Are you new to the world of Salesforce? If so, then welcome to the club! Right now it probably feels a bit like getting your latest smartphone upgrade:

• You know that there is a world of capability and opportunity in this new shiny product.
• You know that right now you’re only using a fraction of what it has to offer.
• You promise yourself that one day you’ll sit down and really familiarise yourself with all of its features.

One day. No need to wait until that day. In this article, we will help you demystify the world of Salesforce, in particular, how it relates to professional services and your specific business requirements. Let’s start with the basics.

What is Salesforce?

You probably know this already but it doesn’t hurt to do a quick recap.

Salesforce is a CRM platform.

Woah hold on…. What is a CRM platform? A recap of Salesforce would be incomplete without a recap of CRM. So let’s actually start here.

What is CRM?

Chances are you know this too, but let’s be thorough. CRM stands for (that’s right) customer relationship management. This includes anything to do with your sales pipeline (the journey from identifying prospects to converting them to clients) to everything you do to retain clients once you have been lucky enough to acquire them.

CRM software captures and analyses data in its many different forms to help you generate leads, optimize your business practices, and manage all of your company’s interactions with current and potential clients. This means streamlining your client engagement process, closing more deals, establishing stronger client relationships, building client loyalty, and ultimately increasing sales and profits.

Using financial services as an example, this could include capturing data such as customer demographics, current investment portfolios, and engagement history with brand content. Managers then automate the creation of highly personalized investment recommendations, such as a new portfolio strategy, based on the customer’s financial goals or previous interaction history.

Before CRM software, businesses would manually take care of data (first on ledgers and then electronic spreadsheets), exposing them to human error and costly mistakes. The first CRM packages were hosted on company servers, which was expensive and time-consuming, particularly when it came to updates. Most CRM platforms are now set up over the internet, allowing easy access to data from any location. Salesforce is the primary example of this – which takes us back to what Salesforce is.

What is Salesforce?

Salesforce is the leading CRM platform on the market today. With its HQ in San Francisco, it was a pioneer of cloud computing and released its first cloud-based product in 1999. From pitch to product delivery, it is implemented by support, sales, and marketing teams worldwide.

The Salesforce product is actually a series of cloud-based platforms that together provide a holistic view of your client’s lifecycle, helping you to connect better with them, and with prospects like them. There are six clouds that are most relevant to the professional services industry.

Depending on your sector you may have adopted one, some, or all of the following modules:

1. Sales Cloud

The Sales Cloud is the most popular Salesforce product. Whatever its source, client data is centralized, segmented, and managed. Sales Cloud also keeps track of client interactions and helps teams communicate with each other. Leads are nurtured through pipeline management, and the effectiveness of marketing campaigns is measured. Time-consuming processes are automated, and the entire application is mobile, helping sales teams to be more effective.

2. Service Cloud

The Salesforce Service Cloud is an AI-driven product that helps client services and support teams scale their operations and boost customer engagement. For consultancies, this means improving the quality of client interactions, service delivery, and internal business processes. In complex projects, client inquiries are fielded to the appropriate recipient through multiple channels (email, phone, chat, social media), automatically alerting your team to cases and leads requiring attention.

3. Marketing Cloud

The Marketing Cloud is essential for B2C communications. It can create targeted marketing campaigns by sending your clients relevant and personalized emails, including automated follow-ups. It also manages rewards programs and subscriber preferences, engages with mobile messaging, personalizes a client’s web content, and connects their social to online ad campaigns. Marketing Cloud exports data to the centralized database and generally tracks a customer journey across various comms channels.

4. Pardot

Also known as Marketing Cloud Engagement, Pardot is designed for B2B marketing. Its key features include lead generation, scoring and grading, lead nurturing, email marketing, campaign management, and marketing reporting. In a nutshell, it helps companies improve their marketing to increase customer acquisition and retention.

5. Experience Cloud

Formally known as Community Cloud, the Salesforce Experience Cloud enables organizations to create mobile apps, portals, landing pages, forums, and help centers. Experience Cloud allows you to interact and communicate with your customers across different channels with a consistent identity. For professional services, it provides real-time project updates, document access, and direct communication with service providers, including comprehensive recording of all interactions with prospects, clients, and contractors.

