5 Ways Salesforce Helps B2B SaaS Companies Gain a Competitive Advantage

Boost Sales with help from your CRM

Your company's sales and marketing tech stack can make or break your company in the competitive environment. Adopting a customer relationship management (CRM) solution like Salesforce goes a long way in supporting your customer-related interactions, thus facilitating the growth of your business. 

Salesforce is a leading CRM solution that supports your sales and marketing initiatives when you generate new leads, convert them into sales, and work on retaining them as repeat customers.

Adopting a CRM helps you deliver personalized communication to each customer regardless of the complexity of your business – it keeps your customers at the center of the company.

 According to Salesforce Customer 360 Playbook, buyers aren't feeling special. 

Read on to learn more about how Salesforce helps B2B SaaS companies gain a competitive advantage.

Salesforce Helps You Manage Customer Relationships More Effectively

Strengthen Relationships with Customers

Customers are the most crucial asset for a business. Without them, it is impossible to remain competitive. 

Businesses spend a significant amount of time and money acquiring customers and converting them from prospects into paying customers. Due to the difficulty and cost of acquiring new customers, the most sensible thing for B2B SaaS companies is to develop and maintain a strong relationship with existing customers. 

Customer relationships are the number one reason B2B SaaS companies adopt a CRM solution into their businesses. The goal is to streamline their communication with customers to maintain a quality and consistent customer experience. 

Some of the ways Salesforce helps in managing customer relationships more effectively:

Providing information about customers

Salesforce brings together all information about your customers from different departments. For example, the customer services, sales, and marketing teams get unique information about a customer from their various roles. 

This information includes a customer's contact information, social media accounts, business information such as their role, languages they speak, etc. 

This information allows you to personalize your communication through messages to which your prospects are likely to respond.

Improved segmentation 

You can't deliver a personalized customer experience if you do not have your customer profiles figured out. As a B2B SaaS company, your general audience is other businesses. But this is not enough segmentation. 

Your CRM solution allows you to segment your audience into more appropriate groups based on data from your customers, allowing you to customize your message based on their needs and position along the customer journey. 

Improved customer retention 

Gaining a competitive edge in the B2B SaaS space requires the ability to retain your existing customers. The experience you promised to deliver should continue to keep them engaged with your business.

Your CRM helps you stay on top of your customer retention efforts by prompting you to reach out with follow-up emails and contacting customers who your business has not approached in a long time.  

Salesforce Gives You a Single View of Your Customers and their Interactions with Your Company

Understand Your Customers

B2B sales take a long time to close. Add to this the fact that the average B2B seller is more sophisticated than ever – they are demanding a personalized experience from the brands they interact with and have no hesitation moving on to a brand that understands their needs and pain points.

Becoming competitive in this space first requires that sales and marketing teams understand the needs and concerns of their users. The B2B sales cycle also has multiple decision-makers with different motivations and considerations when looking for a new product. 

Salesforce simplifies the process of understanding your leads and gathering relevant information about their pain points and concerns. It also stores this information in one central location accessible to your sales representatives when they need it. 

You can combine all the information you have about your prospects from various websites and social sites into the Salesforce platform to get a holistic view of your customers. You also have access to a history of all the interactions a prospect has had with your business, including communications with sales personnel, pages they have viewed on your website, the marketing campaigns they've seen, and the events they've attended. 

With Salesforce, you can have all this information, including the lead's contact details, in one place. In addition, this information is also accessible to all marketing and sales teams members, allowing each person to deliver a personalized experience to customers at each of their touchpoints. 

The information is also available as part of the institutional memory. Even when sales team members leave a company, the new team can use this data to understand what steps the previous team had taken and continue delivering a positive experience to customers.

Salesforce Automates Sales Process, Accelerating Time-to-Close Deals 

Salesforce Simplifies Sales Process

Sales processes are often interconnected with other business processes, requiring regular tracking, testing, and error correction to keep these processes running smoothly. When these processes rely on manual processes, delays and errors are bound to occur. 

Salesforce allows businesses to automate their sales processes to keep them running smoothly. Through automation, key decision-makers can spend their time and resources prioritizing essential tasks and charting a path for the long-term business strategy.

Salesforce automates predefined tasks and activities such as:

Order management

Orders follow certain activities from when a customer places a purchase order to the final delivery. Some of these processes can be automated to simplify the process for sales representatives and customers, such as automatically approving applicable discounts.

Workflows

Salesforce comes with a Workflow tool that allows you to integrate your CRM with other marketing automation tools. For example, you can create reminders to engage with customers or leads at a given time and assign these tasks to your sales team. Your team can also share work items, allowing them to collaborate on different projects.

Customer journey 

Salesforce offers the Flow Builder automation tool that allows your sales team to track the complete customer journey. They can see the customers actively engaging with your business, thus focusing on them to drive faster conversion. .

Salesforce Allows the Use of Custom Applications to Meet Your Business Needs 

Extend Salesforce to Meet Your Needs

Salesforce helps your business improve its sales processes and customer relationships. However, some companies have additional needs and functionalities they desire in their CRM software. 

Salesforce allows your business to create custom applications or use third-party custom apps to meet your needs. Salesforce released the Salesforce AppExchange platform in 2006 as a platform to enable Salesforce customers to extend their systems with third-party solutions. From the AppExchange, you can find building blocks to help you customize a solution that addresses your business needs.

Kudoz is an example of a Salesforce AppExchange solution designed to address the needs of businesses that want to have better Salesforce data. 

Salesforce also has an API integration that allows you to create a custom Salesforce extension.

Salesforce Allows You to Create Repeatable and Scalable Sales Processes

Automate Your Sales Processes

Gaining a competitive advantage in the B2B SaaS space means having repeatable and scalable processes. Your sales team should not start from scratch each time. 

Salesforce allows you to maintain your customer and transactional data in a usable state by enforcing automated rules to support accurate data entry. This simplifies the data analysis process making it faster to make accurate data-driven decisions. 

Salesforce also makes it easier for businesses to improve their sales pipeline management efforts. Sales teams can manage the sales pipeline to ensure that the right activities are completed at the proper stages of the sales pipeline, thus allowing your marketing and sales teams to scale the pipeline size and velocity. 

To make your sales processes repeatable and scalable:

• Identify your sales goals and the metrics you will use to measure these goals. 
• Outline the sales processes that are going to support your sales goals. When developing these processes, consider the needs of all the stakeholders involved, including your executive team and the sales and marketing teams. Your sales process should also outline how you take a customer from the first contact to the sale. 
• Customize your opportunity stages. Salesforce comes with default opportunity stages which might work for your company. However, you can customize them to reflect your business' sales process. 
• Create fields you want to support your sales processes. If you're going to collect a lot of data, create these fields as a custom object that can connect to the opportunity. 
• Add custom features that help your sales teams do their jobs better. 
• Continuously monitor your sales processes for their effectiveness and opportunities for improvement to ensure that they grow with your company and adapt to change quickly. 

Summary

Automate Customer Processing and Enable Repeatable, Scalable Sales Processes

Growing your B2B SaaS company starts with setting up the right team with the right tools they need to achieve business goals. Your tech stack – more specifically – your CRM is an integral part of hacking the growth your company so desires. 

Salesforce is a leading CRM platform that helps businesses remain on top of their communication, customer engagement, and sales and marketing efforts. With Salesforce, companies can engage with their most important asset (customers) through channels and messaging that appeal to them. 

Salesforce also supports the automation of sales processes and allows you to scale your sales operations. You can also use custom applications such as Kudoz with Salesforce to bring even more functionality to your business.