Salesforce CRM for Manufacturing Industry

If you are looking for some best CRMs available in the market, you must have hit salesforce.com somewhere. You may have met not only Salesforce but few other competitors also offering comparable services in the industry, and all those R&Ds have confused you to a large extent.

In this blog, we will be talking mostly on why Salesforce is best in its segment and why you should not spare your time in reading about other competitors. To make this blog interesting, we will be focusing currently on the Salesforce CRM for “Manufacturing Industry”. IT never means that Salesforce is limited to this industry, but it is that we can’t elaborate and exemplify every sector in a single blog. Instead, we would take turns to write about various other industries in separate blogs. Even the manufacturing industries are a huge domain consisting of chemicals, tools, automobiles, sports, and whatnot. To narrow down the domain, in these blogs, we will be talking about the “Elevator Manufacturing Industry”.

Elevator Salesforce CRM for manufacturing industries work on huge customer or human base, and it is preciously vital to manage the relations with customers. Salesforce here can take charge to take care of your customers when you are busy doing other stuff. Before we move to your question: how? Let’s discuss a bit about: what?

Salesforce is a cloud CRM. No definition can define it better than this as the CRM plus cloud combination. A CRM platform helps companies target different audiences, set scores, and alerts based on an individual lead or customer’s activity, proactively work with contacts and maintain relationships. Best of all, a CRM system can be used across departments to ensure that all customer-facing teams are empowered with the right data to create incredible customer experiences. A Cloud is something that can be accessed from anywhere without any significant restrictions apart from security. This modern concept of cloud follows the SaaS model to make Salesforce a successful cloud. All in all, Salesforce is a CRM on the cloud. With the efforts of Marc Benioff, Salesforce.com is the world’s leading CRM that may surely help your business grow in a streamlined and efficient way across all the corners of the world.

Note: We will call this elevator Salesforce CRM for manufacturing company by name EMC in further writings.

Problems Faced by Manufacturing CRM

Reading a whole book is an excellent idea for knowing what all can salesforce does, but you can get the big picture from this brief list. Here are the most common business challenges that major manufacturing CRM face — and how Salesforce can overcome them.

Unorganized database
As businesses embrace data in huge volumes as the order of business in today’s marketplace, challenges emerge regarding how they should handle the data that keeps piling up with the dawn of every day. This dawn keeps piling up and forms a cluster that results in unstructured, unorganized, duplicated, and relationless data. Such data can be a curse to the CRM for manufacturing industry. Let’s take an example. EMC sold 10 elevators to a mall, which got some issue after 4 years of perfect working and maintenance. EMC wants to check the invoice at their end to see if the warranty is not void. If the data is unorganized in this case, the executive may spend several hours searching for the invoice with no guarantee of finding it. Such miss managements can lead to time waste, unpreparedness when disaster strikes, limitations in reporting, and whatnot. Just think if EMC has got 5 customers more together asking for service repair, and you are still searching invoice for the first one.

Here the Salesforce may avoid silos and keep track of your data in a well-organized manner that, with a single search, can find your data within seconds. Now, since the Salesforce data centers are worldwide and in vast quantities, its competitors can offer you unmatched performance and a less searching engine.

Event Scheduling
Imagine an annual maintenance drive where you are required to contact each customer and schedule appointments for the general check-up service of the elevator. Once the meeting is fixed, assign it to an idle engineer to take a visit and update it to the customer. How easy may it sound to you? Now Imagine the volume of customers is in hundreds! Are you still sure you can do it? Managing such a project can be cumbersome and CRM can help you wash your hands easily here.

Salesforce lets you schedule your appointments or meetings and create tasks or events so that you don’t forget them and manage them being closer to the customer.

Salesforce CRM implementation planning for manufacturing industry

Improving customer service
EMC may consist of a huge support team. This team may be scratching their head daily while investigating issues related to invoices. Do you have any idea how much time this team may be wasting on identifying the customers and reviewing the context of previous support interactions? If the team is unorganized and not mentioning records properly, the EMC manager may have to align a relationship manager for each of its customers, which may incur costs for the company directly or indirectly.

Salesforce’s leading cloud works with the support team to tackle all the challenges and help you serve a more extensive customer base within limited resources. Salesforce Service Cloud is an unbeatable solution for this, and no competitor can deny this fact.

Business measurement
How can you improve what you can’t measure? Simple, right? Salesforce has various methods to help you estimate your business accurately. This measurement can be in terms of a sales manager looking for more sales and operation reps, focusing on achieving its monthly target or a CEO wanting to measure the business’s turnover. If you use Salesforce correctly and regularly to manage customers, you have data to make informed decisions. That benefits everyone.

