Salesforce is an industry-leading platform with dozens of benefits to boast about, but why exactly do businesses love this software-as-a-service solution to customer relationship management?
This question is probably the most common one asked in enterprise IT nowadays, whether it’s by a CIO or a sales executive, considering how the CRM market is currently exploding. According to Gartner, CRM software vendors earned around $23.2 billion in 2014. Of course, the competition is tight, as the source found that 60 percent of the market share is divided amongst 10 different tech companies. Yet still, Salesforce dominated the competition in 2014, as IT industry giants Microsoft and IBM combined barely accounted for half of Salesforce’s market share.
Salesforce is undeniably the king of CRM software, and here are five reasons why.
1. It’s only in the cloud
SaaS is taking off as businesses discover that software licenses are costly, employees want mobility and IT departments need scalability. Gartner noted that this is a major reason why Salesforce holds the No.1 position in its sector, and this trend will only continue given the love that cloud adopters have for these Web-based services.
“Strong demand for [SaaS] continues, with [it] accounting for almost 47 percent of total CRM software revenue in 2014,” said Joanne Correia, research vice president at Gartner. “This is driven by organizations of all sizes seeking easier-to-deploy and faster-ROI alternatives to modernizing legacy systems, implementing new applications or providing alternative complementary functionality.”
“Salesforce is always evolving and developing new features.”
2. It’s constantly innovating
Since its public release, Salesforce has been improving its features and offerings, and its latest innovation comes in the form of Salesforce1, a mobile app for salespeople on the go. But, of course, the CRM leader isn’t stopping there. VentureBeat reported that Salesforce recently bought a “smart calendar app” for businesses, and before that, the company acquired Toopher, a mobile authentication startup.
Simply put, Salesforce is always evolving and developing new features and solutions for a variety of business needs.
3. It’s working
Salesforce touts a lot of benefits of the CRM platform, but none are more important than its capability to collect data. Armed with layers of information, businesses are able to shift strategies, improve customer relationships and analyze every aspect of their sales processes.
According to a Salesforce survey, 72 percent of marketing leaders said that CRM tools are “absolutely critical” or “very important” to their businesses, while 86 percent said the same about marketing analytics technologies.
4. It supports a variety of industry verticals
Salesforce is not just for sales professionals and marketing teams. The CRM software is valuable for dozens of verticals, including but not limited to nonprofits, communications, health care, retail, education, media and even the government.
There’s a Salesforce solution for everyone and every situation.
The sheer amount of data collected via Salesforce can reinvent any business.5. It integrates with existing tools
Some might turn to other CRM software because they already work closely with a different vendor. This kind of lock-in is detrimental to productivity, as businesses are just choosing the easiest solution, not the most effective. In fact, Salesforce integrates with many other platforms and software, making it the best of both worlds.
InformationWeek listed a handful of applications and tools such as Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, Chatter and, most notably, Microsoft Outlook, Word and Excel. This just demonstrates that Salesforce will become a critical aspect of the workday, combining dozens of collaboration, productivity and communication solutions in one cohesive – and mobile – package.
From analytics to enterprise mobility, Salesforce provides businesses with the official CRM platform. All companies need is some help to get started on the road to Salesforce success.