As basketball star Joel Embiid always tells anyone within earshot, “Trust the process.” The process we want to talk about here is that of handling your customers over time in Salesforce. Believe us, you can trust Salesforce with making that process easy, automated, and more effective.
Your organization deals with customers (or in the case of nonprofits, donors) every day. What if you had an automated method to interact with customers based on milestones, or stages, that you have achieved with each one of them?
For example, let’s pretend you’re a car dealer (and if you are, hi there!). Occasionally someone will come into your dealership and buy a car immediately, but more often the sales cycle is a drawn-out process. After the sale finally happens, you’re in a preferred position to support that customer for the life of his or her vehicle.
With a customized Salesforce system, you can have the software take a lot of the hassle out of the customer cultivation process.
How so? Imagine the following:
- A new prospect entered your dealership and chatted with one of your salespeople about a car, but didn’t buy one on the spot. It’s up to the salesperson to work that prospect over time and hopefully make the sale. The salesperson acquired contact information for the prospect, and entered it, along with notes on the interaction, into the Salesforce system. In the prospect’s record, a certain stage is marked. In this case, let’s say it’s “First Visit.” Once the prospect record is saved, Salesforce is set up to automatically send a personalized email, with a call to action, to the prospect two days later.
- The prospect decided to buy the car from your dealership! Now that prospect can be upgraded to a customer, and that customer has entered another stage; let’s call it “Sale.” Because that customer is upgraded to that stage, a personalized thank-you email is sent. Three days later, a task pops up on the salesperson’s Salesforce screen, telling him or her to call the customer to see if everything is going well with their vehicle. Two months later, a brochure about your service department is emailed to the customer. All that because the customer was marked at the “Sale” stage.
- Your customer decided that you dealership will also service the vehicle, so they are upgraded to “Service.” Now, at the three months, six months, nine months and so on since the car was purchased, Salesforce send out texts to remind the customer to bring the car in for regular service.
Basically, every phase of the interaction becomes a stage, and certain triggers are associated with each stage. The cool part is that you don’t need to rely on your salespeople and service department to send all of this correspondence (except the phone calls, of course). Salesforce does it automatically based on the rules that are set up in the program.
Imagine what this automation can do for your business or nonprofits. You can probably think of many customer/donor and prospect communications scenarios you’d like to automate.
The key is setting up Salesforce properly so that you too can “trust the process.” Fortunately, we’re here to help! We’ve done this for many organizations, and we’d love to do it for yours. Drop us a line and let’s talk about your unique process.