According to a report by Gartner, it is predicted that by 2025, 80% of B2B sales interactions between suppliers and buyers will occur through digital channels. This will eliminate inconsistencies in sales processes and streamline them to make profits and increase ROI. There are many challenges that are faced by the sales team in IT/ITES. Whether it is streamlining sales processes or interacting with customers seamlessly, it is crucial that these challenges are removed immediately. Salesforce, a leading CRM platform, removes roadblocks and optimizes business processes. With Salesforce sales cloud, IT/ITES companies can resolve their challenges and enhance sales pipelines.
What is Salesforce Sales Cloud?
Salesforce sales cloud helps businesses transform their sales teams and optimize pipelines to boost employee productivity, manage leads effectively, streamline sales pipeline and increase revenue generation. It also shortens and helps IT/ITES close sales deals seamlessly. Now IT/ITES companies can predict future sales and drive data-driven insights.
Additionally, Salesforce cloud data platform also helps in building stronger relationships with clients and create personalized and tailored customer experience to strengthen customer loyalty and prevent customer churn. With tools and resources like Activity Management, Lead Management and Account Opportunity Management, IT/ITES firms can stay on track and exceed targets. This cloud can also enhance productivity and efficiency of sales reps with automated workflow, process automation, and sales CRM.
Key Areas Where Salesforce Sales Cloud can be Used
Top 8 Sales Challenges Faced by IT/ITES Firms and How Salesforce Sales Cloud Helps
Lead Management
Managing leads poses one of the biggest challenges for IT/ITES firms. With large number of leads generating from social media channels, websites, and cold calling, firms need to organize and centralize all the leads in a single unified platform. Moreover, sales reps and managers face difficulty in keeping track of the number of leads that can turn into potential clients. Sales reps also find it difficult to stay on top of the number of leads that are being generated from email marketing and campaigns. Consolidating bulk email lists and keeping in track of several leads’ journey is cumbersome.
To solve these challenges and create a hassle-free process for the sales team, Salesforce sales cloud with its intelligent lead-tracking system, ensures sales reps do not miss out on any potential opportunity. This tool allows sales reps to organize their leads and automate the sales process. This platform also provides real-time insights on lead status, which helps sales managers keep track on the client’s journey and strategize experiences which can help in converting leads into loyal customers.
Sales Representatives’ Trainings
According to a survey conducted by PwC, almost 46% of consumers will move on from a business if employees are not knowledgeable about the services and products. This leads to a huge loss of opportunity to convert leads into clients. Sales reps in IT/ITES firms sometimes lack knowledge about the products and services mainly due to a lack of training to understand technical jargon. Sales reps need to access vital information about the products and services to make a proper sale. This can become difficult, if most data are stored in silos and cannot be analyzed.
One of the many benefits of Salesforce sales cloud platform is it can break down data silos and retrieve essential information and unify them in a single platform. This platform is user-friendly and can be easily accessed by employees. It also has a built-in analytics tool that allows IT/ITES firms to gather information and train their employees.
Additionally, Salesforce cloud data platform also provides the sales managers with an overview of their team’s productivity and efficiency. Training is relatively easier with Salesforce. It helps identify areas where employees are lacking and allows managers to focus working on the shortcomings. This sales platform also helps with effective communication that allows the sales team to work on feedback in near real-time.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
In today’s world it is crucial for every IT/ITES firm to be customer focused. However, it is observed often firms face difficulty in customizing experience for each client. According to a survey by PwC, 73% of customers said their purchasing journey depended largely on a good customer experience. But to create a tailored customer experience, the sales team need to know the preference, predict demands and anticipate customer needs easily.
Salesforce sales cloud has a perfect CRM, that allows IT/ITES firms to enhance their customer experience. It offers a comprehensive, 360-degree view of your customers, delivering insights that extend beyond mere demographics. Additionally, Salesforce cloud data platform also anticipates client’s need which allows the sales team to personalize experience. Employees can also access and update CRM from anywhere in the world through browsers or mobile apps. This mobility allows the sales team to collaborate seamlessly, which helps them to stay informed at every stage of the customer journey.
