After making your initial Salesforce investment it can be daunting knowing where to go next and what exactly you should be doing. A Salesforce Partner can help.

Let us guide you on the benefits of using a partner such as NimbusPoint.

It can be tempting to self implement Salesforce without a partner. Although there may appear to be initial quick wins, you maybe missing out on the expertise and experience which would guide you through any issues or obstacles. Being Salesforce experts means that Partners can often pre-empt any design flaws before they even occur, ensuring a smooth delivery so that you can benefit sooner than later.

Partners will ensure you make the correct decisions at every stage of your implementation and answer all your questions as they arise.

Here we focus on 3 key benefits of using an accredited Salesforce Partner:

1. Better Adoption Rates

New systems often require good change management to overcome adoption issues. Partners will bring the experience from many successful Salesforce roll outs and help you overcome challenges you may face. This experience is backed by certified consultants with have both breadth and depth of specialist knowledge.

Partners will also ensure there is adequate tailored training in place for your staff to become experts quickly and proficiently.

2. Value Added Experience and Future Proofing

Understanding the terminology and the ins and outs of Salesforce is key to making your implementation successful. Salesforce partners live, breathe and sleep Salesforce, making them the perfect tool to use to optimise your return on investment. Partners will bring specialisms in industry verticals ensuring they add value to your business irrespective of the the size and scope of the project.

Partners are scored on their delivery of projects by customers and you can see how the partner is rated. The right partner will not only help you with your current implementation, but also use their expertise to plan for the long term. Having built a good relationship with a partner means they are are always available to help you with any new beneficial features Salesforce may release.

3. Tailoring Salesforce To Your Business

Every Salesforce implementation is different, and every organisation will have different desired goals and outcomes. The highly customisable nature of Salesforce allows organisations to have solution that is personalised and fits perfectly for your needs. Whether is is functional configuration for quick powerful tailoring or requires bespoke code for complex solutions, the partner will have the know how to get the best solution delivered for you.

 

If you’re interested in using a Salesforce partner, here  at NimbusPoint we have experienced consultants who are proven experts with several years’ experience. Explore our customer success stories to discover how we’ve helped businesses similar to yours make the most out of their Salesforce investment, or contact us for an informal chat about how we can help.

LiveMessage

Support your customers on the digital channels they love. LiveMessage in Lightning Experience makes it easy and convenient for customers to get support when they need it using text messaging and Facebook Messenger. Agents can work seamlessly across channels in the Service Console that they are already familiar with.

Support Your Customers with Text Messaging and Facebook Messenger

Customers can use text messages and Facebook Messenger to conveniently contact your support center to get their issues resolved. Agents can use LiveMesssage to respond from the Lightning Service Console, so they can support customers while having all the benefits and information of Service Cloud at their fingertips. Use the guided flow to set up messaging.

Set Up LiveMessage with a Guided Setup Flow

Give your customers a convenient way to communicate by adding SMS text messaging and Facebook Messenger to your support channels. Use the LiveMessage guided setup flow to get started. You can choose which channels to add and whether to set up Omni-Channel to route incoming messages to your support team.

Set Customer Expectations with Automated Response Messages

Use predefined automated responses to set the tone for your agents’ conversations with customers. The Chat Acknowledgment message is sent in reply to a customer’s initial text message and assures customers that their messages got through. Send automated messages when agents accept and end messaging sessions, when customers consent to receiving messages from your company, and when they revoke consent.

Customize Automated SMS Opt-In and Opt-Out Messages

When a customer sends an SMS text message to your company, LiveMessage replies with an automated message confirming that the customer consents to communicating by SMS. Customers can choose to opt in to receive messages or opt out by replying with a keyword, such as “STOP.” LiveMessage then sends an automated message that acknowledges the customer’s preference. Salesforce provides default text for the opt-in and opt-out messages, and you can customize them to better suit your company’s branding and tone.

Keep Customers in the Know with Automatic Text Message Notifications

Use LiveMessage to automatically send SMS text message notifications to customers based on certain events. Personalize the message by inserting merge fields to fill in variables such as the customer’s name or the case status. You can also use Process Builder to define a process that sends the message when certain criteria are met. For example, you can create a process that texts the customer when the status field on the customer’s case changes.
Send and Receive Images and File Attachments with SMS Text Messaging and Facebook Messenger

They say that a picture is worth a thousand words. Agents and customers can get straight to the point by sending images and files in an SMS message and Facebook Messenger.

