store company data, and create a centralized system for your company to grow — and that’s just the start. Here’s how you can use the many benefits of Salesforce to maximize performance in all aspects of your business.

1. Real-time collaboration and communication

Just as you might use social media to connect with friends, you can use Salesforce’s Chatter software, which has similar features, for your work interface. Chatter enables conversations with members of your team about clients and upcoming tasks you want to prioritize, making sure everyone is on the same page.

Plus, with individual customer records easily archived on Salesforce, chats with your coworkers won’t get bogged down in the search for a specific piece of information. Everyone on your team will have access to the same shared records and customer information that they can then use to touch base with clients and guide future business.

2. Tools for generating new business

Bringing in new clients is exciting. It means that other people like what you’re doing with your business and want to be a part of it. It also means more revenue for you and your company. But to attract these clients, you have to be organized and understand what works best for you.

Think of Salesforce as a guide for potential future business. You can use the information you have on your current clients to get a sense of what works and apply this knowledge in your pursuit of new ones.

Salesforce also has logs that demonstrate how much time you’re spending on each of your clients. This is valuable information — it provides a clear picture of your day-to-day workflow that you can use to make operational decisions.

This information also helps with attracting new business, as you can present these stats in meetings. For example, if you’re talking to a steel mill company, you can give them direct breakdowns of a similar client that illustrate exactly how you’d work on their behalf.

3. More efficient workflows

When it comes to the big picture, you can use Salesforce as a gauge for how your company is performing and where it’s using its resources. Salesforce’s information storage is also a great tool for you to see how you’re spending your company’s time and money. If you don’t see great returns on a certain aspect of your operations, but notice you’re spending a lot of time there, you can adjust accordingly.

Salesforce has a lot of automation functions, which eliminate manual data input. This way, you can spend more time developing campaigns to keep and attract business. And, with different cloud services like Salesforce Sales Cloud, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, and Salesforce Service Cloud, you can be specific about the types of data you’re looking at and eventually acting on.

4. Easier goal setting and tracking

It’s nice to have goals, but they won’t mean much if you don’t have a place to track your progress toward accomplishing them. Because Salesforce stores so much of your business information — clients, communication, financial figures, upcoming projects — it gives you a bird’s-eye view of your business operations and progress.

Say you want to track how far along you are in meeting a new business goal. Salesforce can organize your new clients and store information on how you might be able to get more similar clients to reach these goals. Plus, because Salesforce breaks down your company’s information into such detail,  it’s easy to tell whether or not you’re reaching your benchmarks, and if not, how you can adjust for the future.

5. Present your data your way

The way your business stores and analyzes its data is unique — it’s even different from others in your field. There will be certain aspects of your organization that you want to focus on. Salesforce allows for this type of personalization. If a few clients contribute to the bulk of your sales, you’ll want to make sure you can easily break down all of the data you have on them. Salesforce’s systems allow you to get specific with each of your customers and formulate action plans around this data.

Even better, Salesforce integrates with other platforms and applications. With its Jotform integration, you can implement, sync, and search Jotform’s different templates to classify your sales and operations. You can also increase efficiency by getting rid of some of the manual work of transferring this information between systems. Think of Jotform and Salesforce as a one-two punch, working together to make sure your information is presentable and consistent.

6. Better time management and enhanced productivity

Salesforce can help you cut out some time-consuming, manual work. Its databases grow along with your business and coordinate with different applications to keep client information secure, up-to-date, and easy to understand. With Salesforce at your side, you’ll be more than ready for your next big sale.

7. A more holistic approach to your business 

Salesforce’s omni-channel and cross-channel features are helpful if you want to expand your business efforts without stretching yourself thin. With the Omni-Channel feature, you can easily direct various tasks to the appropriate queues and agents, making effective customer service a breeze.

Salesforce also takes the manual work out of cross-channel management. You can check on different business components, whether it’s marketing or HR, all in one place. In doing so, you seamlessly get the bigger picture, and that gives you a huge advantage.

8. Data-driven decision making

You can use Salesforce for better tracking, data syncing, and insightful reporting, which in turn informs how you make your business decisions. You always want evidence to back up your choices; that’s where Salesforce’s wide range of data-centered products can help. 

Use the Marketing Cloud to track and analyze your customer data, whether you need it on an aggregate or individual scale. Build data reports in either Salesforce Classic or Lightning Experience. And if you want to combine data from multiple apps and folders so you can view it all at once, then Collections might be the tool for you. 

With Salesforce, the possibilities for your customer data are endless.

9. Better customer satisfaction

Keeping customers happy should always be a prime goal for your business. A great thing about Salesforce’s resources is that they focus on providing personalized customer data. After all, customers are often happier when they know you understand them and their needs.

With Data Cloud, you can quickly access customer data through individualized profiles and organize data for maximum efficiency. Salesforce even offers a customer service toolkit to provide lessons and advice on best practices. 

Of course, the best way to check how your customers feel is by directly asking their opinions. That’s why Salesforce also integrates with apps that can help you collect customer feedback, such as Jotform. Jotform for Salesforce’s online forms are perfect for helping you understand how your customers feel, so you can make necessary improvements.

10. Less busywork with automation 

The main benefit of automation is simple: It makes your life easier. The less time you have to spend on certain small tasks, the more time you free up for more important ones.

