One of the biggest problems businesses face regardless of their size, is that their critical teams working to nurture and strengthen customer relationships work in silos.
The marketing team is unaware of sales pipelines and their deal stages, while the sales team is unaware of how service teams deliver value, post-product sales.
The overall impact of this lack of synergy is on the personalisation of customer relationships, wherein businesses cannot customise product messaging based on where the customer is in the marketing or sales funnel. This results in a scenario wherein marketing cannot pass the right lead to sales, impacting sales' ability to close deals faster.
The Salesforce State of the Connected Customer report explains why this is important. With 56% of customers looking for personalised messaging, the inability to deliver such messaging means they won’t be making a buying decision in your favor. Also, 60% of customers say they think they are interacting with separate departments within a business and not a unified business entity at different touchpoints. This is a big miss, as customers are looking for consistent messaging.
While teams harness the same data stored in an integrated system, they work with inaccurate or redundant data that doesn’t deliver optimal value. Moreover, data doesn’t pass seamlessly from one team to another, as there is no single source of truth. This can have a long-term impact on customer acquisition and retention.
According to FirstPageSage, the average customer acquisition cost from organic and inorganic tactics across diverse industries is between $87 and $1985. The cost can increase manifold if you don’t focus on breaking down your silos.
A critical step towards breaking down these silos is moving to a CRM like Salesforce Customer 360. IDC has ranked this CRM as #1 in its Worldwide Semiannual Software Tracker, and it has earned the top slot for the 10th consecutive year, which means you are not going wrong with Salesforce.
Salesforce Customer 360 is an all-in-one CRM platform that connects all your customer-centric departments with the customer data that is important to them. Different functions get a shared view of your customers, facilitating meaningful, outcomes-focused, customer-oriented decision-making. This integrated platform helps your business, and its teams track your customer journey, capture essential information and store it in one place. By accessing this information, teams can work together to deliver personalised experiences that help engage customers better, build trust and deliver enhanced ROI.
One of the key advantages of the Salesforce Customer 360 management solution is that it doesn’t restrict itself to sales, service, and marketing. With this tool, you can create a beating heart of your business by bringing together business-critical functions such as commerce, IT, and analytics, thus benefiting from business intelligence that helps you respond to customer needs faster, evolve your business by exploiting growth opportunities and future-proofing your business against market pulls and pressures.
Your business will already be using business apps for different functions depending on your industry. Salesforce Customer 360 can seamlessly integrate with such apps, further enriching your data and delivering holistic insights through a single plane of glass. According to Salesforce, adding more than one app to Salesforce Customer 360 improved tangible benefits for 72% of customers, and 96% of businesses adding more than one app to the platform have met their pre-determined ROI objectives or surpassed them.
Silos can disappear only if every team member across departments looks at the same data. Salesforce Customer 360 delivers granular customer data visibility across all departments that are on this platform. This means they have access to unified and the most up-to-date customer profile and can create personalised customer experiences for every customer interaction while ensuring that the messaging is not at cross-purposes with that of other departments.
While Salesforce Customer 360 and its benefits for businesses address different strategic requirements, purely from the silo perspective, nothing trumps workflows and analytics. This platform helps create workflows easily and quickly, especially those involving multiple users, multiple steps, and especially those demanding multiple approvals across departments. All stakeholders can track and monitor these workflows and their outcomes to iterate as needed and maximise their potential.
With Salesforce, you can leverage the power of AI to analyse and understand customer behavior based on their interactions with your messaging across different channels. Your teams can effortlessly identify customer engagement patterns and buyer behavior, enabling other departments to respond to a pattern change in double quick time. Considering this data is shared with all teams, at the same time, different groups can collaborate to deploy unified, personalised messaging to get the best results.
Before you say this platform is not easy to use, allow us to clarify. No platform out there is easy to use. Maximising a platform's potential takes time. Also, the fact that a platform like Salesforce Customer 360 makes intelligence available to all teams makes the teams see it as a critical enabler of faster decision-making. They are more inclined to use it, and as with any other tool, the more you use it, the more you become confident in optimising its use.
Silos are bad for the health of your business. With silos, you look at stunted business growth and an inability to capitalise on new growth opportunities. Why not break these silos and enhance inter-department alignment with Salesforce Customer 360?
TransFunnel, a marketing automation solutions company helps you accelerate business growth with strategic Salesforce consulting. Be it planning, onboarding and implementation, custom integrations or training, Salesforce certified experts can assist you at every step of the way in reaching your business goals using Salesforce.
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