Marketing Cloud

Social studio: real time reports

An important part to marketing is staying informed and up to date with relevant topics and brand conversions. You can now create triggered alerts based on key words and phrases. Follow and keep up to date with everything relevant to your company, from major social media influencers to people posting about your company or talking about relevant topics.

Social studio: inbound/outbound

Now within social studio you can comment and reply to your customers on social media. You can moderate comments and replies on Instagram from your business account, making the process quicker and more efficient. Social studio now can modify what you see and only show you posts which are posting to your brand or your own posts. This is great for people who just want to see what is important and specific to you!

Pardot in lightning experience

Pardot in lightning experience provides marketers with a 360-degree view of their customers which will help to: nurture leads, maximise ROI and close more deals. With Salesforce campaigns, marketers now have increased report functionality and an increased level of insight into the campaign health. With campaign path, marketers can create a customisable path for every different campaign and organise information accordingly. From here, you can create stages as: planned, in progress, approved, completed, cancelled and complete. Everyone on the campaign will also have access to B2B analytics.

Lightning Experience

Density settings

With the new Winter ’19 release, the density of your Salesforce screens can now be changed for users. As well as the “comfy view” which customers will be familiar with there is also a “compact view” option. This will enable you to see more on your screen with a compacted view and there will be a lot less white space! With the “compact view” users can now access 30% more views on a single page, which is perfect for those who hate switching between each tab.
Quick search

With quick search for reports and dashboards it is easy to find data within the context of reports and dashboard tabs. Now you can find what you need faster than ever before! Quick search is available to all users and it applies to the lightning experience. One thing to remember… quick search only shows the first 20 results. However, if there are more results, you will be notified!

To learn more:

https://releasenotes.docs.salesforce.com/en-us/winter19/release-notes/salesforce_release_notes.htm

As the UK sees an increased demand for CRM and Salesforce year on year, so does the need for qualified Consultants, Developers and Admins. Evidence of the commitment Salesforce has shown towards our Isles is supplemented with plans to open a second data centre in 2019. Over a period of 5 years, Salesforce has pledged to invest £1.9 bn ($2.5 bn), to help growth, innovation and customer success in the UK.

Growth

Salesforce is experiencing rapid growth in the UK. Salesforce is the #1 Customer Experience and Customer Relationship Management market share leader worldwide and the #1 Customer Experience and Customer Relationship Management in the UK based on 2017 total software revenue, according to Gartner. This experience has resulted in many businesses from SMEs to blue chips turning towards Salesforce for their CRM needs. This snowball effect has key growth benefits for the UK:

• Direct job creation – the ever expanding Salesforce customer base and partner community is expected to create more than 329,000 direct and indirect jobs. This is a huge injection into the UK economy and will help reduce the unemployment rate and increase GDP growth.
• GDP growth – the increased investment, Salesforce and its ecosystem of customers and partners in the UK is expected to generate more than $65 billion of net new business revenues by 2022.
• Business innovation – Investment generates money for innovation which is a factor for increasing economic growth.

Innovation

Innovation is the heart of everything Salesforce does The company’s huge success originates from creating new, fresh technology which differentiates from everything else in the market. The capital investment pledged from Salesforce will help to encourage innovation, help promote lower costs in the UK economy and improve dynamic efficiency. The resulting goods and services will encourage further investment into our economy.

Donations

The growth of Salesforce in the UK is positively affecting everyone, and not only just the business owners and users of the CRM platform. Over $1.5 million in grants has already been donated to communities in the UK and the future promises an increase in these donations! The main beneficiaries have been STEM education programmes and workforce development with the aim of helping young people of all ages with free online learning. These young people can look forward to increased employment opportunities and a brighter future.

UK Customer Success Stories

To read about some of the UK businesses benefiting from Salesforce, from the likes of Aston Martin in the motor trade industry through to Ocado, an online supermarket., follow the link below:

https://www.salesforce.com/uk/customer-success-stories/

Salesforce Customer 360

Following this year’s Dreamforce, Salesforce have announced a new cross-cloud technology initiative which aims to connect and manage customer data more efficiently across the Salesforce app. Part of the customer success platform, the customer 360 will connect all the clouds together. Despite 70% of customers admitting they believe connected experiences are very important to winning their businesses, there are still far too many disconnected experiences. The Salesforce customer 360 aims to eliminate this issue by providing a single representation of customer data for connected systems. This new and exciting technology will be available to customers in 2019. Salesforce 360 collects information and maps customer profiles and presents it in one clear view. Customer 360 then assigns a unique ID to each person, so overtime records can be collected from various systems, and will then be presented in a uniform clear way.