Marketing automations in Salesforce can be especially useful for tasks that can get monotonous, like sending messages via email, social media, or text; all you need to do is set up a workflow, and automated messages will go out for you.

Meanwhile, automations for your sales processes will help improve productivity by performing tasks on your behalf. Salesforce’s automations can update data, generate insights, provide predictions, and more according to workflows you can easily set up.

11. Integration with third-party apps

At the end of the day, you will need more than just Salesforce to help you with your work processes. That’s where integrations come in. Salesforce integrates with a ton of third-party software applications for all kinds of use cases, including accounting, marketing, customer service, and human resources.

For example, you can connect your online form data to your Salesforce database, thanks to Jotform for Salesforce. When you use the Jotform app, you can even prefill forms with Salesforce data to make it easy for your respondents. The app is available in the Salesforce AppExchange marketplace, so try it out for yourself!

12. Ongoing innovation

When it comes to your technology, you want to use products that are constantly evolving. Salesforce is always coming up with new ways to optimize your work processes, using feedback from everyday users through IdeaExchange. In fact, Salesforce comes out with new releases containing multiple products three times a year.

That means you’ll be using a platform that continuously works with you and other users to ensure that your business is up-to-date on the latest innovations. 

13. AI-powered insights

Recent innovations in artificial intelligence have shown just how useful machine learning can be, especially for businesses. Salesforce’s Einstein products are built to generate insights for you so you can make smarter business decisions. 

For instance, Salesforce’s Einstein tools use existing data to help make accurate predictions and offer recommended next steps. Einstein can also help personalize customer interactions, create workflows, and develop analytics dashboards for your business. 

There’s plenty more that Einstein tools can do, and ultimately, they’ll help streamline your work processes so you can have a more productive day.

14. Streamlined lead scoring and routing

Searching for leads and directing them to the right sales contacts can be a hassle. Another benefit of Salesforce’s platform is that it features automations and machine learning tools to handle that kind of work for you. 

For one thing, Salesforce’s artificial intelligence can help you with lead scoring, so you can find potential customers faster. Einstein Lead Scoring uses pattern recognition to score and prioritize leads. And you can be rest assured that their insights will be current, because it checks for new trends and refreshes every 10 days. 

As for lead routing, Salesforce streamlines that as well with automated lead management tools. All you need to do is choose which leads to prioritize and customize the workflow rules. After that, your sales team will be on its way to success. 

Salesforce also provides step-by-step guides for lead routing, so you can qualify and assign leads without a hitch. 

15. Better collaboration through Community Cloud

Anyone will tell you that collaboration is key to a flourishing business. That’s why Salesforce’s Community Cloud is useful for its connection-building tools. 

The Community Cloud includes both employee communities and customer communities. When it comes to an employee community, this can help provide structure and encourage collaboration, which are essential to problem-solving and innovation.

And of course, your teams should be able to identify problems, and that happens with the help of customers. With a customer community, your clients can easily ask each other questions and start discussions, driving up engagement for your business.

16. Customer journey mapping

Overall, you want to ensure that your customers are happy with their experience, and there’s no better way to identify roadblocks in the buying process than to see them for yourself. Visualizing how customers get from point A to point B will help. 

Salesforce offers resources for successful customer journey mapping, which is essentially developing a diagram of different engagement points for a customer. This might include aspects like marketing or customer support forums, among others.

What’s especially helpful is the Marketing Cloud Account Engagement feature. With this, you can quickly generate individualized customer journey maps and set up automations accordingly.

17. Better sales forecasting

Another huge bonus to using Salesforce is its sales forecasting software: Collaborative Forecast under Sales Cloud. 

In Collaborative Forecast, you can build a potential sales cycle with others, from the first interaction with a customer to closing the sale. This gives a more holistic view of your revenue and future plans. Once you connect existing sales data, the Collaborative Forecast will help project future revenue and even automatically produce reports to share with the proper stakeholders.

18. Increased revenue

At the end of the day, you run a business, and a business needs revenue. The Sales Cloud can help boost your revenue due to the CRM’s customizability and automations. In customizing your CRM, you can optimize it to fit your business needs and reduce unnecessary clutter. Meanwhile, automations will take care of tedious work for you, like finding potential customers. 

These not only boost productivity, but also help maintain customer satisfaction. After all, your customers deserve a streamlined experience. And happy customers equals steady revenue.

19. Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP)

If you’re in charge of a nonprofit organization, you know how paramount constituent relationships are. Whether you’re interacting with donors or volunteers, it helps to have Salesforce’s Nonprofit Success Pack, or NPSP, in your toolbox. 

That’s because the NPSP will automatically come with essential constituent management features for you, including fundraising, program management, and marketing tools. With these, your organization can get up to speed with the software quicker. 

And since the NPSP is so customizable, you can add features or change it accordingly as your nonprofit grows. The NPSP has everything you’ll need for your nonprofit operations, but Salesforce has other bonus applications for nonprofits, such as Volunteers for Salesforce and the Nonprofit Cloud. 

Saving time with Salesforce

Salesforce can help you cut out some time-consuming, manual work. Its databases grow along with your business and coordinate with different applications to make your record-keeping and client information secure and easy to read. With Salesforce at your side, you’ll be more than ready for your next big sale.