This is an era of quick technology growth where all the business leaders and marketers have to be aware of the latest applications to benefit the technological functions. Salesforce is identified as an innovative platform for the business uses to reap the best benefits of technology. However, like any enterprise software, Salesforce also has to be implemented, customized, configured and administered in such a way to be in tune with your business objectives to ensure optimal functioning. In addition to these, there are some best practices too to be followed for Salesforce, which are unique to various standalone industries. Further, we will discuss the Salesforce best industry practices for retail.
Retail Salesforce best practices
Retail is a really huge sector, which includes providers of various types and sizes. The retail industry is really gigantic, from the small mom’n’pop local shops to big e-commerce stores and massive store chains. However, the underlying principles of all these varied sizes of businesses are primarily sales of their products to the customers. Therefore, they all need to continuously attract new customers and get ongoing business from loyal customers.
The use cases mentioned above have the same approaches. Whether it be selling various apparel, any durable consumer items, technologicalentities, or even food or consumable products. The target audience for each of these businesses also may be different, and their needs also may change from time to time. Based on the industries and products, the purchase cycle may also be shorter or larger. You may also find the competition to be fierce or niche based on the type of products you sell. However, ultimately, all types of retailers have to constantly try and drive in more sales of different individual products that can be sold in single units or bulk.
One major driver in terms of retail sales is the overall customer experience. It is also the speed with which customers may be placing their orders and receiving the different product. Other key drivers are access to customer support services and aftersales services etc. At all these functional areas, Salesforce implementation may play a mission-critical role. However, there are chances that even when you invest in Salesforce, many of the enterprise users like sales, customer services, and support teams may fail to fully leverage the system to its fullest potential to enjoy the best benefits. It is also important to enable Salesforce to access customer data from different associative systems and to synchronize the data for analytics. Further, we may also try to explore some of the best practices to follow in the retail industry by the Salesforce uses.You may also try to take the assistance of expert consultants as Flosum to derive your business-specific Salesforce strategies.
Synchronizing data –Having a winning customer experience by using Salesforce may require the support and sales teams to gain reliable access to comprehensive data, including:
- Purchase history of various users.
- User preferences
- User buying habits
- Interests and preferences of the users along with other types of supportive data.
Getting these near-accurate data may enable you to use your sales representatives to instantly respond to customer needs. On identifying the new customers on the platform, salespeople can again offer accurate services base on their interests. You will also consider the systems you can integrate with Salesforce for achieving these goals as ERP, accounting software, point of sales systems, and e-commerce applications, etc., to help consolidate the online purchase data a comprehensive omnichannel experience for the customers.
Capture optimum data as possible about the customers –In the highly competitive market of today, just knowing the customer’s name, email, and postal address may not be enough to reap the analytical benefits. The smart retailers try to leverage additional data of a contact that is being captured through various channels. It is essential to know the gender, birth date, marital status, customer location, preferences, and dislikes they mark at product ratings, social media feeds, and progressive forums to identify the exact buyer persona of the customer. All these data may empower you to better target the customers around their preferred needs and choices to serve them better. Using the account hierarchy of Salesforce, you can also easily optimize the offerings to the customers.
Leveraging marketing automation– Driving the retail business may be more about positively impacting the customers purchasing decisions. Salesforce also offers automation of the marketing, which can be further effective integrated with various external software to keep in touch with the potential customers without any human interventions. Along with sending some notifications around any abandoned carts, evaluating the time gap since the last purchase, and assessing interest level in your products, you will be able to provide your customers some special birthday offers, coupons at different purchasing milestones, and special events, etc. You can also generate references and drive more alerts around the new products or seasonal trends to tempt them.
Analyzing and visualizing the data– Salesforce will also offer advanced tools to aid the sales and support teams in generating some actionable insights derived from the past data and help forecast the future performance and behavior of the users. All such insights may be really helpful in targeting and re-targeting the type of customers based on their purchase history and preference. It will also help segment the customers based on their purchasing patterns and plan the offer and promotions accordingly. Along with these, the marketing teams can also easily measure the overall impact of various promotions and fine-tune their strategies more precisely. Adding to it, you may also leverage the high-grade Einstein tool from Salesforce to effectively automate the processes and identify the upcoming trends you may tend to miss out on otherwise.
Experiment with loyalty bonuses and other promotional programs–Technology is now used widely to measure the results of various promotional campaigns. It may, however, started creating an impression that the retail sector has become more of a scientific specialty. However, as before, retail success is still an art to practice and master. For example, if you implement the best practices which we discussed above for the retail industry with Salesforce, you will surely be in a better position. With this, you can experiment various promotional offers, loyalty programs, and rebates for the customers. You can also try and devise customized programs and winning strategies for various customer segments. Suppose you want to gain more profitability through your approach. In that case, you may also try to sample your target market and run the promotions against a small number of the potential customers at the first point to see the impact of it before going large scale. You can also test various offers to see which all strategies you adopt may generate better results and returns.
While trying all these strategies, it is also important to revise the Salesforce best practices you try out from time to time. Retain industry has fierce competition and frequent changing customer desires, so you need to be on top of the market to control it and gain better benefits.