Customer 360 for B2B

The customer 360 benefits business to business marketing by:

• • Making it easier for marketers to see how their campaigns turn into leads, opportunity, pipeline and sales.
  • Enabling sales reps to see support cases before a meeting and allowing them to see open sales opportunities

Platforms

Click-based UI for app and data management – This enables admins to see trusted connections between Salesforce apps and orgs, restore data across clouds and create a canonical data model which will provide a single representation of customer data.

Reconciled 360 ID and profile across apps – A single ID assigned to each customer will help recognise the customer across various platforms. This allows employees to pull out specific information on a customer whenever they need it.

Pre-built packages for service, marketing and commerce – these allow companies to move experiences for the most common use cases.

Apple and Salesforce

Dreamforce 2018 has introduced new products, changes and announced a new strategic partnership with Salesforce and Apple. This will be bringing together the world’s number one CRM platform and IOS. This new strategy is mainly focusing on: native Salesforce IOS apps for business, empowering Salesforce developers on IOS and Accelerating developer learning and career growth. The new partnership will be providing tools and resources for millions of Salesforce developers to build their own native apps.

Native Salesforce IOS apps for business

Redesign of the new Salesforce app giving customers exclusive experience on IOS device. Unique Apple capabilities: Siri Shortcuts, Face ID, Business Chat and more.

Empowering Salesforce developers on IOS

The first Salesforce mobile SDK that is optimized for SWIFT, with modern programming language. This will enable businesses and users to build and use apps on an IOS device on the Salesforce lightning platform.

Accelerating developer learning and career growth

Supporting developer learning and career growth. Apple are launching a new Get started with IOS app development trail.

Einstein Voice

Einstein Voice assist is a new feature of Salesforce, and by using artificial intelligence it is now possible for you to talk to Salesforce. Just like Siri you can ask Salesforce to do something. Instead of having to type out long documents you can speak, and the app will write it out for you. From this note you can click on “Einstein analyse” which will send the document to Einstein. Einstein will then pick up key information and draw other records and data you need or may find useful; from opportunity records through to contact records. This is available for everyone who has the Salesforce mobile app. Users can command account updates directly to the Salesforce Mobile App. Einstein will then use this data to update Salesforce records, efficiently and as accurately as it would be inputted manually.

https://www.salesforce.com/blog/2018/09/introducing-einstein-voice.html

It’s been a month since Spring ’18 hit our orgs! With this in mind we wanted to share three features from the most recent release that will be of most help to customers.

Salesforce Surveys

We are super excited by the standard survey component! The ability to create easy-to-use forms for collecting feedback from your users or customers is fantastic. All the data collected via the forms is stored in Salesforce allowing you to utilise the power of reporting and dashboards to share insights with your team.

An added bonus is the ability to embed these forms in Lightning pages and communities making it even easier for you to connect with your customers.

Of course, there are some small limitations. Surveys are available by default in Developer, Performance, Enterprise and Unlimited editions with Health Cloud. If you don’t have Health Cloud, don’t worry, surveys are available in all of the above editions without but, an additional fee applies.

Themes

Other than adding a company logo, Salesforce has been limited in terms of customisation… until now!
Available by default in Group, Professional, Enterprise, Performance and Unlimited editions, Themes allow you to customise your org with colours and logos like never before. You are able to choose from one of Salesforce’s built in Themes or create custom ones in a few clicks.

There are a number of things to take into consideration when using Themes. The main one being that only one Theme can be used at any one time and it applies to your entire org. By default, orgs use the built-in Lightning blue theme which cannot be modified or cloned. However, you can create up to 300 custom themes. If you have any Chatter External users, they will only see the default Lightning blue theme

Store Certain Data Privacy Preferences

The GDPR enforcement date is fast approaching and Salesforce is doing what it can to help you honour and respect your customers’ wishes when they request only specific forms of contact from your company.

Data privacy records, based on a standard object called, the Individual, let you store certain data privacy preferences for your customers. The Individual object includes fields for storing data privacy preferences in data privacy records. These records are then associated with Leads, Contacts and/or Person Accounts in Salesforce. If you have special policies with which your company complies, Salesforce has added the option to create your own custom fields on the Individual object giving you greater control over your customer data.

To find out more about all the features in the recent Spring ’18 release, check the Salesforce Release Notes.

Great article by Joshua Sophy over at Small Business Trends reminding us why Salesforce is also great for the small business and not just for the Enterprise

1 Salesforce started small too — 18 years ago in a small apartment.

It’s easy to forget that Salesforce was started by three people including Marc Benioff back in 1999 seeking investors, and today has a turnover in the billions!

