Getting the most from Salesforce.com in today’s economic climate

The current economic climate is challenging. Budgets are tight. You’ve wisely committed to Salesforce.com to help you maximize your marketing, sales and/or customer service departments but you also need to maximize ROI. This means getting more for less. More sales in less time. Solving customer issues with less internal effort. In our experience, the following are some of the most under-utilized areas within Salesforce.com that hold tremendous value in shortening the sales cycle and lowering the cost of customer retention.

Campaigns. A lot of companies think a campaign has to be a trade show, an advertisement or some other large expense activity. The truth is every thing you do to attract new customers is a campaign. Line up 25 prospects or current customers, shoot them an email blast and set it up as a campaign. Ex. “Email and follow-up, Current High Tech Customers, 2/09″. If it has any associated cost and/or time, it’s a campaign and should be tracked from start to finish to gauge its effectiveness. Recent new features such as Campaign Influence and the Campaign Members Related List makes managing all your marketing requirements in SFDC even more useful. You need marketing to keep new customers coming in and existing customers to keep buying so don’t let this functionality in SFDC go to waste.

Customer Portal/Self-Service Portal. If customers can go back to you with questions about your products and services and you’re not using some sort of web-based case management, you’re most likely spending valuable amounts of extra time tracking emails and re-writing solutions that have previously been provided. There is no cost to use the Self Service Portal and it allows customers to log a case, view and send comments and view common solutions. If you need authentication, the Customer Portal carries a monthly or per-login fee but allows you to expose more than just Cases and Solutions. Accounts, Contacts and custom objects can be customized and used on the portal with viewing and/or editing permissions. In today’s world, customers expect 24×7 support and the ability to log a case, edit information and lookup common solutions gives them that. If you’re a small to medium sized company, you can now play with the big boys and provide your customers with a web-facing system to keep them up and running and coming back for more.

Ideas. This feature for gathering and tracking feedback about your company has been available for a few releases now. It’s free to use Ideas internally, allowing employees to provide their own thoughts on current processes and procedures, company collateral, events, etc. You can also place Ideas on the Customer Portal to gather external feedback on your products and services. Starbucks and Dell have been the poster children for Ideas and found tremendous value in having the ability to gather customer feedback in a blog, forum-like format where participants can vote for their favorite ideas and have a legitimate affect on the products and services they receive. SFDC has put together a new offering for an “Ideas-only” portal that is great for customers not ready to go to a full blown customer portal but still want to tap into the wants and needs of its customer base. The Ideas-only portal pricing is based on the number of logins per month.

And now with the Spring ’09 release, cross-object workflow and Email-to-Case as a service (to name a few) customers have more ways to get more bang for their buck. Cutting costs is one way to make it in challenging times but the companies that will not only survive but thrive in this environment will make the most of the resources they already own and that includes their Salesforce.com licenses!

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