Different ways of innovation with a common end goal: customer centricity

Geplaatst op by Hendrik Pans

One of the things I like the most about the job as a Salesforce Consultant, is being able to work with cutting-edge technology. Proven by their second place in Forbes’ list of the world’s most innovative companies, Salesforce is constantly innovating and improving its products in order to serve their customers’ needs in the best way possible. And that innovative and customer centric mindset is exactly where Salesforce, 4C and I have a match. It’s also one of the things that makes our job interesting: we as consultants have to ‘innovate’ as well. We must constantly learn and develop ourselves to keep up with the evolving technologies and business environments. It requires effort and flexibility from our side, but seeing your clients being happy with your tailored solution to fulfil their needs makes the invested effort and time worthwhile. While Salesforce is mostly focused on product innovation, we as consultants are working on our ‘personal’ innovation. But in the end you can look at it as two different ways of innovation with a common end goal: helping companies to become real customer-centric companies.

Three times a year Salesforce releases updates or new functionality. For example, following new Sales Cloud features included in the Winter ’17 release prove how Salesforce is constantly seeking ways to connect companies with their customers:

  • Predictive Lead Scoring uses lead characteristics, historical information from industries and time to conversion metrics to tell your sales reps which leads are the most interesting ones to nurture and the most likely to convert. This way your sales reps won’t invest their precious time in unqualified leads and they won’t annoy these leads with proposals they are not interested in.

  • With Salesforce Engage in Lightning sales reps have access to all the marketing insights and tools they need to close deals faster. It enables them to send and track marketing emails, get real-time alerts on prospect activity and have access to rich data visualisation and dashboard for key metrics. Additionally, with Wave for B2B Marketing out of the box dashboards are provided to get a great overview of your sales and marketing data in one place. You can analyse the performance of your campaigns and share insights and tasks from within the app. This way your company can improve its campaign effectiveness, close deals faster and have more valuable interactions with its prospects.

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  • With the Kanban drag and drop approach now also available for leads, campaigns and contracts your sales reps can easily update your stages with one click and it looks just so much better. H2

With the Winter ’17 release only being released a few weeks ago, the Spring ’17 release is already around the corner. And with Salesforce focusing more and more on Artificial Intelligence and predictive analysis companies will soon be able to offer their clients exactly what they want, when they want it and the classic sales model will be a thing of the past. Exciting times are ahead and I’m glad I can be a part of it.

Hendrik