To keep their sales pipeline fresh and full of prospects, organizations indulge in lead generation. However, knowledge of lead management can be the difference between losing them and turning them into paying customers. Proper lead management will help in lead scoring leads, guiding them through the sales funnel, and ultimately converting them into paying customers. It is therefore important to ensure the effectiveness of your lead management process as an improvement in lead management efforts can empower sales teams to frequently convert prospects while enhancing customer satisfaction.
According to statistics shared by Sales Lead Management Association, organizations fail to follow up on the majority (80%) of leads generated.
Though lead management is typically considered to be the purview of a sales team, marketing, and customer service teams too play a significant role in the proper management of leads. By creating processes that are integrated across units, training employees on best practices for lead management, and leveraging robust lead management software, organizations can ensure that their best leads remain in their pipeline. This will bound to have a positive impact on their bottom line.
A powerful lead management system does away with weak leads and nurtures those that are most likely to convert. Such a system will help organizations streamline their customer experience and make their sales and marketing teams more efficient and productive.
Why Should Organizations Use CRM for Managing their Leads?
Today, most organizations are looking forward to leveraging the benefits of lead management CRM software such as sales pipeline visibility, real-time analytics, contact management, and so on. Listed below are some instances when leveraging CRM software can be highly beneficial:
Managing Leads that can’t be Handled Manually: Managing leads without a CRM becomes more difficult as lead volume grows. With a robust CRM by their side, the entire lead management process can be automated. Apart from this, sales and lead activity can be monitored via a single centralized dashboard.
When Using Different Tools: If an organization is using disparate tools and applications to manage their lead management, they might not get a consolidated view of the process, are keeping duplicate data or wasting time shifting between the tools. Since, CRM systems have integration capabilities; organizations can manage their data from a single place.
Couldn’t Understand the Reason behind Losing Leads: To provide their prospects with appropriate content during the lead nurturing stage, it’s important to understand their buying behavior, their preferences, and where they are in their buying journey. In other words, organizations have to track how leads behave on their website, the number of times prospects have visited their site, what type of content they take in, and much more. By leveraging robust CRM software like Salesforce, organizations can get access to every single detail, which means they can take all the necessary steps to move their leads from one stage to the other in the Sales pipeline. To understand how Salesforce CRM can help organizations manage their leads, it’s important to get in touch with a reliable Salesforce partner.
Quick Wrap-up:
Despite having sufficient lead in their sales pipeline, often businesses fail to generate the desired revenue. This calls for the need of evaluation for your lead management strategy, which also includes the implementation of robust lead management software. Implementing powerful lead management software like Salesforce can be leveraged to not just increase the number of leads but also manage them effectively. Such a system provides an efficient process for accessing and organizing contact details including information required for qualifying prospects and closing sales. Apart from this, the system also helps in managing the flow of information to make sure that none of the leads fall through the crack. Some advanced tools can gather all data in a single place and provide meaningful insights for a superior relationship with your prospects. So, if you too are looking to implement robust lead management software like Salesforce then it makes sense to get in touch with one of the best Salesforce implementation partners.
The retail industry is dealing with increasing costs, declining sales, disgruntled customers, and stiff competition. This has encouraged retailers to adopt technology tools and solutions to enhance operational efficiency and improve customer interactions. In fact, the retail industry offers a lot of scope for technological transformation in areas of supply chain management, inventory management, sales, marketing and more thereby empowering retailers to increase the overall efficiency and profitability of their business.
One such technology that has the potential to transform the retail sector is artificial intelligence, which has helped retail businesses boost their speed, efficiency, and precision. Let’s dive in a bit deeper to find out how:
Cognitive Inventory Management: The thinking capability of AI can be leveraged to determine the inventory components basis of the current sales trend. Depending upon the data available, AI draws inferences and forecasts of probable scenarios, provides recommendations, and even takes necessary actions with human approval. Well trained algorithms can be used to make decisions, which improve efficiency. An AI-powered system can process huge amounts of data and help create an inventory that is tailored as per the current market trends and customer demand.
Customer Purchase History: With an AI-powered CRM, organizations can target the specific interest of buyers. By breaking down huge volumes of data, AI tools can be used to identify the purchasing pattern of customers and understand their preferences. The AI-powered systems can further recommend similar kinds of items to the customers for purchase. To integrate an AI-powered CRM, retailers should consider partnering with a Salesforce implementation partner.
Interactive Interactions: Customers always look for a prompt response and with an AI-driven chatbot customer service can be improved significantly. These chatbots are trained to communicate with customers and provide answers to frequently asked questions and provide customers with the necessary support. These bots gather useful customer data and use it to determine their preferences and purchasing pattern.