6. Analytics Cloud

The Analytics Cloud (or Tableau®) platform extracts, examines and analyses enormous amounts of data very quickly. It is designed for consultancies who want comprehensive insight into their business, clients, and operations metrics, including real-time and reportable tracking of KPIs. It can also predict potential project delays and profitability and identify where businesses can be more efficient. Analytics Cloud connects seamlessly to your Sales and Service Cloud data and is completely mobile, allowing users to get instantaneous answers and help them make decisions across every area of an organization including sales, marketing, HR and IT.

In summary

Salesforce is a series of cloud-based platforms that can be scaled and adapted to suit your requirements. Most importantly it efficiently helps you understand your clients or customers, as well as those lost or potential. This means you can accurately plan and target your market with the help of real-time analytics and trends.

For consultants, Salesforce is particularly helpful in the areas of client retention, upscaling, and acquisition. Consultants can leverage Salesforce's lead generation capabilities and advanced segmentation and targeting tools to tailor their outreach with precision, aligning their messaging with client-specific needs and pain points.

Managing your clients on Salesforce eradicates the need for clumsy spreadsheets or costly self-hosted software. It can help with workflow and task automation, collaboration, regulatory compliance, and data protection, and, with the help of a Salesforce consulting partner, can be customized to your unique requirements. It also integrates with practice management software such as Projectworks, meaning that even more time in your day to day is freed up to do what you do best – your billable work.

Making the most of your Salesforce Product

So there we have the basics of what CRM and Salesforce are and why Salesforce can benefit your business. Let’s now get into the nitty-gritty of some of the ways Salesforce can help you manage your sales pipeline.

Personalizing your outreach

Providing a targeted, more personalized experience for your clients will make them feel more connected to you and your service. This will help with retaining and possibly even upscaling their relationship with you. If you have news or information that is relevant to their industry then sharing this with them can score you points. If you have something interesting or important to say about your own service or industry then personally notifying them of this is another great way to touch base.    

Clients want to feel like they are being engaged meaningfully in a personal conversation – not like they are being marketed to. But how can you do this without it consuming all of your time? Salesforce can help with data-driven personalized marketing. With its Marketing Cloud you can build a 360° view of your client by pulling in data from various sources then use this to personally connect with them at the right time with the right messaging.

There is a multitude of online tutorials showing you how to send personalized emails on Salesforce, or you could tap into their ever-helpful and highly responsive support team or employ a Salesforce consulting partner. Suffice to say, with its powerful AI engine, Einstein, Marketing Cloud uses data analytics to help you interact with your clients more efficiently and more meaningfully.

Revitalizing your closed or lost clients

Personal emails are also a vital tool for reaching out to clients and prospects who have “gone dark”.

There are many reasons why clients and leads are lost. They may not have a need for your service anymore. They may have moved to a new job. Or they might have just been too busy to respond. Whatever their reason a loss is actually a great opportunity to reach out. There are different approaches you could take (How to Re-Engage Lost Leads | Cirrus Insight):

• Survey – send an email with a list of the top reasons you may not have heard from them and ask them to select which it is (1. They’re still interested but have been too busy to respond; 2. They were interested but decided to go with a competitor; 3. They’re simply not interested anymore.) Whatever the result from the survey you will have new data to input into Salesforce that you can draw on down the line.

• Use a “trigger event” – this could be something that has happened in their organization, such as a new website, office, or product launch. You could use such an event to reach out with a personalized email. You might even get a response.

• Re-engage with relevant content – in exactly the same way as sending personalised emails to existing clients, you can make contact with a lost client or lead. This could be in the form of reports, research, or news that is relevant to them. If you’d really like to see if they are still interested in you, then you can send an initial email asking if they’d like you to send them the content. If they don’t respond, then you really know you’ve lost them.

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• Ask for feedback – what do you have to lose? They’ll either respond or they won’t, but both results still give you valuable data.

All of these approaches are easily achieved with the help of Salesforce. (Winning Back Lost Customers in MedTech & Biopharma with Salesforce - Coastal (coastalcloud.us) Data, integrated from various sources such as website visits and support inquiries, can be analyzed to identify lost clients or leads, allowing for targeted and personalized sales and marketing communications. These insights can then be fed into Marketing Cloud for tailored email content and personalized subject lines, including special offers and exclusive access to new information.The insights can be fed into Sales Cloud too, giving your sales team a deeper understanding of a prospect’s history and needs. This allows for more meaningful and informed conversations, offering personalized solutions and addressing specific pain points. And ultimately winning back those you thought were lost.

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