Data loss poses a severe threat to businesses of all sizes. When sensitive data is compromised or stolen, the financial health, productivity, and reputation of a company take a hit. As data volume is increasing exponentially, opportunities for thefts and breach of proprietary information are rising significantly. While businesses are adopting strategies to prevent the loss of their confidential data, it isn’t entirely possible to avoid the same. While organizations using robust CRM systems like ‘Salesforce’ might develop a false sense of security as they store their data in the cloud, yet these systems aren’t prone to outages. While Salesforce till now provided data back-up recovery services for retrieving lost data, especially in scenarios such as ‘data import’, which might at times go wrong. However, Salesforce is about to cancel its data recovery services by the end of July 2020.  What makes Salesforce retire from their data recovery services?  Salesforce doesn’t consider their data recovery service worthy enough to be continued due to the time and cost involved in retrieving the data. Apart from this, some data cannot be recovered using Salesforce data recovery services, and an excellent example of it is the metadata. In fact, only data as old as three months can be recovered and is recommended as a last resort that, too while recovering large quantities of data. While the Salesforce recovery process requires you to pay a hefty rate of $10,000, it takes several weeks before you receive the CSV file much before you restore data to your org. What’s more bothersome is that Salesforce doesn’t assure of complete retrieval of data. With such poor services, Salesforce finally decided to call off its data recovery services without any replacement.   Alternatives to data recovery services by Salesforce  Salesforce provides three out-of-the-box options that require manual intervention: Data Loader: Using Dataloader, you will be able to export all your data manually. With a developer by your side, you will be able to automate the export process easily. Data Export Wizard: This function enables you to program a downloadable copy of your data. Once the back-up is ready, you will be notified regarding the downloading of the files via email. This allows you with 48 hours to download all the data before they expire.  Reports: The reporting function, just like Data Loader, can be used to export your data. However, running extensive reports can be taxing and time-consuming.  What is the Best Fit? In such a situation, the best approach is to use third-party applications that are available on AppExchange for data recovery and back-up. However, it would help if you looked out for features like multiple snapshots of data, comparison between production and sandboxes, and data hosting solution coupled with a mechanism for querying data. Since, the Salesforce platform is designed to facilitate integration with third-party tools; it provides for a back-up data solution.  Conclusion:   While it isn’t easy to prevent data loss, the good news is that it is easy to avoid the loss of Salesforce data with a robust disaster recovery strategy. Though Salesforce intends to back out from their data recovery services, it certainly provides for a back-up solution.  Girikon – a reputed name in the Salesforce consulting space offers wide array of IT services that can be leveraged by organizations across different sectors to fulfill their specific business needs.

Today, technology is evolving at a very high pace and Salesforce continues to be at the forefront of such a change. Over the years, this robust and innovative CRM system has been constantly introducing cutting-edge features, which has re-shaped the way businesses across the globe interact with their clients. Recently, Salesforce introduced Lightning Experience (LEX) – its newest user interface that offers a cleaner and visually appealing interface, easy navigation and many more benefits over its ‘Classic’ counterpart.  While it might be tempting to leap to the Lightning platform right away, it’s equally important to understand the benefits and limitations that the shift might bring to your organization. It’s in your interest to ask yourself the following questions before making a shift.  Are You Ready for the Change?  Users need to understand the pros and cons of adopting or making a shift to a new system. While some users might be apprehensive of making a shift as they might get accustomed to the look, feel, flow and form of Salesforce classic, those who are planning to leap should have in place a change management strategy. This will help them deal with the roadblocks that might arise during the transition and will provide them with a structured approach for supporting the shift from Classic to LEX (Lightning Experience). In fact, the sole objective of change management is to make the transition to LEX as smooth, easy and transparent as possible. Businesses can also seek the support and guidance of a Salesforce implementation partner to ensure a smooth transition.  Will LEX fulfill the needs of my Users?   It is important to ensure that the new system can fulfill the needs of every user group. This would require every user to have the necessary tools required to stay put with the new system (LEX) rather than getting back to Salesforce classic. While LEX allows customization of several features such as content density, page layout, new connectivity tools and accessibility for different user groups, there are some features that aren’t supported in LEX. It is therefore important to run ‘Lightning Readiness’ check to analyze what all are LEX ready and what all aren’t. The ‘Lightning readiness check’ should be followed by the discovery phase to understand how users are utilizing the tools available to them. The discovery phase should include a key step i.e. the technology assessment stage, which is usually conducted by a Salesforce expert who can use LEX for a couple of weeks and create an existing state of the business processes that too for multiple user groups. This will further help in developing key functionality plans, technology requirements, and wish lists, which can be used to build UX design for ensuring LEX usability. Ultimately, the design for each user group can be created. This will allow users to visually view the benefits or the change that will affect them.   