Why Integrating Salesforce CRM For Small Businesses Is Beneficial?

Are you a small business owner who aspires to integrate Salesforce for your business? Salesforce is the world’s top CRM software that helps businesses manage their processes effectively. Small size businesses can take advantage of its range of products and services to improve efficiency across different domains, including B2B, B2C, and D2C.

With this powerful customer relationship management software, small businesses can save time and money as well as elevate their customer service to compete with the best.

According to Statista, Salesforce CRM is powering more than 150,000 businesses of different sizes across industries globally. In a Salesforce survey conducted by over 3,500 businesses, Salesforce helped them save 25% of the average IT cost and boosted the organization’s productivity by 26%. Small businesses can also reap similar benefits with the integration of Salesforce to reduce operational costs while improving revenue.

In this blog, we will have a detailed discussion about the benefits of integrating SF CRM for Small businesses. We will also talk about the best practices that you can follow to maximize the potential of your business with Salesforce.

Ready to learn more? Let’s get started.

Benefits of Integrating Salesforce CRM for Small Businesses

The benefits of customer relationship management software for small businesses are endless, here we have outlined the most prominent benefits that you avail for your business:

1. Marketing Automation

What is the biggest challenge for small businesses? The ability to reach out to ideal customers and convert them into long-term customers is one of the biggest challenges.

This is where Salesforce CRM and its intelligent marketing automation capabilities excel.

It enables marketing and sales teams to work together and automate many steps to help them focus on increasing revenue, and nurturing quality leads rather than investing time in traditional manual processes like follow-up and lead assignment.

The behavioral tracking capabilities of Salesforce help small businesses keep track of customers’ interests, purchasing lifestyles, and so on. This information helps businesses to create relevant marketing campaigns to ensure maximum engagement.

Furthermore, the Salesforce Marketing Automation platform can help businesses segment customers into different groups according to their interests and purchasing history to deliver personalized marketing messages at scale.

2. Bringing Intelligence to Business Decisions Through Improved Data Analysis

The value of data is proving to be the new gold for businesses. The majority of businesses are strongly emphasizing collecting and analyzing data for customers to improve operational efficiency.

Salesforce CRM for small businesses helps them to effectively collect big data, extract valuable insights from it and put it to work for the organization. The CRM platform has advanced data analytics capabilities that analyze the customer’s data, interests, buying habits, and preferences. Having convenient access to this data helps small businesses to make informed decisions about which products or services to offer, and when to communicate with. The analysis of this data can also help the small business to identify the targeted potential opportunities like market and trends to expand businesses to grow revenue.

3. Increased Customer Engagement

Personalized content is the key for small businesses to bring maximum engagement to their business. According to Salesforce, 66% of customers expect businesses to understand their individual needs.

Small businesses can integrate Salesforce to boost their customer engagement by offering a personalized experience for each customer. CRM helps businesses to build a 360-degree view of their customers to keep track of their interests, purchasing habits, and so on. This information helps businesses to create relevant marketing campaigns to ensure maximum engagement. Furthermore, the data can also be utilized to help businesses to create customized rewards and discount offers to bring customer loyalty and engagement.

4. Leveraging the Power of Omnichannel Marketing

Omnichannel marketing refers to businesses using multiple channels like social media, websites, mobile apps, email, and so on to reach out to customers. According to to Think With Google, “Omnichannel marketing brings an 80% of a higher rate of incremental store visits”.

Small businesses looking to expand their customer base should adopt strong omnichannel marketing strategies and this is where Salesforce CRM provides great help.

Salesforce customer relationship management software helps small businesses to shape their omnichannel strategies across different channels to bring more customers to businesses. Furthermore, Salesforce helps businesses to deliver consistent and personalized experiences through all channels to improve customer engagement and loyalty.

5. Improved Cross-Functional Collaboration

Every business comprises multiple departments such as sales, marketing, operations, support, and so on. Bridging the gap between various departments, Salesforce CRM can streamline communication and collaboration across multiple departments.

Customers’ data can be collected from multiple sources and viewed unified across departments using Salesforce CRM. Furthermore, Salesforce makes it easy to set up automated triggers to alert team members whenever customers require a response. This benefit of CRM for small businesses helps them stay aligned with their customer’s needs and quickly respond to their needs to maximize customer satisfaction.

It ensures every department of the organization is on the same page and better serves customers. Furthermore, with real-time analytics, the performance of cross-functional teams can be monitored, and identified areas of improvement to enhance the productivity and efficiency of teams.

6. Cost-Saving

Being able to successfully navigate the journey from startup to Fortune 500 requires a lot of planning and efficient management. A business should be more responsible with every single penny spent on your business and strive to maximize its revenues.

According to Business Insider, “82% of small businesses fail due to cash flow problems”.

