Tag Archives: informatica cloud mdm
Will Salesforce be the Catalyst to Propel MDM into the Cloud?
Salesforce.com – a company that has become synonymous with the cloud – acquired over 100,000 customers and one million users within a span of just 10 years. Compare that to a traditional company like General Electric, the only company to be on the Dow Jones Index for over 100 years – it took them over five-times that many years to acquire the same number of customers. This goes to say that customers have been enamored by the cloud and its benefits – no software maintenance, rapid time-to-value, and subscription pricing – to name a few. No wonder, there are thousands of cloud applications and millions of users out there now. I’ve seen projections that the cloud computing market will grow to $241 billion by 2020. This might be a conservative estimate.
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…)