Streamlining Supply Chain: The retail industry can streamline their supply chain by leveraging AI-powered tools. This might involve categorizing in-demand products, transporting them, tracking the shipment, and inventory management. With an AI-powered CRM in place, the retail industry is poised to attain new levels of efficiency while maintaining a good customer relationship.
Why Should Retail Businesses Consider Leveraging Salesforce Einstein?
Salesforce Einstein is an AI-powered CRM that integrates predictive analytics, and machine learning. Apart from this, there are other features such as Einstein discovery that allow users to figure out hidden data patterns in customer data. Other important features such as Einstein prediction builder provides for business predictions through custom AI models. Bots connected to CRM along with the integration of computer vision make use of deep learning models for identifying the make, model, or brand via product images. Another innovative feature is the Einstein voice assistant that helps in interacting with users in real-time.
Quick Wrap-up:
Given the growing preference for online retailing by customers, organizations working in the retail sector are gradually adopting AI-powered solutions to enhance operational efficiency and business productivity. With a robust AI-powered platform like Salesforce Einstein in place, retailers can provide exclusive customer experience while taking business efficiency to the next level. If you are looking for implementing Salesforce Einstein within your business ecosystem, it’s in your best interest to get in touch with a reliable Salesforce consultant.
As businesses face growth and expansion, so do their challenges to sustain and remain competitive. This requires them to leverage new technologies that can prepare them to deal with the ever evolving challenges, which usually legacy systems fail to resolve. Legacy systems are inefficient; fragile, obsolete, and difficult to integrate with new cloud and web-based services. Moreover, replacing them can be an extensive and expensive process.
Consider a case in which you have a customers’ order history data in one legacy system and customers’ web interactions with the brand in a modern and robust CRM like Salesforce. Without the CRM’s integration with the legacy system, your business would lose out on valuable insights that could otherwise be achieved by merging the data and creating one single view for their customers.
Another case would be in which a large-scale company has many subsidiaries and it does not want to migrate its business to a new Salesforce environment but wants the Account, Contacts, Leads, and Opportunity data to be synced in with their existing CRM environment for a detailed analysis using Einstein analytics.
The problems stated above creates the need for a co-existing system in which the legacy system is still operational with the data being transferred simultaneously to the new system. This article throws light on new technology solution i.e MuleSoft integration.
What is MuleSoft?
MuleSoft provides exceptional business agility to companies by connecting applications, data, and devices, both on-premises and in the cloud with an API-led approach. Using MuleSoft’s anypoint Platform; companies can integrate their SOA infrastructure with their legacy systems. They can migrate their technology infrastructure to the public or private cloud and prioritize the adoption of SaaS applications, as well as other cloud technologies.
As represented from the diagram MuleSoft helps in connecting any CRM or service portal to any Database or third-party application. It also can perform hybrid integration between legacy systems and cloud-based systems.
How will we achieve this?
In this article, we will be demonstrating a technique to integrate two Salesforce environments so as to sync the creation of each account record.
For this, we will need 2 Salesforce orgs and MuleSoft’s Anypoint Platform.
Step 1: Create 2 global configurations for the 2 Salesforce environments.
For this, you will need the UserName, Password and the Security Token for your Salesforce. If you don’t know how to get the Security Token you can refer this Salesforce help article: https://help.salesforce.com/articleView?id=user_security_token.htm
Repeat the step for the second environment.
Step 2: Use the On New Object component from the Salesforce module in the flow component.
In the On New Object select the following fields:
Connector Configuration: The source Salesforce connection i.e the legacy system.
Object: Account
Scheduling Strategy: Fixed Strategy
Frequency: 10 (You can change it as per your business requirement)
Time Unit: Millisecond
Step 3: Use the Transform message component to map all the fields that you want to migrate from the Source org to the Target org.
Step 4: Use the Create component from the Salesforce module. Select the Connector Configuration for the Target org. Add a Logger to check the account sync.
Step 5: Open the Source Salesforce environment and create an Account.
The account will be synced to the Target org.
Conclusion:
We can say that traditional architectural approaches are centered on point-to-point integration that is unable to address concerns inherent to legacy system. Using MuleSoft’s Anypoint platform, Legacy systems can be integrated seamlessly and in an efficient manner. This will allow organizations depending on their legacy systems to adopt more efficient technology solutions. In addition, organizations can lower their costs by reducing dependency on legacy system while eliminate the need to re-develop complicated legacy system interfaces.
About Girikon –
As a reputed provider of reliable IT services, Girikon offers a wide array of services including Salesforce implementation, Salesforce consulting and Salesforce support.