salesforce consulting company

In today’s business landscape, a successful enterprise must adopt a system that seamlessly integrates all departments and their respective business processes to enable them to interact and collaborate effortlessly. This is where Salesforce has established itself as the market leader in the CRM space.  Salesforce CRM sometimes popularly referred to as the Customer 360 platform, is a user-friendly solution with virtually limitless flexibility that connects teams across departments in an organization and drives growth. As a result, companies that use Salesforce see improvements in growth and efficiency. But to get the most out of what Salesforce CRM has to you need professional expertise. While most of the Salesforce products are centred around sales and customer service, Salesforce can be used for almost anything. And while the key Salesforce functions haven’t changed much – consultant, administrator, architect and developer, the specializations required based on the unique business needs of an organization have become quite apparent. One needs to have specialization on some of the key aspects of Salesforce to make the implementation count. Consultants don’t just bring in the necessary skills and experience for implementing the CRM platform. They also add significant value in being able to understand the customer. Not only in terms of business processes within the organization but also outside of that realm, such as the people who drive those processes. And they are an intrinsic part of the customer’s growth journey onwards of implementation. While businesses can provide the Salesforce implementation team with data and insight, certain things can only be understood by a specialist. This is where the Salesforce consultant role becomes important. They are trained with skills like attention to detail, analytical thinking and problem-solving along with hands on expertise on the platform. Why Is Salesforce so Popular? Salesforce upgrades its product offering three times a year. Which means every year they add new features and functionality to help existing and new business innovate rapidly. Salesforce is founded on a Customer-360 vision and promotes a collaborative work culture that brings people together and promotes productivity. The Salesforce online community provides help and support to the entire developer community to solve any business challenge The Salesforce platform has virtually limitless flexibility and businesses can create any number and kind of custom apps and integrations to support their business Salesforce allows you to automate routine business processes which frees up employee time to focus on core tasks. Salesforce is powered by an advanced AI engine which delivers qualified analytics on Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) of your business. Here's where Salesforce Consultants add value across various phases As Part of an Implementation Team CRM implementation is a time-consuming effort and requires coordinated team effort. It would be a wise decision for a business to hire a specialist with extensive experience in Salesforce implementation since the Salesforce platform is complex and offers virtually limitless customization possibilities. Consequently, Salesforce consultants are in high demand across businesses that need the Salesforce CRM implementation. Here are the phases that require the services of a Salesforce Consultant: The Pre-Implementation Phase Before preparing a draft of the Salesforce implementation plan, a Salesforce consultant needs valuable insight from within the company. Information on the type and number of employees, the working structure of the company, regular business processes and workflows, are all important to understand how the organization works and what are its vital parts. The consultant needs to work closely with the business leaders within the organization to understand goals and expectations and current challenges and workflow bottlenecks During the Implementation Consultants play a vital role during the implementation phase as well. They are the link between the technical team – architects, administrators and developers who install and configure the platform and build and deploy custom apps, and the company. Their role is to maintain good communication between the two groups and ensure everything is well captured. After the Implementation The implementation is not over until the customer starts seeing results. After all, the technical implementation is just side of it. Once the technical tasks are completed, the implementation team also needs to train the users on the platform. Typically, this is another key responsibility area of a Salesforce consultant. It requires good communication skills, teamwork and leadership skills. Businesses are evolving continuously. And the software that they use needs to keep pace with it. Businesses need to add and upgrade their apps and workflows on an ongoing basis to stay ahead of the curve. If you are already using Salesforce in your organization, the presence of a Salesforce Consultant will help you to upgrade rapidly by building and deploying apps in an agile framework. And do to that you need a strong team of specialists. Moreover, just like every other complex platform, Salesforce also requires maintenance time to time. This is another key responsibility area of a consultant. As part of the organization Salesforce consultants also work in organizations that don’t do implementation for others. They just have enough in house needs. These are regular businesses that use the Salesforce platform and a small team of consultants to oversee the implementation, upgrades and maintenance activities. In this context, a Salesforce Consultant’s function is to make sure system performs perfectly and the users are able to use it easily. On top of that, they also discover methods to further enhance the customer experience through the use of the platform and make sure teams continue to communicate with each other. Shortage of Salesforce Professionals Currently, there just aren’t enough people trained in Salesforce to meet growing demands of this