How exactly will you track LEX ROI?  It is important to educate your stakeholders regarding the benefits and the potential LEX offers in generating significant ROI for organizations. According to a survey conducted in 2017, organizations leveraging LEX have enjoyed a 15 to 20 percent growth in ROI. In fact, there are several ways businesses can utilize LEX to achieve their objectives.   The Bottom Line:   In a nutshell, we can infer that though the Lightning experience offers an array of better features over its classic counterpart, it’s important to weigh in the pros and cons of the new system before making a shift. By gathering apt answers to the aforementioned questions, businesses can expect a significant rise in ROI, ensure seamless adoption and eventually enjoy increased productivity from users. If you are still on the fence, you must get in touch with an experienced Salesforce consultant who can aptly guide you throughout your Salesforce journey.    

Superior customer service lies at the heart of every business undertaking. Today, every customer looks forward to a frictionless and Omnichannel experience from their service providers. So, when customers face any type of friction during routine activity, not just their perception about the organization changes but the brand value of the institution too takes a hit. The banking and the financial sector is under tremendous pressure to fulfill the growing expectations of both customers, as well as its employees. This is because of the legacy systems, outdated processes and changing regulatory requirements that have pressurized banks and financial institutions to balance the provision of personalized customer service with the rising cost involved in meeting their rising expectations.   According to a survey conducted by Finextra and Pega, 90% of premium corporate clients consider switching financial institutions for superior servicing.   To eliminate friction across all touchpoints in the customer journey, banks would require having in place a system that not just does away with the loopholes of the traditional legacy system but is also optimized to provide efficient, personalized and high-end services. Blockchain – A distributed ledger technology has the potential to address the pain points of the banking and finance sector by helping streamline processes and removing inefficiencies. In fact, progressive organizations are adopting this innovative technology solution for overhauling their fractured processes and systems.   How Does Blockchain Benefit the Banking Sector?  Over the past few years, this innovative technology solution has drawn a lot of attention from investors and other banking experts thereby propelling its popularity beyond the Bitcoin fanatics. So, what is so unique about Blockchain that has taken the banking and finance sector by storm? The features of decentralization, immutability, transparency, etc. make it an extremely secure, transparent, and an impossible to alter platform. The consensus mechanism offered by the ‘smart contract’ functionality of this robust platform provides a way for different actors or parties that are a part of the Blockchain, to reach a state of an agreement without the need for an intermediary. By providing access to a ledger that isn’t administered by anyone, Blockchain can provide a wide array of financial services i.e. from record-keeping, third-party transactions, cross-border payments to back-end operations, audit and regulatory compliance in the most secure, transparent and efficient way.  While Blockchain offers endless possibilities for the Banking sector, the challenge for the financial firms lies in identifying the right use case as per their business needs. In other words, the journey of introducing Blockchain into your business model is indeed a challenge? Since the functioning of Blockchain is powered by data (usually stored in multiple places and formats by legacy business networks) it’s prudent to move the company’s database onto a Blockchain. This brings together data from the company’s databases, as well as other parallel systems including its partners’ data.  With this, all the parties will have instant access to a single source of truth (data and other important information) about a particular business process.   How Does Blockchain-powered Salesforce CRM Transform the Financial Sector?  While a robust CRM system like Salesforce offers a centralized location for storing data that comes from multiple sources, combining it with an innovative technology solution like Blockchain can help financial institutions significantly improve their workflows and build reliable partner networks that extend the CRM. Besides extending its’ capabilities of transparency, trust and traceability in every single customer interaction, a Blockchain-powered solution can help break down data silos and business boundaries.    The recently launched Blockchain initiative by Salesforce is the first and one of its kind Blockchain integrated into CRM. Powered by Salesforce Lightning and built using Hyperledger fabric, this low-code platform extends the capabilities of the Salesforce CRM by helping businesses build trusted partner networks that share substantiated and distributed data. Allowing developers to build DAAPS or Blockchain applications with simple clicks and no code, Salesforce powered Blockchain platform can help financial institutions understand their pain points while ascertaining opportunities to advance their business models. In a nutshell, it provides the trust and transparency that the financial sector requires to share with their customers, as well as themselves.   The Road Ahead:  Though banks and financial institutions are under strict regulatory pressure, more and more financial institutions are leveraging the tremendous potential of Blockchain technology to streamline it for transparent, reliable and accessible financial transactions. When integrated with a robust CRM platform like Salesforce, businesses can create new processes and models that can help them accelerate business speed and agility. As a forward looking financial organization, you can draw benefits from a Blockchain powered Salesforce platform by partnering with a reliable Salesforce consulting company.  

