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Tag: small businesses

CEPTES > Blog > small businesses
automating
SMEs
August 5, 20200

Why should SMEs opt for Salesforce?

Gone are the days of tardy pitches over innumerable inconvenient sales calls that struggle to retain information and customers, let alone bring in new leads. The world of sales needs a digital transformation into an efficient system where each cog has a purpose.

Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) rely heavily on sales teams to pitch their services and/or products to new customers or update existing customers with better deals. Despite all their efforts, the reason why sales teams often fall shorter than their original goals is because of the lack of an organized, flexible, scalable structure to support their hard work. In a world that runs before it walks, an SME simply can’t afford to lose customers due to the absence of a streamlined sales process.

The CRM approach

CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tools allow the sales team to manage all customer-related data at one place, to be retrieved anytime, anywhere, and from any device. Whether you’re making an urgent call or pursuing a game-changing lead on-the-go, a powerful CRM has your back.

Process automation

Software solutions automate critical parts of the sale process to ensure quick responses and better lead generation. Imagine an automated process that takes care of lead distribution, lead prioritization, responding to FAQs, analyzing reports, and getting sales alerts! With a digital transformation, all of this is possible and more.

Better security

The conventional approach to sales includes loosely recorded information, loss of leads from previous sales reps, disgruntled employees who turn rogue, and a vulnerable database. A CRM software solution provides a more secure option for crucial data.

Why Salesforce?

Salesforce the #1 CRM in the world, is the perfect CRM solution for all your needs that integrates companies and customers on a singular forum. While most of the small businesses wonder if Salesforce is for bigger enterprises, you can actually implement it to start your CRM journey. Certainly, you need to perform some customizations, integrations, and configurations to meet your specific business goals, but with the right Salesforce partner, you can achieve what you really need.

Sales process optimization & streamlined customer service are extremely crucial for any company, and SMEs are no exceptions. Moreover, SMEs are more concerned over their customer service and sales ROI, and using a platform like Salesforce will certainly help them transform their needs. 

How Salesforce can help SMEs?

  1. Start instantly with easy set-up
  2. Sell smarter with in-built intelligence
  3. Offer enterprise-grade customer service
  4. See all your customer info in one place
  5. Scale your business with the world’s #1 CRM
  6. Affordable pricing
  7. In-app tutorials & guided set-up

CEPTES is a global provider for Salesforce services, via consultation, digitalization, and innovation. We provide a one-stop-shop for a plethora of services, some of which are listed below:

Salesforce Implementation Services 

Partnered with Salesforce.com, we provide an economical solution in the form of CRM implementation and integration.

Salesforce Customization Services

CEPTES ensures custom-built, hand-crafted, tailored solutions to fit the designs and requirements of your SME. We deliver a product that’s unique to your SME’s processes and milestones, thus optimizing your Salesforce. Also offering continual support, even after the delivery of the product, to ensure seamless integration.

Salesforce Advisory Services

As your numero uno Salesforce consultant, CEPTES performs regular audits, assesses roadblocks or gaps in achieving goals, recommends solutions, and identifies opportunities.

Salesforce Analytics

CEPTES provides an in-depth analysis of your salesforce so that you can make quality decisions based on actionable data-driven insights. Make farsighted business decisions with AI at the helm.

CEPTES, and in extension Salesforce, have managed to revolutionize the sales industry by making the impossible possible. In a world that wishes to achieve an exponential increase in targets, truly opening the portals for success. SMEs often lack the well-oiled machinery required to establish greater visibility, credibility, and authority in a dynamic market.

CEPTES can strengthen the Salesforce for small businesses, making their targets more achievable, their processes methodical, and their success inevitable. Get in touch for more details.

COVID-19, MSMEs
July 6, 20200

How Indian MSMEs can reinvent themselves digitally post COVID-19?

The Indian MSME sector contributes about 29% of the country’s total GDP. On similar lines, saying that MSMEs are a crucial part of the Indian economy won’t be an exaggeration. Companies that make an annual investment less than Rs. 50 Cr. and the annual turnover not exceeding Rs. 250 Cr. are classified as Micro, Small & Medium Enterprises (MSMEs). 