ecosystem. One of the key reasons is that Salesforce isn’t your run-of-the-mill software. It’s a specialised and complex product and unless you're a service provider or you are a part of an organization that uses Salesforce, it’s unlikely that you know much about it. Many of the Fortune 100 companies use Salesforce. IDC published an article in October 2017 saying that over 3 million jobs are expected to be there in the Salesforce ecosystem by end of 2022 through its network of partners. Salesforce has been growing at a brisk pace year on year, and so are their customers, consequently driving up the demand for Salesforce professionals to support that growth. And the skills one acquires as a Salesforce professional are highly transferable in case one wants to switch over to another industry. Developing Salesforce Skills Irrespective of your available budget, there are multiple options available to help one get familiar with Salesforce and develop skills in a certain are: Developer organisations— Sign up immediately for a free developer licence and start practising Trailhead, which is a Salesforce powered only community where one can get hands-on exposure to Salesforce and learn the technical and business skills one needs to succeed from anywhere for free. Girikon is a dedicated Gold Certified Salesforce Partner. Our relentless focus on understanding the unique needs of our customers combined with our rich expertise and experience on the Salesforce platform allows us to deliver value driven solutions to our clients. Contact us today to know more.

Managing superior customer relationships is no longer a choice but has become a necessity in today’s era. This is easier said than done as businesses are engaged in multiple activities including but not limited to managing multiple business processes. Salesforce – a robust cloud-based CRM has become one of the most popular and widely adopted CRM platforms across the globe. The innovative platform is endowed with multiple features, functionalities, and components that can be leveraged by businesses to resolve their business issues.

There is a general consensus in higher education that institutions of nearly all types and sizes need to improve persistence and completion rates. While there have been slight improvements in recent years, data indicates that only half of the students complete degrees at the institution at which they start. Studies have suggested that many students complete their degrees at other institutions, taking completion to about 62%. Student departure remains a mystery for most educational leaders. They feel a compelling need to understand and fix the causes of attrition. There is no shortage of knowledge or reference on what works in student retention. Given all that, it is surprising that rates have only gradually improved. This could be for two reasons. First, institutions are flooded with data points and may not be able to identify the ones that must be tracked or which ones help would explain the persistence patterns of their students. Second, we may lack the connections between institutional supports and students who need them to see if we are truly doing something about it. Organize the Data Points with a Model Student success models can be helpful for educational leaders who wish to identify the key aspects associated with student success, persistence and completion. While there are many models to choose from, one of the most talked about is Tinto’s “Theory of Student Departure”. The model helps track the student lifecycle and identifies areas where both student and college attributes can impact the decision to stay in or leave an educational program. Tinto’s model, when analysed and condensed, suggests that there are five key areas where students may encounter challenges that disrupt their educational careers. Likewise, they may identify areas where students may have strengths that boost their success: Academic Integration Academic Integration in a college can be segmented into three parts: preparation, transition, and performance. These three can be connected sequentially, meaning lack of preparation can lead to a poor transition and weak ongoing performance, or they can occur in isolation, disconnected from one another. Experienced faculty and advisors probably know several cases where poorly prepared students were highly successful, well-prepared students failed, and those from both groups realized a trajectory in line with their levels of preparation. Social Integration Social Integration addresses the extent to which the student is able to connect with peers within the educational ecosystem. Adult learners often bond with other adults through common programs. The extent to which students have successfully bonded with their peers can be hard to read; it is not usually a one-size-fits-all model of social integration and student information systems are not typically built to collect and report the data that may be associated with this important area of student success. This aspect may also be useful when working on student faculty engagement.  This form of social integration in which students feel heard, seen and accepted by faculty is important especially for under-represented groups to feel a sense of belonging at their institution. Financial Support Financial Support is critical to enable a student to be able to afford education at that institution.. For those who complete annual aid applications, the resulting calculations serve as a proxy for the ability to pay. The data collected for this purpose does not include factors that can help a student afford costs such as support from family or those that can hamper affordability such as need of a student to work to support a elderly dependent household. We often have a different perception of need-based aid than how students view the issue: the amount of the education bill, less the aid is the amount to be paid or financed. More often than not, it is this bottomline number that impacts students’ real or perceived ability to remain in an educational program. It can also impact the value perception of the educational experience. Is this experience worth it’s