In today’s competitive business landscape, banks and other financial service companies have to deal with rapidly evolving customer requirements. Today, with new entrants and consumer technologies simplifying the way people save and invest their money, the demand for the digitalized financial transaction along with high-touch and personalized experiences have increased manifold. To remain competitive, bankers and wealth managers require delivering smart and tailored experiences, which is significant for building best-in-class customer relationships. While these customer-facing organizations have always understood the importance of providing superior customer service, they struggle to manually sew up and make sense of customer data from disparate sources. This calls the need to have in place a robust and intelligent system that can help organizations meet the growing expectations of customers for speed and personalization. Salesforce Financial Services Cloud – a financial software used for wealth management could be leveraged by organizations for enjoying a customized CRM experience. Now, with the addition of Einstein Analytics to the financial service cloud, bankers and wealth managers have access to AI-powered insights that have helped them strengthen client relationships and grow their business.  Let’s take a quick at the amazing features that Einstein Analytics powered financial services cloud offers: Actionable Insights Enabled by AI: With this, financial services professionals can get predictive guidance which is built-into routine client engagement. For instance, financial consultants can now receive updates about clients who are likely to grow their assets. This helps them to focus their attention on retaining such clients that too in a smart way. In-built Industry Dashboards: These are built-in to help with data collection regarding the financial activities of clients. The pre-built templates help wealth advisors and retail bankers to gather quick insights using analytics rather than depending on a data scientist to share daily insights around common KPI’s. Now, retail bankers and wealth consultants can draw insights by directly accessing the dashboards, which in turn helps them in identifying opportunities, as well as threats.  Customizable Platform: To get a complete view of the financial goals and needs of their customers, users have the option to build custom apps and connect them to data from external sources.   Built-in Compliance: With an Einstein analytics powered financial services platform in place, users can expect data to be hosted in a secure, trusted and compliant cloud-based platform. This comprises of privacy, security, and other tools that are configured to fulfill compliance requirements.  How Does Einstein Powered Financial Cloud Services Help Fintech Companies?  Get Rid of Loopholes of Legacy Systems: Financial services organizations often face challenges fulfilling the expectations of their customers using their legacy systems that are outdated and inefficient. With all the useful features and customizations, the Salesforce financial cloud lends organizations the power to connect all the internal systems and push all the vital data to a single place i.e. the dashboard.   Better Engagement with Customers: To fulfill the growing requirement of their clients, financial service organizations require having a clear and comprehensive picture of their accounts, financial goals, etc. This becomes possible with Einstein powered Salesforce Financial service cloud, which besides fetching crucial client data from different systems and gathering in a single place i.e. the dashboard offers real-time recommendations. With a clear view of their customers, financial services organizations are better positioned to fulfill the expectations of their customers. Better Compliance: The financial service industry deals with the constant pressure of being compliant. Packed with compliance features, the Salesforce financial services cloud paves way for hassle-free client communication, transparent collaboration, and simple to build internal processes. All this helps in saving a lot of precious time. Quick Wrap Up: The introduction of new capabilities i.e. Einstein Analytics into its financial services cloud has taken its performance a notch higher. With such updated features, wealth managers and bankers can leverage predictive analytics to remain more strategic about how they manage their book of business, as well as client relationships. So if you are a financial service organization looking to create a long-lasting professional relationship with your clients, it’s important that you partner with a Salesforce consulting company to avail robust CRM functions. Girikon – a Salesforce consulting partner offers reliable Salesforce consulting, Salesforce support and Salesforce implementation services to businesses across the globe. As a reputed Salesforce consulting company, Girikon offers robust solutions that can transform the way organizations conduct their business.

