Managing clients on Salesforce - a consultant's guide
Just starting with Salesforce? You’re not alone. Many find its vast features both exciting and overwhelming. This guide simplifies the essentials, helping consultants in professional services get the most out of Salesforce.
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.
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.
Join our community of experts
Subscribe to our newsletter and receive consulting insights, industry news, and actionable tips delivered straight to your inbox.
Using reports on Salesforce
If you’d like a greater understanding of current trends and gaps in your business processes, then a report is a good place to start. The Salesforce report builder and report generation tools can help you visualize and analyze your data to gain valuable insights, track performance, and support the decisions you make.
Salesforce reports organize and present data in a meaningful and actionable format and can be customized to your specific needs. There are four main types of reports in Salesforce – tabular, summary, matrix, and joined. Each exports data in different ways, depending on what you need the report for.
You can also insert charts and graphs into your report and share your finished document all within the Salesforce ecosystem. There are a lot of resources online with details about the different types of reports and how to generate them. Saasguru has a particularly good demo here Salesforce Reports📚 What It Is, Types, How To Create a Report and Best Practices | saasguru (youtube.com).
Integrating Salesforce with PSA software
We’ve covered at length Salesforce’s CRM software and how it can be maximized to help your firm. We’re now going to run another acronym past you – PSA, which stands for Professional Services Automation.
PSA software can transform the day to day running of your business, cutting out endless hours of admin and double handling of tasks.
Projectworks is a great example of PSA software that will help increase your margins by giving you time back to focus on your billable work. Projectworks is an all-in-one solution for project planning, time tracking, expenses, resourcing, and invoicing. With real-time forecasting, budget tracking and built-in reports and insights, it helps you manage and audit projects rigorously, ensuring profitability every time.
Projectworks can be easily integrated with your Salesforce software to provide a single automated view of opportunities and projects. You will be able to gain visibility and control of your sales pipeline to help your delivery teams build better resourcing plans. Best of all, you will save time by automating handover between your CRM and PSA software, maximizing your billable time.
FAQs
What is CRM?
CRM, or customer relationship management, is a system for managing your client interactions with current and potential clients.
What is Salesforce?
Salesforce is cloud-based CRM software that integrates all of your business data to give you a full view of your clients, prospects and market trends to help you connect with them in a more intelligent and efficient way.
Is Salesforce easy to use?
In a recent review by tech.co Salesforce Review (2024): How Good Is the Popular CRM? (tech.co) Salesforce was found to be a robust and easy to use CRM. It also gets consistently good reviews for its responsive and helpful support team. For a relatively low cost you can also employ the services of a Salesforce consulting partner.
What is a Salesforce consulting partner?
A Salesforce consulting partner is a company authorized by Salesforce to assist clients with the implementation and optimization of their products. This includes offering customized solutions to customers.
Does Salesforce use AI?
AI is integrated across all of Salesforce’s products through its Einstein platform. This trusted AI will generate data for a specific task and employ that data into any format you need it for. It is used for customer chatting, improves team communications, automates repetitive tasks and generally improves productivity.
Can Salesforce be used for project management?
Salesforce is not intended to be used as a project management system. While Salesforce project management capabilities are limited, they do cover some core functions, including task notifications and internal communications tools. How to Use Salesforce for Project Management (technologyadvice.com)
However, for professional services the best approach would be to integrate Salesforce with PSA software. A good example of this is Projectworks, an all-in-one solution to project planning, time tracking, expenses, resourcing, invoicing, real-time forecasting, budget tracking and built-in reports and insights. Salesforce and Projectworks can be easily integrated and either support team is always available to help you with this.
Can Salesforce send automated emails?
Salesforce can send automated emails based on specific events or customer actions. These automated emails can be triggered by actions such as downloading content, completing forms, or specific website interactions.