price? Goal Clarity Goal Clarity indicates the degree to which a student recognises why they are enrolled in certain college, and the end goal of the program being pursued. Certain institutions might assume that a chosen program or subject translates to goal clarity but data often shows that students change subjects two to three times before getting a degree. A few of the factors that can determine whether a student may have clarity about program they have chosen are its requirements, their personal ability to meet required standards and their practical experience in that field. Faculty and advisors will spot a common situation of students feeling lost when they are unable to pursue a popular program. Support of Family and Friends One of the least investigated areas for measuring student persistence is the support of family. As the number of college students grows, the perception of the college experience amongst their friends and families may differ than those who come from families where college attendance is common. However, that does not mean all families don’t support of first-generation students across the board. In fact, many families place high value on college education. Having said that, there may not be an obvious relation between the program curriculum and career, time spent away from class, student services, and the potential of associated programs for providing key career skills. Create a Framework of Indicators for Lagging Using these five aspects of higher education as a model, it is possible to establish a data framework that measures what we know about students and their probability to continue and succeed. Lagging indicators are most commonly available data points that reflect things that have already occurred. These include grade point average (GPA), which don’t reveal student successes and struggles with certain concepts and skills. They also include the marks of courses finished in a term, unpaid fees that disallow registration for another term, abandonment of courses midway etc. While these data may support analysis of past activities, rarely do they provide understanding of current students. For insight that is “current”, institutions need data indicators that reveal outcomes in real time. Lagging indicator data is important. It allows the institution to conduct detailed, multi- parameter analysis to reveal student groups that may enter into high-risk situations. It may also aid in identifying remedies and support structures to support future students who may have the same characteristics. Too often, these analyses are univariate, such as GPA and one-year retention rate. Even while doing multivariate analyses, the data silos and not sufficient to form regression models with retention values high enough to explicitly establish the differences between students who continue and those who don’t. Human behaviour is complex and is driven by many factors. Consequently, analysis needs to be detailed and based on comprehensive data to allow analysts to investigate multiple factors to understand the patterns of their students. Leading indicators allow institutions to impact persistence in real time. Awareness of a student not connecting with faculty as expected, assignments, fellow students, lets the institution to intervene and attempt to resolve the issue before the student feels isolated to a degree that compels him/her to leave. Identifying students who have pending program fees within the term, which usually happens because loans applied on parent creditworthiness, have not been approved, allows the institution to intervene and find a solution. The institution can support in bridging the gap and mitigate the stress felt by the student before it becomes overwhelming. These are but a few examples of how leading indicators can be used to impact student persistence. Identify and Address Gaps There is typically more data available on lagging indicators than leading indicators, which implies that we have been more attuned to collecting and using data that reflect information on something that already occurred. It must be re-iterated that lagging indicators are help in analysing patterns and suggest interventions for future students. There is far less data available and used as leading indicators, however, and this implies an emerging area of practice that demands more attention. Analyses need to have robust and comprehensive data, yet those tend to exist in various systems/data silos. Institutions that have data warehouses are one step ahead; identifying the important data and extracting them from those systems may still be a challenge, even with solutions in place. Many other institutions that lack these data tools find themselves wishing for better insights and tools to help them collect, assemble and analyze their data. Certain areas suggest polls or surveys. While there are a number of solutions available today, these can also have limitations. One of these is the timing of offering a survey to new or current students, when receive the data back and place those into the hands of those who need it (especially advisors). Some of these instruments allow comparisons of student responses at your institution to others, which can be helpful, but that may be outweighed by the timing, where these data then become lagging, not leading, indicators. Short polls, such as those that ask students to rate how they are doing that day with facial emojis, may capture those who are feeling overwhelmed. Longer polls, that tease out the nuances of family and friend support, shouldn’t exceed 10 questions and five would likely increase response rates. Survey overload can be avoided by good planning and timely distribution of short polls and surveys. Connect the Dots (and the Data) Collecting, assembling, analyzing and acting upon a robust dataset is an evolutionary process. Institutions should start with what they have and gradually augment and enhance their data and its usage as part of a quality development process. Knowing what the desired state looks like is important to creating a strong road map toward it. Assembling a robust set of lagging indicators means getting data from