One of the most crucial aspects of managing a business is creating and maintaining strong customer relationships. To remain relevant, businesses require figuring out ways through which they can consistently fulfill the evolving customer requirement in a hassle-free and streamlined way. An extremely effective way of forging strong relationships with customers is by implementing a robust CRM (Customer relationship management) system that can help organizations take customer satisfaction to the next level.  As leaders in the CRM space, Salesforce has created ripples in the world of marketing and sales. In fact, with its suite of features and applications, this innovative platform is beginning to find widespread adoption across different industry verticals. As organizations across the globe are searching for new methods to make the most of this innovative CRM, let’s take a sneak peek into the technological upgradations that are expected to happen in 2020, which in turn can enhance the experience of the users.  Make the CRM more technology-oriented: Salesforce made quite a few acquisitions in the year 2019, most of which have become highly profitable. Through these acquisitions, Salesforce intends to bring technological upgradations to its future CRM. These upgradations may include orchestrating enterprise data in the cloud, integration of location-based software, AI-powered communication tools, enhancing field service offering in-service cloud and more. Lightning Platform will come to the fore: Salesforce aims to enhance its Lightning platform (not the classic platform) by introducing several user-friendly features for making it more useful and productive for its users in the year 2020. So, it can be assumed that users leveraging the Classic platform will migrate to the lightning platform. Users looking to make a smooth transition to the Lightning platform can get in touch with a reputed Salesforce consulting company.  Einstein Analytics will be Used for Scaling up AI: Just the way Salesforce introduced powerful features of Einstein Analytics to its cloud service offerings such as financial service cloud, commerce cloud, service cloud, etc. in 2019, there are high chances that Salesforce might introduce Einstein AI to many other cloud service offerings in 2020 as well.  Mobile capabilities will be Broadened: Prioritizing the mobility needs of sales reps is extremely important in today’s competitive business landscape. With the growing need for security, speed, and reliability of customer and enterprise-grade mobile experiences, it becomes important to adapt to the ever-evolving mobility environment. While Salesforce has introduced mobile SDK, which has not just flouted technical barriers but has also broadened its mobile capabilities. In 2020, the market leader is expected to take more steps to expand its mobile capabilities and take it to a new level.   New Industry Verticals to Join the CRM Bandwagon: With every passing year, Salesforce is witnessing more and more adoption by businesses across different industry verticals. This undoubtedly has increased the demand for its services. In the year 2020, Salesforce is more likely to expand its’ adoption to several other verticals including the retail and manufacturing industry. As evidence of industry-specific verticalization, Salesforce has presented Consumer Goods and Manufacturing Cloud as its CRM cloud solution. The Emergence of Unified Customer Profile: The significance of data in offering superior services to customers cannot be denied. Consequently, a large number of organizations are switching to customer 360 primarily for gathering data from different units of the organization including Sales and marketing. This data can be leveraged to draw meaningful and actionable insights regarding sales forecasts, charting out the marketing plan, resolving customer service issues, etc. With Salesforce making significant investments in customer 360 and Mulesoft, it wouldn’t be wrong to assume that the year 2020 will witness the advent of a unified customer profile.  Conclusion:  As a cloud-based system, Salesforce continues to reign the CRM space. With an array of features, functionalities and applications in its arsenal, Salesforce has found widespread adoption among businesses across different industry verticals. Let’s hope that the year ahead lives up to all the predictions made for and by Salesforce allowing it to grow further and reach new heights of success. Girikon – a Salesforce consulting partner offers reliable Salesforce consulting, Salesforce support and Salesforce implementation services to businesses across the globe. As a reputed Salesforce consulting company, Girikon offers robust solutions that can transform the way organizations conduct their business.

