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[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Having worked with 100’s of businesses over the past 7 years in my Salesforce career, there is a clear turning point when a business needs to investigate a powerful CRM. But unfortunately, these signs usually come quite late and only when systems are starting to fall down and cause big issues.One of the biggest reasons to look at Salesforce is to scale. At EMPAUA we primarily work with Hypergrowth clients, and quite soon into their business journey, they realise that their current CRM just can’t scale with their projected growth plans. This results in months of pain and frustration until the new CRM can be up and running.So what are the signs within your business that you need a CRM like Salesforce? Let’s take a look…
It’s still shocking to find out from a lot of businesses that seem to be a well-oiled machine, how little they understand their core KPI’s. This could be anything from MRR, Pipeline, Revenue by Lead Source or Marketing ROI. If your CRM can’t give you the numbers that are most important to your business, it might be time to look elsewhere. In addition, if you are having to export data from your CRM, combine in an Excel sheet and use pivot tables to get our useful information, I’m sure you would agree you need a better system.
Salesforce has a reporting engine that can be used to report on any data held inside your CRM. This can range from marketing data, sales data or support data.
Are you guilty of using loads of cool looking Apps that serve a purpose but will never help your business scale? It may be time to look at a platform that can. I work with countless companies that focus so much time on their core product, they quickly build up a portfolio of point solution systems to help them with some quick wins. From Sales solutions to Support solutions, or Live chat systems to email marketing tools. I think we are all guilty of focussing on the short term instead of looking at the wider picture. Consolidation of these Apps onto a platform like Salesforce can result in better reporting and collaboration between different teams, with no problem in scaling your business 10x or 100x.
Are your sales team spending the majority of their time selling? Are you marketing team spending the majority of their time creating campaigns? Or are they manually updating different systems and doing a whole bunch of admin that doesn’t excite anyone. Then it may be time to look for a different system.Manual tasks are the bane of our lives. Manually updating multiple spreadsheets, or sending out emails that can be automated are no fun at all. One of the most powerful elements of Salesforce is the ability to automate workflows. With powerful point and click tools that can automate the most mundane of tasks, it couldn’t be easier.
Are you able to determine the performance of your sales or support team? Can you dive into detailed metrics to not only see the top level metrics, but low level metrics such as emails sent, phone calls made, average age by stage? Then it may be time to look for a different system.Only looking at topline metrics can result in a warped view in your users performance. If you can’t see the underlying reason why a rep isn’t closing a lot of deals, then how can you provide feedback on how they should improve? Being able to report on anything and everything in Salesforce means that feedback can be provided on a very granular level. This enables managers to support their employees in a much more holistic way.
How much information is sitting in your users inboxes with no visibility across the business? In the age old question of “what happens if an individual gets hit by a bus?”, all that information is lost. If you have little visibility into this, it may be time to look for a different system.Salesforce has multiple solutions to integrate with users inboxes, ensuring that any contacts, calendar invites, or emails, are all synced back to the central Account in the CRM. This means that any illnesses, or other reasons for not being in work, can be overcome by always having visibility into what is going on with Accounts.
Dealing with Hypergrowth and startup companies means that a lot of our customers have backend or proprietary systems. The information stored in these systems are vital to any CRM. Information generated in these systems needs to flow freely to and from the CRM in order for users to get the best visibility into their accounts. Information such as usage, transactions, holdings etc...should all be visible in the CRM to enable optimal account management.Salesforce has a platform that can easily integrate with any other cloud platforms out there. Whether you are using a middleware, or need to do a REST API integration from scratch, all the facilities are therefore a smooth integration.
I hope that some of these signs have given you an idea of when is the right time to switch to a CRM like Salesforce. In addition, the cost of unpicking other costly unscalable solutions can be more expensive that identifying the right time for your business to move onto a proper CRM.Ben McCarthy has 7 years experience in the Salesforce ecosystem, having come from a Technical background and working in a variety of Salesforce end-users and partners, he is currently Founder & Marketing Director of EMPAUA, UK. To chat to Ben about what a Salesforce implementation looks like, you can reach out to him here - ben.mccarthy@empaua.com[/vc_column_text][vc_cta h2="To chat to Ben about what a Salesforce implementation looks like, you can reach out to him at ben@empaua.com"]Ben McCarthy has 7 years experience in the Salesforce ecosystem, having come from a Technical background and working in a variety of Salesforce end-users and partners, he is currently Founder & Marketing Director of EMPAUA, UK. [/vc_cta][/vc_column][/vc_row]Do you know more information about Salesforce Implementation?