A Salesforce CRM solution makes small business finances smarter so they don’t run out of budget and operations run smoothly. With CRM, repetitive tasks can be automated, freeing up human resources for more complex processes. Moreover, CRM enables businesses to manage all their customer data in one place, making them more efficient with decision-making. Businesses can track the team’s performance more efficiently with data analytics capabilities to identify areas that need improvement.

You can also check here Why You Should Salesforce CRM Over Others?

Salesforce Integration Best Practices Maximize the Potential of Your Business

Salesforce integration enables small businesses to leverage the capabilities of Salesforce alongside other third-party applications to drive business success. Here we have shared a few of the best Salesforce integration best practices to help businesses reap the maximum benefits from the integration.

1. Know Your Business Needs

What you want from the Salesforce integration cannot be determined without having a strong understanding of your business needs. The features and capabilities that your business requires should be determined beforehand. You can hire Salesforce CRM integration services provider who can use their knowledge to create tailored strategies to meet your unique business needs. Further, it will enable businesses to identify the areas where Salesforce integrations can be used to improve business operations.

2. Establish Integration Goals that Support the Organization’s Overall Objectives

The next Salesforce integration best practice would be to establish clear integration goals that align with your business needs. Businesses can also stay on track to achieve desired results by following a development route and using resources more efficiently. Additionally, it helps to ensure the integration process is not too complicated and does not add any unnecessary complications.

3. Choose the Right Integration Tool For Your Business

The selection of the right Salesforce integration tool is essential for businesses to ensure seamless and efficient integration of Salesforce with other applications. The right tool will ensure that the data is transferred accurately and securely.

The popularity of Salesforce integration tools includes MuleSoft, Workato, Jitterbit, and Boomi. These integration tools can be used to integrate Salesforce with other third-party applications such as ERP, accounting, HR systems, and more. These integration tools also ensure the secure transfer of data between Salesforce and third-party applications.

The other most popular example of Salesforce integration tools is Zapier and Tray. These tools can be used to integrate Salesforce with other third-party applications such as Gmail, Dropbox, Slack, and so many others.

There are a variety of Salesforce integration tools available. You should explore their use cases and choose the best one that suits your business integration needs. Furthermore, you should get professional Salesforce consulting services to figure out which integration tool is right for your business.

4. Establish Governance, Ownership, and Data Standards

Establishing governance, ownership, and data standards is essential in the process of Salesforce integrations with third-party applications. Having these three in place ensures that the data is accurately shared between third-party applications and Salesforce. Furthermore, they are also essential to ensure the data is secure and integrations are compliant with industry standards. Having clear ownership of data integrations and data standards ensures that integrations are successful and meet organizational needs.

5. Set Up Appropriate Security Protocols

According to Accenture, “nearly 43% of all cyber-attacks are targeted at small to medium size businesses (SMBs). Only 14% of SMBs have strong security practices to deal with such attacks”. Therefore establishing strong security protocols is a must for small businesses to safeguard themselves against cyber attacks.

Security protocols refer to the strong practices followed by an organization to ensure its data is secure from unauthorized access. Salesforce integration security protocols are capable of dealing with unauthorized access, data breaches, and malicious attacks. Furthermore, security protocols also ensure compliance with industry standards and regulations.

6. Monitor and Optimize the Salesforce Integration Process for Continual Performance Improvement

Salesforce integration is a complex process, so continuous monitoring and optimization are essential to ensure success. Regular monitoring also helps small businesses to detect and resolve potential threats before they become a serious threat. Furthermore, it also helps to identify the areas for improvement and new features that can be implemented to enhance the system’s performance.

7. Implement Robust Data Quality Checks

As said above, data is the new gold for businesses. Hence, Salesforce integrations should employ robust data quality checks to ensure the data is accurate, valid, and current. Discrepancies found in the business data can also be corrected early to ensure a smooth integration process. A data quality check also ensures that the data meets industry standards and can be used effectively to make decisions.

8. Train your team to use the Integration

Once the integration of Salesforce CRM with small businesses is accomplished, the next step would be to train your team to use integration. There are multiple ways to help your team make comfortable with the usages of the new system. You can provide tutorials, webinars, and other study material to help businesses learn how to use the different features of Salesforce integration to create value for the organization.

Final Take

Integrating Salesforce CRM for small businesses can help them to reap several benefits for their businesses. It is one of the powerful tools that will help businesses to enhance operations and maximize productivity. Setting up security protocols, monitoring & optimizing data quality, and training your team will help you maximize CRM for small businesses.

Looking for a partner to extend the capabilities of the Salesforce platform by integrating it with third-party applications. Cyntexa is a Salesforce Crest (Gold) Consulting Partner with 300+ Salesforce professionals who are well-versed in the Salesforce platform. Our team of certified Salesforce experts will help you to integrate Salesforce CRM for your business and stand with you to help you reap maximum benefits from it.