Sales Cycle
IT/ITES firms often struggle with closing lengthy sales cycles. These lengthy sales cycles pose a huge threat to losing potential clients. These long sales cycles may result due to inability of the sales reps to convince clients to purchase their products or services, or inconsistent customer engagement; leading to a longer time frame for customers to make decisions and the probability to close deals is delayed.
To optimize the sales cycle and close sales deals quickly, the Salesforce sales cloud automates processes within the sales cycle. Such as: automating solutions through chatbots when clients ask queries, escalating quickly to customer service personnel if the problem is persistent, and providing the sales reps with the necessary customer data. This allows the sales team to tailor and personalize experience and anticipate their needs.
Salesforce sales cloud also helps in upselling or cross selling products or services, which helps in increasing revenue and ROI. Sales reps or customer service personnels can also access the clients’ social media platforms which gives them an idea to craft targeted emails with offers/discounts. These efforts considerably reduce the sales cycle and help sales reps to close deals easily.
Proposals
Proposals need to be comprehensive and easy to understand. The sales team at IT/ITES firms often struggle with creating the right proposals. This is mainly due to ineffective collaboration between several departments, employees losing interest or motivation while drafting long proposals and inconsistent information in proposals due to difficult product and service descriptions.
Salesforce provides the sales team with effective collaboration tools that allow the sales team to communicate effectively with different departments. It also helps professionals to draft proposals with automated templates that are easy to understand. Clients can understand these proposals which narrow down the decision-making process. By implementing sales cloud, the sales team can focus on delivering the right proposal. This platform also facilitates document management which relieves the sales reps from maintaining the proposals in physical folders, which are inconvenient to maintain.
Forecasting
With huge amounts of data accumulating every day, IT/ITES firms find it difficult to maintain those data and derive correct predictive analysis. It is important that these companies can forecast trends and demands from historical data. This type of predictive analysis can be difficult if sales managers do not implement any kind of forecasting tool.
But why are forecasting tools essential? Forecasting tools provide details about consumer journey or demands with accuracy. However, due to lack of accurate forecasting tools, IT/ITES firms often find themselves in a tough spot.
Salesforce sales cloud understands these challenges and predicts demands or trends with perfect accuracy. It leverages advanced analytics which helps break down data from silos and transform data into meaningful insights. It allows the sales team to plan, allocate resources for the future and take data-driven decisions.
Data Security
From the survey conducted by PwC, it is observed that 43% of U.S. consumers would not like to share their personal history or data with companies. This is due to rising threats to clients’ personal data. Sales reps are unable to persuade clients to share their details due to the inability of firms to provide strong data security. IT/ITES firms need a correct tool that can protect clients’ data and allow them to access it to derive analysis, without causing data leaks.
Salesforce sales cloud provides robust encryption, access control and continuous monitoring. This allows sales managers to ensure clients’ data is not leaked and utilize it without any fear of accidentally corrupting it.
Scalability
As IT/ITES firms continue to increase in size, the data generated also increases. This creates challenges for IT/ITES firms, as most of them lack potential infrastructure to store and scale this data. The sales team needs a platform that allows them to scale data seamlessly and analyze it without investing in multiple platforms.
The many benefits of Salesforce sales cloud allow the sales team to scale data efficiently without having to rely on any third-party infrastructure. It is designed to evolve as data grows, which allows the firms to achieve success steadily.
Why Choose Kasmo
Kasmo, a proud Salesforce crest partner, we help clients leverage Salesforce sales cloud to optimize their business operations. With sales cloud platform, business can drive efficiency with Einstein AI, boost productivity of sales reps, enhance sales pipeline management and close deals easily. IT/ITES firms can also focus on enhancing customer service experience to increase customer loyalty. Kasmo helped Infocom optimize their customer engagement, streamline sales pipelines, optimize lead generation and shorten sales cycle. Read the full success story here.