The business landscape is constantly evolving. Organizations should thus lookout for new ways to grow their business. One such option, which organizations should leverage to remain competitive, is a ‘Marketing automation software that can help organizations streamline and automate their workflows and marketing activities. Marketing automation software can help improve operational efficiency, which further translates to greater ROI. However, it is crucial to select the right marketing platform that can power up your marketing efforts. According to a research report shared by Frost & Sullivan’s, revenue generated from global marketing automation software stands at $550.7 million and is projected to reach $1.9 billion by 2020  Before zeroing in upon the right platform, businesses need to consider their specific needs. Salesforce Pardot and Marketing cloud are two powerful marketing platforms organizations can leverage to streamline their marketing activities. But before making a choice, it’s essential to delve in a bit deeper to know more about each of them:  Users: While Pardot is positioned for B2B organizations, Marketing cloud is designed for B2C use cases. Since, Pardot caters to the b2b segment, it primarily revolves around lead management as a result of a longer sales cycle. Consequently, Pardot users focus on preparing email campaigns with an objective of lead nurturing. To support lead nurturing, Pardot offers a set of lead grading and scoring tools, which allows users to allot scores basis the actions of customers and their engagement with the emails, website, etc. The features of the Salesforce marketing cloud allow users to offer a completely personalized experience to every customer. From creating roadmaps of the customer journey, planning campaigns and promotion to data management and cross-channel messaging, SFMC with its array of features offers support to different marketing segments. Though the Salesforce marketing cloud has a more powerful and comprehensive marketing suite than its counterpart, it misses out on the sales-and-marketing alignment part i.e. lead scoring. However, it is possible to integrate lead scoring in the Salesforce marketing cloud.  Channels: Since, Pardot caters to the B2B space, users can expect complete support when it comes to channels such as emails, website, and social media. However, cross-channel options are limited in Pardot. The SFMC platform supports various channel engagements as it has in its arsenal several tools that help users to provide support to its customer via every channel including web, SMS, advertising, social media, and email. Each of them can be managed via separate applications on the platform.  Integration: It’s important to know that to leverage the full potential of Pardot and SFMC, a database is required. Though Pardot is commonly integrated with Salesforce’s Service or Cloud (CRM), it also integrates well with Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Sugar CRM, and NetSuite. Offering a full marketing suite, Salesforce Marketing Cloud can be integrated with Salesforce solutions such as Sales, service or Community Cloud besides other CRM systems. Though, the platform doesn’t offer a database as a part of the package, a Data Management Platform (DMP) can be integrated into your Marketing Cloud by paying some extra cost.  Price: Since, Pardot and Salesforce marketing cloud serves two different models i.e. (B2B and B2C), they have different pricing structures. For Pardot, the pricing is available online and is segregated in three different categories i.e. basic, intermediate and advanced, basis the automation features one wishes to access. However, there are no standard pricing options available online for the Salesforce marketing cloud. Though the cost will certainly be more than Pardot, it’s more likely calculated basis the volume of data as B2C companies deal with daily customer interactions and transactions. The pricing for the Salesforce Marketing Cloud also takes into account the cost of implementation and the number of users using the platform.   Which is the Right Fit for Your Business?  Both Pardot and marketing cloud have their share of pros and cons. However, the right platform for your business would depend on your specific business requirement and business type. So, it can be inferred that while the Marketing cloud is ideal for B2C customers, Pardot is appropriate for businesses looking to nurture their sales process by aligning the sales and marketing teams. If you are still on the fence regarding the best fit for your business, you must consider partnering with a reliable  Salesforce consultant.   Girikon – A reputed name in the IT space offers end-to-end Salesforce consulting services for businesses looking for reliable Salesforce implementation and consultation. 