multiple systems, modules and tables in to a unified dataset. Once aggregated, data analysis and visualization should reveal the interaction of the data categories within the framework. Human behavior is often complex and more often than not the decision to stay or leave a program is a mix of multiple factors originating from various parts of that experience. And there may be outside factors as well such as childcare, work pressure etc. External factors may be harder to capture through these data collection mechanisms and may not reveal the true picture. A proper assessment of the internal factors within the control of the institution will augment the analysis and sidestep simplistic, one dimensional solutions about why students are staying/leaving. Assembling and using a robust set of leading indicators is often a tremendous challenge at the most forward-thinking institutions. Is anyone following up to check if any student needs help on unpaid balances? Does the financial aid office, who may be equipped to discuss solutions, even know that this has occurred? Is financial stress causing the student to look for additional outside work, such that they have less time to read and complete assignments? Is the early alert system complicated to use by faculty?  Do residence hall advisors have a similar alerting mechanism for issues they might spot? Who is following up on these and what data do they have that will help them facilitate an empathetic and inform conversation with the student before they make a decision to leave? Adopting a case management methodology to understand student persistence and success has been used by institutions in first-year programs. Some of the more remarkable results have linked students to institutional resources, as well as community services and supports, in a “wrap-around” approach to student success. These approaches can only work when cases are surfaced and those empowered to act have sufficient information to meaningfully interact with the student. It requires that the information from disparate systems is brought together. Improving student outcomes also requires that the care teams and staff can see the relationship between suggesting services and resources and the student’s engagement or lack thereof. Higher education. student support has been based upon a “build it and they will come” approach, as well as an invitational approach to student referrals. Become a part of the Innovation eco-system Girikon is a certified Salesforce Consulting Partner with extensive Salesforce Consulting experience. Get access to experts who can help you adapt fast and achieve success. Contact us today. Questions? Our reps have answers. CONTACT OUR SALESFORCE CONSULTANTS

Compared to yesteryears, customers today are more aware and informed and thus expect a personalized experience besides quality services and products. Since customers are the lifeblood of every business, retaining them, especially the existing ones, is crucial as they spend 31 percent more than the new ones. This calls for a robust customer retention strategy that will not just ensure an increase in revenue but also a decrease in overall cost. It is possible to acquire a higher level of customer retention by implementing a robust CRM (Customer Relationship Management) platform like Salesforce.  According to a survey conducted by Salesforce, it has been revealed that acquiring new customers or clients is more expensive than retaining the existing one.     How to Boost Customer Retention Using Salesforce? Tracking Customer Interaction: It is possible to keep track of your customers with Salesforce integration. From where your customers are, when they made the last purchase to what they are looking for on your website, Salesforce helps you know everything about your customers and prospects. This will help you understand customer behavior and preferences while helping you respond to their needs appropriately. Moreover, you will be able to engage with your customers by sending them personalized messages/emails while introducing them to your products and services. Unify the Database of Your Customers: Since Salesforce helps gather, organize, and analyze all your customer data in a single location, which helps in customer retention. Your sales team will access all the data easily while staying informed. With this, data accuracy is increased, and data duplicity is reduced. Moreover, client satisfaction is ensured as transparent communication is ensured between business and customers. By partnering with a Salesforce consulting company, you will be able to make the most of this fantastic platform.  Power of Personalization: For every business, customer data is a mine of gold. By centralizing this wealth of data to be personalized later, it is easy to resonate with your customers. By leveraging Salesforce integration services, you will be empowered to take control of your customer relationship by using tools such as Pardot dynamic content that allows you to personalize emails, subject lines, and more. By personalizing communication, you show your customers that you care for them.   Engaging Inactive Customers: Salesforce enables you to interact with inactive customers by keeping track of their customers by consolidating emails, calls, etc., by checking their purchase history and buying preferences, keeping them engaged via personalized messages, and more. This way, you will save money and acquire new customers. Integration of Customer Service Tool: Several customer service applications such as service cloud, desk.com, etc., offered by Salesforce can be leveraged to eliminate silos ensure collaboration between teams, especially the account management and customer service departments. By leveraging these tools, overall customer experience can be improved. Quick Wrap-up: Businesses should consider harnessing the power of Salesforce to grow their revenue and profit. So, make sure you get in touch with a certified and reputed Salesforce implementation partner to ensure the successful implementation of this platform, which will ultimately help you retain your customers and build a strong relationship with them.