However, all is not well with MSMEs. The global pandemic has brought a plethora of challenges for them to survive and enable business continuity. 

Lack of awareness and investments in the latest technologies are among the critical roadblocks towards their advancement.

Every Crisis Is An Opportunity

The pandemic has put immense pressure on small businesses to balance and retool to thrive in the post-pandemic world. It has also demonstrated the value of technology and digital transformation across industries. It has become imperative for businesses to look for new solutions to stay relevant and ahead of the competition. 

Start Your Journey with Salesforce

Salesforce, the global CRM leader is sharpening its focus in India, and small businesses stand to benefit from its scalable industry solutions designed to improve customer engagement and drive sustainable business efficiency and growth. Salesforce is not just a CRM, It is a genie in the lamp indeed.

Let’s explore a few of its immense potential:

  • Salesforce offers crucial information on inventories, customers, tools, platforms to MSMEs for better recognition of customer persona.
  • Salesforce offers a complete 360-degree view of a customer, which means you can generate more leads, nurture them, close deals faster, and retain them easily.
  • Team collaboration becomes easy with multiple communication modes and scheduler in place.
  • A cloud-based solution implies that your team can be active in your customer’s response at any time, from anywhere. They can work from even the remotest of the location and using any device.

Salesforce: Changing the Indian MSME Landscape

Recently, Salesforce has brought on board a prominent personality in the field of banking, Arundhati Bhattacharya as CEO of Salesforce in India. Experts see this as a highly strategic move by Salesforce to help small and medium businesses in India realize their digital dreams. 

What makes Salesforce great for any small business?

  • Salesforce offers a complete view of each of your customers, which can help small businesses prioritize their lead pipeline by automating the entire sales & customer service process. Automated workflow enables MSMEs to assign tasks easily, follow-up on approval requests, and suggest changes.
  • Salesforce drives a high-level of collaboration. The in-built functionalities help small business sales reps and other team members seamlessly collaborate. The collaboration includes resource sharing, hassle-free data sharing, report generation that will save high time and costs.
  • Having an opportunity to run a company on the go is simply great, regardless of the size of the business. Moreover, AppExchange (Salesforce’s App Marketplace) offers a large number of apps for a variety of business needs. 
  • Salesforce is highly flexible in terms of pricing. With a large number of subscription plans as well as user licenses, small businesses can have affordable pricing, functionality, and several business users.
  • Due to its high customization capabilities, numerous integration options, and a large number of apps, Salesforce is a viable choice for MSMEs of all sizes and scales.  
  • Salesforce Trailhead, a fun knowledge hub can help small businesses to learn Salesforce for free in order to get the best out of their Salesforce investment.

Reopening the business post-COVID-19 will be a challenge & Salesforce could play a crucial role here by offering Indian small businesses the tools and the power of the platform to imagine their business. 

CEPTES Salesforce Solutions for Small Businesses

As a Salesforce Silver Consulting Partner, CEPTES is renowned for its decade-old expertise in the Salesforce platform. In fact, CEPTES also offers small businesses highly customized Salesforce solutions that can be scaled and upgraded to meet the ever-changing business needs. Besides this, we help businesses adopt or upgrade their systems with our easy-to-deploy Salesforce solutions.

With over a decade of experience and a highly-skilled Salesforce Certified workforce & leveraging the characteristics of Salesforce, we facilitate digital transformation and innovation for Indian MSMEs using our Customer Success Platform. Making it convenient for business owners to analyze, consolidate, and segment data for improved decision-making capabilities, more personalized user experiences, enhanced productivity, and optimum ROI.   

To learn how CEPTES can help you drive growth and partner with you to harness the true potential of Salesforce, please get in touch with us.