Salesforce reporting and dashboards can give you easy-to-use tools to measure and analyze your business. EMC can know if their opportunities are failing compared to the previous year (to measure the worthiness of sales team) if the elevator batch of this year required more service visit (to measure the worthiness of quality audit team) if more escalations are getting done by customers this month (to measure the worthiness of service agents) and so on. Salesforce analytics fights closely with its big competitor and generate impactful results.

Documentation
Process documents, activity documents, technical documents, contracts, and all other types of documents are the ones that are a general practice in the manufacturing industry. Both creation and preservation of such documents are solely important to EMC as it is never that which document will behave like evidence on which event. Let’s take a day to day life scenario, a current sales rep is going to a new organization and new hire has been on board as a replacement. This replacement may take some time to handle everything. There may be a case when he/she will forget some process and may need to recall the knowledge transfer document, like the previous quote generated for the customer, and how much discount was provided at that time. Here, the CRM may act as the rep’s manager in remembering everything from scratch with no lasting memory.
However, No one wants to undertake manual documentation anymore. Not only is it sluggish and monotonous, but also highly counterproductive. A CRM will help you set everything behaving like a virtual manager, and Salesforce is damn good at it.

Documentation in Salesforce for Manufacturing Industry

Collaboration in Salesforce for Manufacturing Industry

Collaboration
Do you still consider Old Is Gold? But let me remind you, this may work in many industries, but this is a pretty old school in manufacturing CRM in the industry. In EMC, selling directly is a thing of the past. To gain leverage and cover more territory, many companies work through partners. Adding partners to your business always influence sales. Some local businesses and companies do have a strong grip on their territory or regions. And instead of combating an unbeatable grip, how about collaborating with them. This way, you earn something where it was supposed to be none and also let your competitor earn. Unite and rule always works! Also, it may be possible for EMC to outsource some of its work. Management of such outsourcing is equally essential. Consider EMC doesn’t have its transportation and either outsource its work of transportation to another company through a contract. How can EMC be aware of delivery statuses, how can they send updates to customers about the time and date of delivery?
By using Salesforce Communities, your channel team can track and associate partners’ updates and get better insights. CRM may manage everything like integrating with partners for updates, sending required notifications to the customer, and managing risks involved. Hence, keep Salesforce and forget the rest. Also, let us know if someone offers as best community cloud as Salesforce.

Efficient Salesforce CRM for Manufacturing Industry

“An experienced personnel can do a work of 4 unexperienced dedicated personnel” If you believe in this fact, thumbs up! And if not, probably you have to self-experience it in real-time. Working efficiency not only drives the work faster but also makes room for other engagement activities. Imagine, the EMC hires a team of technical engineers. They hire 10 college pass out fresher who might start their career in learning and building things. With this decision, you can conclude that EMC will get stuck hard in the future while performing some heavy loads or priority tasks. Instead of that, if EMC may have hired 8 fresher and 2 experienced professionals, they might have acknowledged smooth work with minimum stress.

Like an experienced person, a CRM also behaves as a responsible and dedicated employee who can help other employees by becoming a helping hand. Implementing a CRM can not only increase the rep efficiency but also lead to reducing costs in hiring new reps. However, this applies true for sales reps or similar work but hold false for technical engineers or other field service agents. All in all, Salesforce CRM always helps to boost your team efficiency.

It always depends on a person to adapt to some facts. I am not sure if you would agree with me in all the facts I shared with you above, but I am confident enough that at least any one fact may surely have hit you somewhere. And that might lead you to understand the importance of CRM in the real world. Also, you may be striving now to learn more about Salesforce as you are already excited by reading about Salesforce can do that, and Salesforce can do this. Now in the next topic, we will discuss more Salesforce.

Why Salesforce for manufacturing company?

If you are still in the consideration that what is special about Salesforce it is again just like other CRMs then let me convey to you that Salesforce isn’t just a CRM tool; it’s a complete CRM solution that goes beyond the basics of contact management. At the forefront, Salesforce is and always will be a CRM platform. However, there is ultimately more to the integrations that drive this tool. So you are getting a complete package for the price of a CRM, what else do you need? You won’t be convinced at this point and that’s why we are presenting more rigid reasons for making a bold choice.

