What is CRM?
Salesforce.com is a customer relationship management (CRM) service. Sounds like a mouthful but essentially every company out there has some form of CRM process that they use. This is a tool companies employ to determine what stage of the buying process a customer is in and helps manage hundreds or even thousands of customers progress through the buying process all at once.
So now that you know what CRM entails, what does salesforce.com do that I can’t and why should I care as a salesperson? Essentially, Salesforce uses a plethora of products and add-ons to help marketers and sales people more effectively nurture prospects into paying customers. The thing to love about Salesforce is how they have integrated cloud technology into virtually everything. Salesforce.com was created in part by the legendary sales expert and best-selling book author Aaron Ross.
Okay but what do they do?
Here’s what they do. They utilize the cloud for fast and interactive user interfacing to provide quick analytics and organization of data. They apply the magical return on investment formula seen below, provided by entrepreneur.com:
Their services include lead scoring. which lets you assign a value to each potential lead, so that you can target only the most important ones. I could go into the nitty gritty of explaining the process of launching a campaign, but that would ignore the real issue. How has this changed the sales game?
I liken Saleforce.com to Google Analytics. It allows marketing and sales professionals to gain insights and organize data about their customers. Some type of CRM software is essential for every medium to large business. Scalability would not be possible without services such as these. In the old days, it was on done with paper and pencil. Then, companies started developing their own in house versions of CRM. Now, we have Salesforce.com. Providing these essential services for far less money than the cost of developing in house.
So if you’re in sales and looking to grow, you need to check out salesforce.com. They are changing the way sales are facilitated. For more nitty gritty details (if you’re into that sort of thing) click here to check out entrepreneur.com’s take.
BoweryJE22
I think one of the most interesting things about sales is how it integrates interpersonal skills as well as analytic thinking–this post did a great job of showing how important the latter is to being effective in sales. I’d heard of salesforce.com before but this provided an excellent overview.