Booom
May 29, 20200

Everything you need to know about ‘Booom’ – CEPTES’s new solution for Salesforce Essential customers

CEPTES has recently introduced a lightning-fast productivity utility called ‘Booom’ for Salesforce Essential customers. The solution will help small businesses with a Salesforce Essential license start with Sales Cloud or Service Cloud within less than 30 mins.

Salesforce Essentials is helping small business owners leverage the power of Salesforce in order to transform their sales and customer service processes to drive excellence. Salesforce Essentials is certainly enabling SMEs to compete in the market and grow with the world’s #1 CRM platform as it seamlessly takes care of critical business processes while small business owners can focus on other important core business aspects. 

It has been a challenge for small businesses to immediately start with Salesforce as there are trials related to quick implementation, configurations, customization, migration, and much more. Though Salesforce ensures seamless onboarding, however, you need the platform expertise to get the best out of the investment. ‘Booom’ will help small businesses with a Salesforce Essential license start with Salesforce within 30 mins. 

How does this work? 

If you have a Salesforce Essentials edition (Start with Salesforce Essentials now), get in touch with our support team. Fill in the required fields in a simple excel sheet shared by us. Upload the file & click submit. Then Booom. You are ready to start your Salesforce journey. 

Why Booom?

Do you want to transform your small business & grow with Salesforce? Do you have a Salesforce Essential edition? Do you want to sell faster & deliver superior customer support? If your answer is ‘Yes’, then you can opt for Booom. Here are some of the top reasons why:

  • The quickest way to start with Sales Cloud or Service Cloud with an Essential Edition. (Turn around time <30 mins)
  • Reduced implementation time – 60% to 90%
  • Reduced implementation costs
  • Faster ‘Go to market’
  • Quicker ROI
  • Deliver superior customer support & sell faster from day one

Get started with Booom now. 

Salesforce Essentials
November 21, 20180

How Small Businesses are moving faster with Salesforce Essentials

During 2017 Dreamforce keynote, we heard the next generation of Salesforce’s Customer Success Platform will empower enterprises to make every customer interaction smarter and more personalized. A year after today, we are witnessing something similar happening as businesses have transformed the way they used to interact with their customers a year ago. All thanks to Salesforce CRM. Especially when we talk about small & medium scale businesses, Salesforce CRM has proved to be a savior.

In this blog post, we are going to have a look at one of the largest ESMB countries in the world – ‘India’. ESMB sector has employed over 50 million people in India and contributes approximately 30% to the GDP. Rightly called as the ‘engine of growth’, Indian ESMB sector is witnessing a significant wave of digital transformation with the increasing penetration of internet and smartphones. Though most of the small & medium business owners understand that technology can make their lives better, they face certain challenges which are not allowing them to implement technology in every business operations.

Salesforce Essentials

Salesforce introduced Salesforce Essentials which will enable every small business to embrace the power of Salesforce with apps for crucial business areas like sales and service that are user-friendly, easy to set up and maintain. In every four months, Salesforce keeps on adding new functionality to its platform, so small businesses don’t have to spend a huge additional time or cost in order to be aligned with the latest technologies. While Salesforce takes care of the business in the most efficient way, small businesses can focus on what matters the most- customers.

Small businesses can quicken their sales cycles and build a community of happier customers with the world’s #1 CRM in just $25 a month. *

With Salesforce Essentials can;

  • Start instantly with an easy set-up
  • Sell in a smart & quick way with built-in intelligence
  • Offer enterprise-level service to their customers
  • Grow with world’s most trusted platform

How Salesforce Essential is helping small businesses grow

See all customers details in one place

Automatically pull data from various channels like emails, calendar, spreadsheets and more to offer a single, 360-degree view of every customer and their info along with your entire business.

Easy to use

Salesforce Essential offers an easy option to interact with your customers by answering their queries in just minutes. There are in-app tutorials and guided setup so that you will never lose your way.

Faster sell

A comprehensive and highly customizable view helps you easily identify key contacts, easy lead follow-ups, and much more in Lightning view.

Time-saving

You can now track emails, calls, and meetings automatically with the help of Einstein Activity Capture. Small business owners can collect and sync key info right from their inbox. This will help you spend less time in spreadsheets and focus more on customers.

