Tag Archives: Force.com
Mind the Gap: How Sales Operations Can Overcome Five Customer Information Gaps in Salesforce
Lockton is the world’s largest private insurance broker. Their goal is to achieve 95% client retention. The company, which operates in 60 countries, successfully adopted Salesforce to empower 4,450 associates to continually improve cross-sell and up-sell to existing clients.
To succeed, the director of operations at Lockton knew that the associates need to know who their customers and prospects are and which products and services they already have. When he investigated, he found several customer information gaps in Salesforce.
Below are five customer information gaps in Salesforce CRM that can impact sales:
Mind the Gap: How Sales Operations Can Overcome 5 Customer Information Gaps in Salesforcecompanies.
Gap #1: Which customer record can I trust?
Before reaching out to a customer (let’s use fictitious client Mark Niles), the sales rep needs to access Mark’s contact information in Salesforce. Chances are Mark Niles’ customer information is spread across multiple duplicate lead, account and opportunity records with inaccuracies, inconsistencies and incomplete information. For example, potentially four records exist in Salesforce for one customer 1) Mark Niles 2) Marc Niles 3) M. Niles 4) Mark. The customer information gap becomes worse when a company has multiple Salesforce orgs. Sales dilemma: Which Salesforce customer record can I trust and update?
Gap#2: Which products and services does my customer already have?
Before a sales rep can identify which product or service to offer Mark Niles, she needs to know which ones Mark already has and if he has any outstanding issues. Chances are Mark Niles’ product information is stored in enterprise systems such as SAP, Oracle or JD Edwards ERP, customer support systems and maybe cloud applications such as NetSuite and Eloqua that are not integrated with Salesforce. Sales dilemma: Why can’t I access all relevant customer information from my Salesforce customer record?
Gap #3: What is impacting my customer right now?
Sales reps want to be up-to-date before reaching out to customers. They may need to go outside of Salesforce to get information such as credit scores and news announcements that may impact the timing of customer contact and the conversation. Sales dilemma: Why can’t relevant third-party data be included in my Salesforce customer record? (more…)
How Integration Platform-as-a-Service Impacts Cloud Adoption
Did you know that Forrester estimates in their 10 Cloud Predictions For 2012 blog post that on average organizations will be running more than 10 different cloud applications and that the public Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) market will hit $33 billion by the end of 2012?
However, in the same post, Forrester also acknowledged that SaaS adoption is led mainly by Customer Relationship Management (CRM), procurement, collaboration, and Human Capital Management (HCM) software and that all other software segments will “still have significantly lower SaaS adoption rates”. It’s not hard to see this in the market today, with cloud juggernaut salesforce.com leading the way in CRM, and Workday and SuccessFactors doing battle in HCM, for example. Forrester claims that amongst the lesser known software segments, Product Lifecycle Management (PLM), Business Intelligence (BI), and Supply Chain Management (SCM) will be the categories to break through as far as SaaS adoption is concerned, with approximately 25% of companies using these solutions by 2012. (more…)
Informatica Cloud Recognized by #Salesforce Customers for Data Integration
I’m pleased to announce that Informatica Cloud has once again been honored by salesforce.com customers with the AppExchange Best of ‘11 Award for Integration. Based entirely on user reviews for the Informatica Cloud listing on AppExchange, it’s clear that when it comes to Salesforce CRM and Force.com data integration requirements, Informatica Cloud has become the clear choice for salesforce.com customers. This is the fourth year in a row that Informatica Cloud has achieved this honor, and our free Data Loader Service continues to be the all-time most popular application on the AppExchange. (more…)
Cloud Integration For The Insurance Industry
Today Informatica announced that, “an increasing number of insurance companies rely on Informatica to address their unique challenges of integrating disparate data from a multitude of channels including adjusters, brokers, service providers, underwriters and other related parties.” I thought that two points were worth highlighting here:
- The wide adoption of cloud-based CRM in the insurance industry. Just look at some of the customers highlighted by salesforce.com on their website.
- The wide adoption of cloud-based data integration in this industry. (more…)