For a business to sustain in this competitive landscape, the sales and marketing teams must align with each other for ensuring better organizational growth in terms of efficiency, productivity and revenue. However, this is difficult said than done as the goals of sales and marketing teams are misaligned, which encourages them to prioritize their own goals over organizational profits. So, how to deal with this situation? The key lies in having a steady flow of qualified leads that the Sales team can close readily, and this can be made possible by having in place a robust lead scoring system for prioritization of leads. What is the Need for Lead Scoring?  Though, the main priority for marketers is to generate constant flow of sales-ready leads, only a small percentage of the leads generated by the marketing team are considered closable. According to statistics gathered from recent industry research, around 40%-50% of all inbound sales leads aren’t followed up by the salespeople. And even if they do so, a lot of time had already passed by for leads to be converted to customers.  Lead scoring, which is a key aspect of lead management helps marketers make the most of all the leads generated. By providing an objective way of sorting through all visitor interactions and ranking them basis their likelihood to buy the company’s products, lead scoring divulges details about the most sales-ready leads besides providing insight about how and which leads should be nurtured. By helping organizations rank their leads basis several behavioral and demographic factors, marketers can determine and focus on the most potential leads.   Evolution of Lead Scoring Tools and Capabilities:  Having information about which leads to follow up and which to ignore can be more of a speculation than science. Lead scoring provides sales and marketing experts a head start on the lead qualification process, which otherwise is time-consuming. Before the recent developments in technology, lead scoring was conducted manually and included making a detailed research on potential customers, recording their details on a database, and finally scoring them.   Today, Marketers have access to tools and capabilities that can help them rank, manage and nurture leads, so that more leads carry a higher probability for positive sales results. Automated capabilities and processes provide powerful ways to handle lead scoring and nurturing to help get the most from every visit to the website.   CRM assisted Lead Scoring:  Since, the task of manual lead scoring was strenuous and time-consuming, CRM (customer relationship management) systems emerged as the savior by automating and simplifying processes. With a robust CRM in place, businesses were able to gather data regarding every single lead and scoring them basis the selected criteria. While integrating a robust CRM system like Salesforce improved the manual way of scoring leads, it still lacked the efficiency required to quickly score leads basis their quality with sales and marketing teams still spending a lot of time gathering details about leads.   This paved way for another innovation i.e. marketing automation. While marketing automation is doing its bit by analyzing and processing a wide variety of data in an automated way, it doesn’t provide the efficacy to differentiate between visitors who are actually interested in making a purchase and those who are simply visiting the site without any intention of making a purchase. This has left space for a new player that offers a solution to all the lead scoring woes i.e. predictive lead scoring using artificial intelligence.   Predictive Lead Scoring:  A Game Changer  Powered by Machine learning and Artificial Intelligence, predictive lead scoring allows businesses to determine the criteria for defining a strong lead, creating models for lead scoring based on the specific needs of your company while adapting themselves in a changing market. The Einstein AI capability of Salesforce provides lead scoring an altogether new approach by streamlining a variety of tasks associated with it. Right from automatically collecting and analyzing CRM data for determining strong leads, creating finely tuned lead scoring models to gathering account insights, using Salesforce Einstein AI for lead scoring will augment the efficiency of sales and marketing teams by saving their time significantly. However, you must get in touch with a reliable Salesforce consulting company for any assistance regarding lead scoring including the creation of appropriate lead scoring formulae.   The Bottom line:  The value of figuring out sales-ready leads is inestimable. However, it isn’t easy to manually analyze humongous data to determine closable leads. A robust lead scoring system will help organizations to align their marketing and sales team while ensure better utilization of resources, improve rate of conversion, and condense sales cycle, which will ultimately translates to increased revenue. This will allow sales and marketing teams to close deals quickly while forge a strong relationship with their customers. As a cloud-powered CRM, Salesforce has become preferred choice of businesses due to the wide array of features, functionalities and components offered by the platform. To make the most of this platform, it’s important to partner with a reliable and experienced Salesforce implementation partner.