“Your business has to work when it’s small in order to survive to the point where it gets big.”
– Seth Godin
What Seth Godin quoted rings true when starting a small business. You have to work relentlessly to reach to the top and make constant efforts to fit in a modern-day business environment.
For instance, the evolution of small businesses in Australia. According to research[i], small businesses in Australia have contributed around $418 billion, which translates to 32% of the country’s GDP. Isn’t it interesting?
However, most small businesses remain unable to make it to the top.
Approximately 20%[ii] of small businesses fail by the end of the first year of their inception. And 50% businesses face a downward shift by the end of the fifth year of their inception.
Amid the dynamic market shifts, there are numerous challenges that hinder a business’s growth. By using modern digital technologies, you can lead in any vertical you want.
So, before we dive into a solution that enables small businesses to thrive, let’s take a quick look at the challenges that obstruct their performance.
Challenges Faced By Small Businesses
Here are a few of the common challenges that small businesses face:
- Customer Relationship: Only providing products or services to the customers doesn’t fit the bill. You have to offer them a seamless experience. Due to a lack of technology and resources, small businesses find it challenging to handle customer demands and therefore remain unable to retain their customers or attract new ones.
- Repetitive Tasks: To stay ahead of the competition, a business needs to perform tasks at 10X speed. And this can’t be done manually. Small businesses who have not upgraded their technology find it cumbersome to accomplish their objectives and perform repetitive tasks that are time-consuming, resulting in being less productive.
- Meeting Customer Requirements: Nowadays, customers want businesses to fulfill their needs without any delay. In this AI-driven era, most companies still follow traditional practices that demand manual work. This impedes them from meeting customer requirements on time. This challenge can’t be remained unseen as it causes a great customer loss to the companies.
- Maintaining Customer Records: For businesses, keeping their customer records intact is essential. But without technology enhancement, it is difficult as business data is always in silos and breaking them down is the foremost thing to do.
To deal with the aforementioned challenges, it is important to opt for an AI-driven CRM platform that makes your business run smoothly. And when it comes to a CRM platform, Salesforce is the best in the business. It not only helps you streamline your business operations but also comes with a lot of products and features to boost your business performance.
Why Should You Choose Salesforce for Your Small Business?
To make space in the digital era, small businesses need to move a notch faster. Yes, being in a small business, you should be open to new and advanced technologies that can make your business processes smooth, boost your customer relationships, automate your tasks, and ease your business processes.
Salesforce is one such platform for all your unique business needs. It offers impeccable functionality, creating a solid foundation for any organization that wants to make a mark.
Here are a few benefits that let you know why to choose Salesforce for your small business:
- Customized Integrations: The best part of using Salesforce is that it can be easily customized and integrated with your existing tech stack. This helps businesses meet their unique needs easily.
- Analytics: Your ability to analyze data contributes a lot towards your growth. And Salesforce makes it happen. Einstein analytics help you discover insights, predict outcomes, and discover new opportunities.
- Learning and Community: For any business, it is vital to engage their customers and stakeholders. That’s where Salesforce communities step in. With numerous built-in features for engagement and initiate learning, a Salesforce-powered community brings a brand and its customers at one place.
How Salesforce Combats Small Business Challenges?
Investment in Salesforce would be the smartest that you’d ever make. It helps you fill in the gap in your business processes and speeds up your business operations. Let’s take a quick look at the factors that make Salesforce a foremost choice for small businesses.
- Boosts Productivity: Salesforce adds a layer of automation to your business. So, it helps you automate repetitive tasks, store and manage data more efficiently, and improve your business efficiency.
- Improves Customer Experience: Salesforce enables businesses to offer personalized customer support to make customers feel valued. And it makes it possible with Salesforce Service Cloud. It automates service activities, organizes workflows, and discovers topics to support customer service agents. Service teams get a unified view of customer cases and get access to a knowledge base for quick information findability.
- Improves Your Sales Function: Salesforce Sales Cloud enables sales team to fetch accurate customer information, connect on various projects, share competitive data, and do much more. Also, it includes the web-to-lead feature that enables online lead capture with auto-response conditions. Sales Cloud helps you easily find leads, contracts, price books, quotes, campaigns, etc. It allows you to keep track of your overall sales journey – from monitoring sales operations to closing more deals.
- Improves Your Marketing Operations: Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud is a powerful marketing automation solution. It provides insights into customers’ buying behaviors, creates personalized customer experiences, and helps marketers engage new customers. Salesforce Marketing Cloud offers features like Journey Builder, Email Studio, Mobile Studio, Audience Builder, etc., to help small businesses deliver the right message to their customers at the right time.
Salesforce Starter Pack for Small Businesses
If you’re ready to level up your small business, you can start with the small business edition of Salesforce, which is known as Salesforce Essentials. Its pricing structure suits small businesses, which makes it a good platform for them to start with.
Salesforce Essential helps businesses to:
- Get a complete view of customers for better decision making
- Automate tasks to drive more efficiency
- Track contacts, opportunities, and close deals faster
Conclusion
There’s nothing that small businesses cannot do. Adding the right set of technology platforms to their tech stack, they can improve business efficiency and grow at scale. And investing in Salesforce is the right step to get started on this growth journey.
Want to Unleash the Power of Salesforce? Let’s Talk!
If you want to know more about Salesforce for small business and need assistance with its implementation or customization, drop us a line at [email protected] and we’ll take it from there.
Statistical References:
[i] Take a Tumble
[ii] Fundera