2 Salesforce has more than 150,000 customers, many of which are small businesses.

Salesforce started off by providing services to small businesses in it’s early days, but has made sure not to forget those customers.

Salesforce got off the ground by serving small business needs. Today, some of the biggest companies in the world rely on Salesforce but still, many of its customers are startups and small businesses. The company is not taking its eye off the customers who got them where they are today.

DUFL is a great example of a company that has grown tremendously with Salesforce. Acting like a personal valet for business travel, DUFL cleans and stores garments customers need for their trips and ships them directly to their destination. DUFL uses Salesforce to keep a complete record of each individual’s unique needs so it can then deliver personalized, 1-to-1 experiences to its customers. With Salesforce supporting its sales and customer service, DUFL’s team of less than 50 employees has seen 10% month-on-month growth while maintaining a retention rate of more than 99%.

3 Today, Salesforce is much more than CRM.

Sure, Salesforce is nearly synonymous with CRM, especially for small businesses. But the company is getting a reputation for other services it provides companies like yours.

For instance, a few years ago Salesforce acquired Demandware, which it now calls Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Commerce Cloud allows small businesses to create unique shopping experiences for all its customers, including new ways of engaging customers on mobile devices at any time.

Salesforce also offers Quip, content collaboration tools for businesses.

4 Salesforce puts on one of the largest user conferences in the United States.

You’ll never walk alone at Dreamforce. That’s the annual user conference put on by Salesforce. And this is a big deal. It’s the largest software conference in the world.

Dreamforce offers the opportunity to learn first-hand how Salesforce — and any of its offerings — can help your small business. And if one of the many experts on hand isn’t enough, you’ll have a chance to meet the 175,000 or so attendees at this year’s event. That’s right — 175 THOUSAND!
“It’s bigger than a lot of cities,” says CRM Essentials co-founder Brent Leary, a regular at Dreamforce.

Many of those at Dreamforce are small business customers. This year there will be over 300 sessions dedicated to small businesses.

5 Salesforce has invested big in artificial intelligence.

Salesforce is integrating artificial intelligence with its CRM platform. The company calls its AI Einstein and promises to make everyone in your small business using it smarter.

In an interview with Small Business Trends, Salesforce’s Tony Rodoni stressed the role and impact of AI for a small business.
“No small business should have to have a data science department,” Rodoni said. “But we want to put functionality into the product that helps them see trends, recommend actions, and take next steps. And our SMB customers are going to see that in our products pretty darn quick.”

Your small business can access capital, find an investor, or get help on growth with Salesforce.

6 Salesforce has its own venture capital and investment arm called Salesforce Ventures.

The company has also created the AI Innovation Fund and is investing $50 million in startups that use AI to integrate their companies’ products with Salesforce.

Salesforce for Startups provides startups with access to the Salesforce technology, resources and expertise needed to become thriving customer and community-focused companies. Salesforce helps startups build, grow and give back through the AppExchange Partner Program, Salesforce Ventures, Pledge 1%, customer-focused products and much more.

7 Salesforce has a 1-1-1 philanthropy program.

Making an impact on your community, outside of being a successful company, adds value to any small business. Salesforce.org is based on the company’s own 1-1-1 model of social philanthropy.

And the 1-1-1 model is ideal for small businesses to donate from the beginning without stunting
their own growth. The 1s in 1-1-1 represent a percent of time, resources, and products that go to the common good of the community surrounding every business who’s pledged to contribute.

Salesforce.org says, to date, it has donated $168 million in grants, 2.3 million hours of community service, and product giveaways to more than 32,000 nonprofits and higher education institutions.

8 The AppExchange offers other apps for your business that automatically integrate with Salesforce.

Salesforce was the first to come out with an app store for third party integrations and extensions. It’s called Salesforce AppExchange. The AppExchange is where you’ll find other business apps that integrate with Salesforce.

The AppExchange recently reached its five million installs milestone, which shows the accelerating momentum of the AppExchange. Salesforce hit one million installs after six years, but in the last 12 months, it has grown from four to five million. This illustrates the exponential growth and strength of Salesforce’s partner ecosystem, which empowers SMBs with pre-integrated business apps to help them run their business efficiently.

9 Salesforce training is gamified.

Salesforce has a learning system dubbed Trailhead. The company calls it the fun way to learn how to use Salesforce.

Trailhead is free and offers learning modules and guided trails for every skill level. Check out this blog post to learn more about how small businesses can use Trailhead. There’s even a special “Trail Mix” designed especially for small businesses.