Company: Salesforce.com (CRM)<\/p>\n
Austin Davis<\/p>\n
Word Count: 785<\/p>\n
Imagine a company with multiple offices around the world. Each office houses \u201ccube farms\u201d with hundreds of cramped desks, and sales reps crunched over their computers, \u201cdialing for dollars\u201d many hours a day.\u00a0 They have a paper list of 1000\u2019s of names, phone numbers, and potentially email lists, and as they make their outbound calls, repeat the same generic speech to try to convince their B2B prospects to show interest in what they\u2019re selling.\u00a0 A boss casually strolls over to rep\u2019s desk and asks if he could get a summary on leads and opportunities for product X, in region Y, and how has that trended over the past 18months.\u00a0 The rep defeatedly gets up and walks into the even larger file storage room, where miles of file cabinets are stored which hold customer and lead records, which will take hours to sift through.<\/p>\n
Although somewhat dramatized, that is a view into a world where enterprise Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software doesn\u2019t exist.\u00a0 Enter Salesforce.com (SFDC), who has come to digitally transform the way companies manage their sales processes. \u00a0Founded in 1999, SFDC developed its first CRM solutions for B2B commercial applications, and has built a portfolio of products featuring cloud hosting, process automation, content marketing management, and others1<\/sup>.\u00a0 CRM software did exist prior; however, only in a point solution, customer owned\/hosted medium.\u00a0 SFDC has digitized the space, coming to offer cloud-enabled services so customers can host all their data in the cloud, share with their global business, ensure backup for safe-keeping, and other valued activities 1<\/sup>.<\/p>\n Why is CRM so important?\u00a0 Although more reasons than fit here, we can simply consider the world of client A\u2019s \u201cExisting\u201d vs. \u201cNew\u201d customers.\u00a0 For \u201cExisting\u201d customers, retention and relationship management are key, so Client A can maintain a solid base of sticky, healthy recurring revenue.\u00a0 Through industry surveys, it\u2019s believed ~66% of legacy customers leave for reasons other than location change, bankruptcy, or move to a competitor.\u00a0 Speculatively put, customers leave then because they simply feel ignored or are not receiving the service level desired 2<\/sup>.\u00a0 For \u201cNew\u201d customers, it\u2019s all about widening and converting the sales funnel to grow sales.\u00a0 This requires significant investment in time, headcount, and strategic tools to both 1) interact\/generate the most leads, and 2) convert them to sales.\u00a0 The sales process has shifted to where customers are now more than 60% of the way through the purchasing cycle, so they are more informed, and less interested in spending unproductive time with sales reps 3<\/sup>.\u00a0 Thus, inbound marketing and digital content strategies have become the focus of many firms to attract those leads and convert those in their \u2018sandbox\u2019 who are more likely than cold leads.<\/p>\n For many years, smaller firms simply didn\u2019t have the scale to dedicate large efforts to marketing and CRM, and the ones who did, saw unfortunately low RoI on spend.\u00a0 With these new digitized automation products, firms at any size could now compete with their enormous competitors by operating a sales team making just as many outbound distributions (i.e., email campaigns) as their competitors.\u00a0 Or, they could focus their attention on the customer information side, becoming as \u2018smart\u2019 as possible on any given lead, thus translating to much higher likelihood of conversion.\u00a0 They also could now transition their marketing models from \u2018outbound\u2019 to \u2018inbound\u2019, realizing an estimated 3x improvement on every dollar spent on content marketing efforts rather than traditional outbound 4<\/sup>. \u00a0The reason for this extra low cost, is that SFDC offers its products through a Software as a service (SaaS) model, where customers pay cheap, monthly rates hosted on SFDC\u2019s cloud servers 5<\/sup>.<\/p>\n This inexpensive digital model has disrupted both B2B and B2C verticals, growing SFDC from $5MM (2001) to $6.5B today 1<\/sup>.\u00a0 It has allowed for serious growth within the software and technology space, and allowed small and medium size businesses to focus on their core products and innovation, rather than costly CRM tools and sales\/marketing tactics.\u00a0 SFDC can do more however. First, social media. \u00a0Even in the B2B space, over 41% of a LinkedIN survey audience believe it\u2019s effective in marketing 6<\/sup>.\u00a0 And this at relatively low cost – 81% found increased traffic occurred with only 6 hours\/week invested in social media marketing 7<\/sup>. \u00a0Innovating on products which can track and retain social media activity, linking to other\/existing CRM prospect data, could help customers continue to increase conversion ratios, as well as monitor content marketing and digital campaigns.\u00a0 Secondly, integration and \u201cworking in the cloud\u201d is another important opportunity.\u00a0 It\u2019s extremely time consuming to operate huge databases, constantly up\/downloading csv files.\u00a0 Providing more nimble platforms for working directly and integrating to existing business tools would allow for even more efficiency, particularly as businesses scale.<\/p>\n —————<\/p>\n Citations: <\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n 1<\/sup> Reference for Business, \u201cHistory of salesforce.com, Inc.\u201d, http:\/\/www.referenceforbusiness.com\/history2\/84\/salesforce-com-Inc.html<\/a> , accessed November, 2016.<\/p>\n 2<\/sup> SuperOffice, \u201c4 reasons why your CRM system is your most valuable asset!\u201d, http:\/\/www.superoffice.com\/blog\/4-reasons-why-your-crm-system-is-your-most-valuable-asset\/<\/a> , accessed November 2016.<\/p>\n 3<\/sup> HubSpot, \u201cNo Sale Left Behind: Sell More, Better, Faster With Inbound Sales\u201d, http:\/\/blog.hubspot.com\/marketing\/how-to-do-inbound-sales-slideshare-hspr#sm.00001gv36xv4nke1txzfj3jaoe4b7<\/a>, accessed November 2016.<\/p>\n 4<\/sup> Jumplead, \u201cWhy Inbound Marketing? Statistics on Inbound vs. Outbound Marketing\u201d, https:\/\/blog.jumplead.com\/2013\/11\/29\/why-inbound-marketing-statistics-on-inbound-vs-outbound-marketing\/<\/a>, accessed November 2016.<\/p>\n 5<\/sup> Salesforce.com, \u201cSalesforce.com Annual Report 10-K 2016\u201d, http:\/\/s1.q4cdn.com\/454432842\/files\/doc_financials\/2015\/Annual%20Report\/Updated\/Salesforce-FY-2015-Annual-Report-forweb_v001_n0jhq9.pdf<\/a> , accessed November 2016.<\/p>\n 6<\/sup> LinkedIN Slideshare, \u201cContent Marketing Spotlight Report\u201d, http:\/\/www.slideshare.net\/hschulze\/b2b-content-marketing-report-40688285<\/a>, accessed November 2016.<\/p>\n