More than 150,000 businesses use Salesforce, a SaaS-based CRM solution, to maintain relationships with customers and drive growth, and many of which are small and medium-sized businesses. Once a startup itself, Salesforce leapt up by providing solutions for small business needs, and even today, when some of the biggest businesses across the world have hooked on to Salesforce, it’s small and medium enterprises (SMEs) that take the predominant seat. This is majorly because Salesforce continues to care for what helped them get off the ground and become what it is today - a billion dollar company with 19.6% CRM share.

So, without further ado, let’s discuss what makes Salesforce a go-to CRM for small and medium sized businesses, and why Evon is a perfect partner to turn your utopian SaaS idea into a palpable reality.

First things first, why Salesforce is among the best for SMEs:

Offers a comprehensive package of important features: Salesforce is the only CRM that offers all the important features to not just big names but small businesses too.

• Lead generation

• Opportunity management

• Contact management

• Forecasting

• Workflow and process automation

• Reports and dashboards

• Collaboration with built-in social tools

• Mobile access 

Also, since Salesforce is a cloud-based CRM, there’s no need to install any software and set up a complicated internal network. This adds to the convenience of small businesses as the SaaS-based solution supports all major browser and can be accessed from anywhere, anytime. 

• Scalability: As you grow, your contact book grows too and there will be a point of time when maintaining a simple contact book won’t be that simple. The best part of Salesforce is that it very well understands the problems that SMEs are highly likely to face in the future (As Salesforce was also a startup and faced those problems itself). That’s why Salesforce offers scalability to all its users - efficiently stores every bit of information of your existing customers at every point no matter how many of them are.

Also, as you grow, using the same tools won’t be that effective as they were before. For this, Salesforce has AppExchange - a platform that enables you to add extra apps and features to deliver new functionality, systems, and capacity to stay on top of your growing business needs and up the productivity and ROI levels.

• Customizable platform for your specific business needs: Creating a customized platform is only good (which some may argue is complex and includes additional cost) as it precisely meets your business requirements and lets you make the most of a CRM. Salesforce offers thousands of free and paid apps on its marketplace AppExchange and also allows you to integrate with different third party apps, software and ERPs. A customized CRM helps you boost operations and expand the boundaries of marketing for faster growth. For example, Sales Cloud Essentials is an enabler for small sales teams of SMEs to sell smarter and faster and Service Cloud Essentials for their customer service teams to serve better.

You may click here if you want to go deep into how Salesforce customization helps businesses create success.

The stark reality

Small businesses usually have budget constraints and small sales and customer service teams, which often hinders their marketing endeavour to find highly-likely-to-buy prospects and get repeated sales from existing customers. This is where Salesforce implementation comes as a rescuer. The secret mantra is - today’s customers just don’t buy “what you sell” but “how you sell”. For over 80% of customers, the experience a company provides via day-to-day interactions is as important as what it sells, the “State of the Connected Customer” report found.

Salesforce takes care of the “how” part pretty well

When your sales team uses data dispersed across multiple spreadsheets, they don’t have complete information about user interactions (browsing behavior, purchase history, etc.), making it difficult for the sales team to qualify and follow up on leads with personalized messaging for closure. Salesforce does wonders here by pulling all the data from your email, calendar, spreadsheets, multiple support channels, and more, and consolidating all that information just in one place. A single view of every customer greatly improves the efficiency and predictability of sales.

Besides, Salesforce allows to sync the data of your existing customers with different social media channels and create lookalikes. So, instead of targeting everyone you come across on different channels, you get to target only those who are most likely to show interest in your products and services. Marketing Cloud and Salesforce Einstein AI help you listen to what type of content engages your leads the most on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. and serve them on their preferred channel in a way that makes them feel important and cared for. You also get to identify sales trends and generate a sales forecast. For any CRM, AI  can prioritize the leads and opportunities that are most likely to convert, and Salesforce has already started leveraging that with Einstein AI.

So, Salesforce is a great platform for SMEs to find a niche audience (lead generation at its best) and engage them with tailored, contextualized and personalized advertising for higher conversion rates. Automation (which we are going to discuss next) also plays a big role in making Salesforce that CRM worth an SME investment.

Salesforce automation helps SMEs be more productive and increase ROI using business intelligence

Salesforce provides a plethora of automation tools to automate day-to-day business processes to create smart workflows. For example, automation tools, such as Pardot and Hubspot, allow SMEs to let their marketing teams be free of repetitive but necessary tasks by automating marketing activities across every touchpoint like email, social media and websites, that too with BI-powered personalized content.

With Salesforce automation, you actually get that ability to bridge the gap between different sales channels. AI-powered automation helps small businesses create automated triggers to engage the right customers at the right time, enable real-time sales reporting, ROI reporting, running multiple campaigns at one place, to name a few

Salesforce also taps into the incredible potential of mobile phones

Mobile phones have become a more common means of social media visits and different sorts of Internet searches. The good news is that Salesforce is available as a mobile app too with all the same functionalities as web. A new interface of the Salesforce app lets employees easily access, create and update records on the go. Most CRMs have a mobile app, but Salesforce app is rated as one of the best in the industry by SMEs that are using CRMs for smart business processes.

Now, 

What Salesforce brings on the table is irresistible, but not every SME is a full-fledged technical expert, and therefore Salesforce implementation to power the sales pipeline and maintain customer loyalty becomes very challenging for that ilk. Limited resources, limited budget and lack of technical expertise… how will an SME zero in on growing the business with the help of Salesforce? A Salesforce consulting company, like Evon with the availability of right resources and years of proven excellence in Salesforce consulting and implementation services, can give you that much-needed edge, that too at a market-competitive cost.

What makes Evon a perfect partner for your SaaS idea

Evon has constantly evolved as a technology partner by providing software development and consulting services to several clients world over for over 10 years now. What makes Evon a perfect partner for an SME to implement Salesforce is not just its over-a-decade experience in providing Salesforce development services in India, but the zeal to take new challenges and provide highly innovative technology solutions to businesses of all sizes. Evon understands the common problems of SMEs as it was once a startup itself and eventually became an established offshore software development company in India by catering to different technology needs of many startups and small businesses across the globe.

You can read here how Evon helped an online gambling company with Salesforce implementation that turned its marketing engine into a revenue generating machine. 

Tell us what sort of marketing challenges your small or medium sized business is facing. We promise to get back to you to explain how Evon can help you with Salesforce implementation and customization to maintain stronger relationships with prospects and grow your loyal customer base in the process.