Because so many Salesforce solutions are function-focused (
Sales Cloud,
Service Cloud and so on), it’s easy to assume that they only provide value to whatever team’s name is on the box, so to speak. In reality, that’s not true. Salesforce can benefit every person in your organization, from executives to office assistants. How? It’s because Salesforce isn’t really designed to be an auxiliary tool, but rather a
central business hub.
It’s like email. Yes, you can think of the inbox as one application among many that helps employees do their jobs, but it’s more than that, right? We use it as a launching pad for our calendars, to-do lists, cloud drives and more. It’s the first browser tab we open and the last one we close.
Your company can use Salesforce in the same way. Let’s say you’ve decided to implement Sales Cloud. Obviously, your sales reps will use it for things like lead/opportunity management, forecasting and reporting — ideally, they’ll use it as their single source of truth. Thanks to the platform’s many additional capabilities, however, employees across the organization stand to benefit from treating Salesforce similarly — that is, as their own source of truth. Doing so can help boost collaboration, increase insight into important company operations and even create a better work culture.
Don’t believe me? Read on to learn more.
{{cta('082c66b0-c7e8-4a26-98ae-e7535c910537')}}
Salesforce helps employees collaborate and connect across teams.
Successful businesses don’t operate in silos, and that means any platform that’s going to serve as a digital “home base” for your employees needs to enable effective communication (see the email example above). Thanks to
Chatter, Salesforce more than fits the bill.
For those who don’t know, Chatter is Salesforce’s built-in communication tool that gives users the ability to post and respond to messages. You can use it to tag individuals on important notes, contribute to groups and even comment on records and files — all from a simple, sortable feed. Essentially, Chatter combines the ease-of-use of social media with
a level of security greater than email’s.
On a given day, I might use to Chatter to ask Torrent’s client services team a question about a blog I’m writing, post a shout-out to a hard-working colleague and keep up on important company announcements. On another, I might weigh in with feedback on a new marketing asset or tag my boss to request a day off. It really is my go-to for all company communications. Whenever I’m not logged in to Salesforce, I feel as if I might be missing out on some valuable information.
Of course, Chatter isn’t the only way to communicate and collaborate in Salesforce — there are also useful third-party apps you can download from the
AppExchange. At Torrent, we rely on a project management tool called
TaskRay that allows us to take larger, team-wide projects and divvy up individual tasks to different members. Each person associated with a given project can see who’s responsible for what, the current status of each task and when all tasks are due. On our marketing team, we use TaskRay to plan webinars, sort upcoming blogs, track quarterly initiatives and more. And I know our services team uses it to manage their many client-related to-dos. It’s flexible enough to accommodate most any need.
Salesforce gives users insight into crucial information.
Okay, we’ve established that any workplace technology hub worth its salt needs to give employees intuitive ways to communicate and collaborate. But it should also offer them easy access to relevant company information, and this is where Salesforce really shines.
Unlike email, Salesforce is built to manage data. Again, let’s say your company is using Sales Cloud. That means your sales team is regularly adding new leads and contacts, logging calls and updating opportunities. At first, you might not think such information would be valuable to anybody other than your reps. But thanks to Salesforce’s extensive reporting capabilities, people across the company can turn all of that raw data into valuable insight.
Leadership, for instance, can view sales trends by region, rep, product — you name it. Rather than making strategic decisions based on your gut, then, you can simply act on the numbers. Product delivery and client services teams, meanwhile, can use pipeline reports and dashboards to anticipate material/allocation needs accurately. In my role, I frequently reference our industry sales dashboard to pull stats for use in Torrent’s marketing collateral. I could go on with more examples, but you get the point: Salesforce isn’t just a way for individual salespeople to manage their deals and quotas. It’s also a way to transform the data they generate into full-company value.
It isn’t only financial info you can store in Salesforce, either. At Torrent, we house some key personal stats on each employee’s contact record — things like their favorite treat or drink and how they prefer to be recognized or acknowledged. If somebody across the table from me is clearly feeling overwhelmed, I can look up their go-to coffee order, pick it up from the shop down the block and (hopefully) brighten that person’s day. In itself, a small thing. At scale, though? A great way to reinforce a culture built on respect and care.
Truthfully, there just isn’t enough room in a single blog to convey all the ways Salesforce can benefit employees across a company. If you want to hear more about anything mentioned above, or if you’re curious about other ways you can use Salesforce as a central business hub,
send us a note. We’d love to tell you more.