Accessibility

The speed, scalability, intelligence and customization of Salesforce platform is not limited to desktops. You can access and update your business data anytime with your Salesforce mobile app. You can now close deals faster on the go.

Seamless customer support for your business

Essentials allow you to collect and organize all your support channels and customer information and place it on a single page. This will help you to interact with your customers on all the channels.

Autopilot

You can enable autopilot mode in order to automate various repetitive tasks, route each question to the right agent, and earmark task based on agent expertise or availability.

As a Salesforce registered consulting partner, CEPTES helps small and medium scale companies leverage the Salesforce platform to offer smarter and more personalized customer service. Contact us today to learn more.

 

Source: Salesforce

Salesforce, SMBs
March 28, 20180

Why “Salesforce Essentials” is the best solution for small businesses

Salesforce Essentials 

Salesforce has offered various products and solutions geared towards SMB set up in the past. All these solutions were typically best-suited for medium-sized and large enterprises. In 2017, Salesforce has introduced Salesforce Essentials. Salesforce Essentials also called as Lightning Essentials is a business solution supports up to 10 users and is best suited for small businesses and start-ups.

Let’s have a look at how Salesforce Essentials plan differs from other Salesforce packages.

Implementation is quicker & easier

As per Salesforce’s 2017 SMB trends report, only 26% of the small businesses have one or more in-house IT support member. One of the prime reason for small businesses avoiding SaaS solutions is lack of implementation support. For a small business owner, it not realistic or feasible to spend weeks on negotiating with service providers, watching demos and going through booklets to set up a CRM system.

Keeping this in mind, Salesforce has simplified the implementation process in Salesforce Essentials by providing user access to Trailhead, a “free gamified online learning platform” which guides users for a quick and smooth set-up process. Since there is less number of features in this streamlined version of Salesforce CRM, there is less effort to put to run it and you can also do it in-house without any IT expert help.

Affordable Pricing

As this solution is for small businesses, Salesforce has priced it quite reasonably in order to entice small business owners. The reason behind this is, small business owners will sign up for Essentials and gradually upgrade to the higher versions of the solution. It is not difficult to upgrade in the later stage as Essentials is just a lower tier option of Salesforce’s Lightning line.

Just for $25 per user/per month, a small business user can get access to Sales Cloud Essentials and Service Cloud Essentials for up to 10 users (even though it says 5 users on the website). The next plan is $75 per user/per month if you are business is growing rapidly and you are expecting more than 10 users in the near future.

Features focused on small businesses 

Salesforce Essentials doesn’t offer all the functionalities of Lightning, but it offers several features as compared to the price. Below are few of the best features Salesforce Essentials offer to small business users.

Sales Cloud Essentials

Targeted for a small sales team, Sales Cloud Essentials offers a lot of useful features at a low price.

  • Account and contact management
  • Opportunity management
  • Customizable sales process
  • Task management, activity feed
  • Einstein activity capture
  • Configurable reports and dashboards
  • Collaboration tools
  • Case management
  • Lightning app builder and Appexchange

There are few obvious limitations, like limited analytics/forecasting, lack of workflows, lack of roles and permissions, and lack of built-in billing and price quoting features.

Service Cloud Essentials

Customer service is perhaps the most critical aspect for a small business. Salesforce’s Service Cloud Essentials is a great asset for basic service management. In order to get rich features like order management, and advanced reporting – you need to upgrade. But the current set of features are impressive.

  • Salesforce mobile app
  • Collaboration tools
  • Case auto-assignment
  • Email optimization (web and email case capture and auto-response)
  • Case escalation rules and queues
  • Lead-contact account management
  • Task management and activity tracking\
  • Lightning app builder
  • Custom profiles and page layouts

Bottom Line

Salesforce has given an opportunity to small businesses to use world’s #1 CRM at an affordable price. If you keep an eye on costs as your business grow, and stay within your data limits, Salesforce Essentials can be a really useful and productive solution for your business.