Making the Most of Your Salesforce Investments: Three Use Cases
Summary: If Salesforce drives your business, now’s the time to focus on making positive, proactive changes that will help you weather the storm and prepare for a return to normal operations. This article illustrates how clients used Salesforce to gather data, develop strategies, and execute new processes that improved customer relationships, service, and their internal teams.
Read below for more detail than the tl;dr version.
Getting Value When Things are Uncertain
The radical changes to our lives and economy over the last few weeks are forcing us all to scramble to adapt. A few are experiencing unprecedented demand, but most are seeing slower business and an uncertain future.
In a previous blog post, we talked about responding to change by using reports and dashboards to help manage remote sales teams. In this article, we’ll talk about:
Recalibrating go-to-market strategy and entering new markets.
Nurturing customer relationships to protect your client base and improve service.
Identifying Salesforce process improvements to maximize team productivity.
Go-to-Market Strategy and New Markets
Industries that rely on in-person engagement are in survival mode, while others are adjusting to unexpected demand. Many B2B providers serve customers on both sides of this scale. No matter the current state of things, the ability to shift your focus, resources, and action will greatly determine performance over the next 30-60-90 days as the plan for recovery becomes clearer.
Here’s how a leading residential service provider transformed it’s go-to-market strategy in three weeks to shift with their customers during the current crisis.
Company Profile: Management and operational solutions for large residential providers. Uses Salesforce internally for customer management. Recently implemented Pardot for marketing automation.
Challenge and Solution: Address customer spending cuts and the rising risk of recession. Pivot value prop during global crisis. Shift priorities to solutions that help combat viral spread and empower customers to take preventive action.
This decision had three facets:
Identify the customers that are the strongest fit for these solutions. To do this, the organization used firmographic data in Salesforce to define specific customer segments. These segments were then organized into Pardot lists and built through automation. Time required: Two to four hours for leadership decisions, less than one hour hands on keyboard.
Build messaging for the cause. This part was crucial — messaging during a time of crisis is extremely difficult and we wanted to hit the right tone. Emails were structured in Pardot using straightforward statements: (1) acknowledge the situation (2) share how the solution improves the condition (3) provide a call to action. Buzz words, flash, and complexity were omitted in favor of simple messages providing helpful solutions. Time required: Four to eight hours messaging and design, two hours hands on keyboard.
Distribution and follow up. Using Pardot Engagement Studio, they built logic to guide customers through a series of communications (no more than 2x/week), sharing a variety of approaches for mitigating risk and promoting safe environments. Pardot has an incredible capability to score engagement, which provided valuable data for follow-up. They placed calls only after natural interest or engagement, not cold calls pitching services. This approach proved not only effective, but very genuine and natural. People like to help people. Time required: Two and a half weeks based on email pacing in Pardot, six hours hands on keyboard.
Results: Early results are promising. In advance of hard revenue figures, email engagement metrics are some of the highest to-date, as are customer conversations. Pipeline is increasing and folks are optimistic. Salesforce and Pardot were instrumental in the organization’s ability to analyze, decide, and take swift action.
Cases and Support Data
Maintaining good relationships with your existing customers is more important than ever. Your organization may already use Salesforce Cases to track customer service requests, but does your management team have the visibility they need? Are they able to use this data to make decisions and allocate resources effectively? Many out-of-the-box case fields give you the framework to create reports and dashboards that grant insight into actionable data with no elaborate configuration required.
Company Profile: Tracks customer support cases across multiple lines of business, which they distinguish via different case record types.
Challenge and Solution: Protect the existing client base. Nurture customer relationships at key moments of customer engagement. Ensure resolution of issues and satisfaction with service provided.
Their strategy involved these steps:
Their team identified which case type values are shared among the various lines of business, and which only apply to specific lines. The team also identified common values needed for reps to add another level of categorization precision via the standard Case Reason field. The type and case reason fields were configured accordingly.
Customer support reps were trained on how to use these new values so that each case is categorized appropriately.
With that framework in place, the management team created a report grouped by:
Row Grouping #1: Case Record Type
Row Grouping #2: Case Type
Row Grouping #3: Case Reason
Results: By creating groupings along increasing levels of specificity, the organization’s customer support management team can easily answer the following key questions:
What line(s) of business are experiencing the highest volume of customer service cases?
What kinds of requests are customers most frequently submitting?
Are certain kinds of requests taking longer to resolve than others?
What are the root issues that are leading customers to submit service requests?
We also created a version of this report with a row grouping by account name, allowing them to more easily identify which accounts are potentially at the highest risk, based on their case volume. These reports help guide the management team’s decisions as to what areas in the customer delivery and service pipeline require the most resources and attention.
These reports also provide a focal point for weekly meetings with all customer service reps, allowing for greater visibility into key business priorities and a shared understanding of the trends that affect customer satisfaction and retention.
Business Process Efficiencies
While there is a lot of uncertainty, one thing is for sure: the current state of the world won’t last forever. When we return to our regularly scheduled programming, you’ll want your business to be as prepared as possible. Now is a great time to focus on these efforts so you can make the most of a return to normal, whenever that may be.
Company Profile: Major provider of key nondurable goods and services.
Challenge and Solution: Management wanted to invest in their communication and their people. To accomplish this, we used Salesforce surveys to ask key questions of the team. Salesforce Surveys are free functionality already available in Salesforce, so this was a great way to make the most of what they already had.
Specific questions around operational efficiencies included:
Where do you spend the majority of your time day-to-day?
What tasks don’t require higher-order thinking to complete?
What part of your job could we automate so you can do more of the things you enjoy?
Results: Using the results, this organization mined valuable insights that helped them focus on the right business process automation for their teams. Automation helped with immediate, short-term needs around shifting resources during this challenging time. It’s also expected to pay long term dividends in terms of productivity and efficiency.
Start like this business by creating a list of the kinds of questions you want to ask. Focus on pain points, repetition, or manual work.
Once you capture this information, make the most of that additional time you saved your team. When things are back to “normal” you’ll be operating at peak efficiency and using that feedback from your team to make their lives easier. It’s a simple way to invest in them at a time when every little bit counts.
Not sure you’re making the most of the tools you already have? Let’s jump on a 30-minute free phone call to talk it out. We want to help you squeeze every little bit of value out of your Salesforce investments. Give us a call at 919-578-7711 or email info@cloudgiants.com to get it on the calendar.