Salesforce for Start-Ups?

  

  

As a start-up you only want things that you really need. So why spend money and time on a CRM? What benefit does it give you? The point of a CRM is to keep track of your customers and incoming customers, making it easier to get in touch with a range of individuals and businesses quickly and professionally. This goes a long way in building strong customer relationships which can help to guide targeted marketing and communications.

  

  

Salesforce in particular is scalable, available on the cloud and on mobile/tablet, secure, and has heaps of resources for learning on your own at Trailhead. There are a couple of specific Salesforce plans that are particularly useful for start-ups or small businesses however...

  

  

Sales Cloud is the ground level, basic structure to your CRM. It covers the pipeline that you take prospecting customers (Leads) through from complete stranger to paying customer to loyal advocate. It's all about closing deals, so provides you with a sales path where you can see at what stage each prospect is in your sales cycle and what the next stages are. It includes task management, team collaboration, and an inbuilt note-taking app using Quip. What's more, it's all available on your mobile or tablet, meaning you can update your customer data after a coffee meet up, conference, or after chatting to someone on the street. Design your sales pipeline. Enter in your customer data. And get selling!

  

  

Great CRM is not just about selling - it also covers serving customers. Helping them with their problems, responding to emails, chats, social media, and phone calls. How on earth do you handle it all? Presenting Service Cloud. Service Cloud can help you set up self-service options through guided processes your business sets up and can even take advantage of AI chatbots. This helps to free up your time for the important stuff. The service requests that you want to handle yourself are prioritised according to your needs so you handle the things that matter most first. You can store all your blog posts or knowledge articles on Salesforce so they are easy to refer customers to at any stage, through any platform. Salesforce also tracks all your service data so you can make intelligent decisions on what areas of your business are generating the most confusion. Like Sales Cloud, it syncs with a mobile app so you can handle all of this on the go. Oh, and did we mention it supports all social media channels as well as email and messaging?!

You can try it for yourself by creating a developer account which lets you look around Salesforce from the inside. Check out this selection of sales related tutorials on Trailhead to really get a first-hand understanding of what Salesforce could do for you. If you want more information from the source itself, make sure to have a scroll through Salesforce's Small Business Solutions page for more details and their Small Business Pricing page for the costs.