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.

Who is a Salesforce Consultant? A Salesforce Consultant is a knowledgeable, experienced person who helps in utilizing your CRM qualities to the fullest which will benefit your business. Finding a suitable Salesforce Consultant who can be fit for your business is never an easy task. You need to have confidence in their Salesforce experience, knowledge, problem-solving abilities.

It is a worldwide truth that Salesforce is World’s number one CRM. It will be quite obvious for the business owner to go with Salesforce CRM for their business. If you need clarification on why you should go with Salesforce CRM, then please check out my previous article here. Let us now assume that you will use Salesforce CRM for your business for the sales management. Now, its functionality is not limited to sales management only, you can expand its functionality depending upon your business model. Salesforce CRM will not only boost your sales process but it will also display the loopholes in your business process like cold leads, lost opportunities, contact or leads having insufficient data, etc., through “Reports & Dashboards”. You can generate a lot of reports based on different parameters and apply various filters and know what needs to be fixed to improve the efficiency. Like this there are many features of it which can improve your process. To offer timely services, you can make use of case management, where you can set the priority of the case and assign to the concerned agent. So, for every problem there is a solution available with the Salesforce. Can I implement Salesforce on my own? The answer is easy. Yes!!! For sure you can configure and setup Salesforce CRM for your business. But to take the full advantage of such a good CRM you will also need assistance from a Salesforce Consultant. A Salesforce Consultant has comprehensive knowledge & experience in Salesforce and knows every in and out of it. You can bring the hidden features of the CRM on your table so that you can juice it and bring maximum profit. How hiring a Salesforce Consultant can help you? So, you can implement Salesforce CRM on your own but for making use of its full capacity, it is also recommended to hire a Salesforce Consultant. Save the time of your colleagues: When you implement a new system and need immediate result then you have to learn to operate it quickly so you attend training of that system. Now, this training part is newly added to your old routine so now your colleagues will provide undivided attention to training and normal job responsibilities. Now, hiring a Salesforce Consultant is beneficial in this case. If there was no deadline for achieving result, then you could have gone with the training and invested a good amount of time. But, now you need result soon so Salesforce Consultant can do the setup, customization to yield a solution and your team can focus on their job. Going with Coding standards: Hiring a Salesforce Consultant also means that whatever customization they are doing is following the best practice which means your system is protected from web hacking, making your software stable and the quality of the software is also improved. Fast Support & Maintenance: After implementation, customization your system was working really well. Now after some time, you start facing some issue which is hampering your production and efficiency. So, with the help of Salesforce Consultant, you can always rely on them for support. How hiring a Salesforce Consultant Increases ROI? Adapting New System: You have implemented Salesforce CRM for your business. Now after proper training and guidance when your employees will start using that system then it will improve their efficiency, redundant data will get reduced, you can track their work (leads, opportunities), know their pipeline. You will have a better idea of your business flow. You will come to know about the issues faced by your employees and then you can also work on it. So, this is also increasing your Return on Investment. That is all for this article, in case you need Salesforce Consultant for any Salesforce related work, then please feel free to reach out to sales@girikon.com