Multitenant Platform

Imagine EMC have been dealing with hundreds of leads in a month. Each lead might be associated with the customer’s multiple contacts, many quotes iterations, product descriptions, legal contracts and so on. Now tens of reps will be handling hundreds of such leads. This is the position of one single salesforce org. Simple huh? Now just imagine thousands of such manufacturing companies working together on a hundred thousand such orgs accommodating millions of their end customers or leads. Now that seems to be havoc. At present at the point of writing this blog, Salesforce has 150,000+ customers, including small to fortune 500 companies. The question that arises here is how Salesforce can be efficient in maintaining such a vast base with adequate performance. And the answer is Multitenant architecture.

Multitenancy is a gift of the salesforce. Let’s understand this by using a real-world example. Consider nature, who treats everyone equally—rain showers evenly over an apartment. Nature never thought of showering more on the top floor and lesser on the bottom floor. It is the social practice that made this happen. If you were in the open ground, you might enjoy the showers equally across the field.

Similarly, taking this example in the virtual world, multitenancy showers its speed and features equally over all the users.

It’s the org user who has to manage in the available rate like if the org is 10% filled, it will experience speed and performance similar to the rain on the top floor and if the org is 90% filled, it will experience related to the rain on the bottom floor. So it depends on the users, how to manage the resources. Multitenant architecture is like a parallel connection which provides light equally to each bulb, no less even if one goes off. This concept of multitenancy was first bought by salesforce in the cloud CRMs, it is the best working model in the current trends.

Third party friendly

Salesforce works with the concept of “Unite and rule.” Even discussed in the previous part of the blog that how important it is to work together with various partners, salesforce supports almost every other third party tool either through AppExchange installation or the API.

Salesforce keeps a strategy of collaborating with various experts of their domain to offer their services to salesforce and its customers for the growth of both salesforce and partners without harassing the customers to move from one platform to another for a feature that isn’t possible in salesforce. So if a customer uses Gmail often for emailing purpose – salesforce offers salesforce Gmail integration for customers by partnering google if a customer wants to perform digital signature on contracts – salesforce partnered with DocuSign to provide that from the marketplace and similarly thousands of app and features for the partners to post and help customers. New partners are also free to create and publish application which they think is useful and can solve some real-time salesforce problems. And finally, you can also connect with other third parties that are not partners with salesforce via web service. Hence you can connect a partner or a non-partner, all together on a single platform. And this third party friendliness you may not find on any other so-called CRMs.

Vision in long run

You have seen many companies going rapidly up and soon down due to a lack of vision. Salesforce was titled as a leading CRM solution in 2014 by Gartner, and it has maintained that position without fail. You can be on the top with your competitive tool, but holding that position is a point of vision. Salesforce missioned back in 2015 to move its server-side programming language to the client-side so that the server loading can be reduced and client-side performance can be enhanced. They adopted Aura and web components with that vision. The need for IoT cloud was already figured out in the past and is now available for the users with a charm. The stacks of eCommerce are rising at new heights daily, which was figured in advanced by Salesforce and had an eCommerce cloud established for customers.

road map for salesforce crm for manufacturing industry

Further Salesforce being the beast of expansion, has acquired more than 63 companies to date, in favor of bringing the best services to its customers. Mulesoft is one of the most significant known acquisitions of the Salesforce. All these things have become possible only due to the long vision of the company and as a customer, you can rely on Salesforce to improve services more than current in the future.
In June 2013, ExactTarget was acquired for $2.5 billion, which helped enhance the Marketing Cloud through email campaign management and marketing automation. ExactTarget acquisition has also resulted in Salesforce owning Pardot, an application for marketing automation that primarily works in the area of online marketing campaigns. Pardot helps boost sales by creating and deploying marketing campaigns. Pardot has a vital significance in the increased revenue and efficiency of Salesforce CRM Software.

Diversified offerings and Community

The proficiency of Salesforce is in creating on-demand software that reduces the overall cost for the customer. With that, it’s not limited to a single application or an approach. Using SaaS, it has been a successful leader of chatter, sales cloud, service cloud, and others. Using PaaS, Heroku has been the best example for applications involved in using various other programming languages. Salesforce also allows its technical users to build and publish custom applications built on force.com and database.com. Marketing, IoT, eCommerce, Community, and others are examples of the diversity of Salesforce for serving various types of users.

Also, Salesforce has huge community members who are always ready to help. Either you are a developer, admin, or end-user community may answer you according to your profile. This community helps you excel in understanding salesforce and hold your hand during issues. Trust.com is the portal offering the maintenance alerts of various servers of the Salesforce. This way it is always easy to know mandatory things and you are never clueless.

Since its release, Salesforce has helped many businesses better manage their customers and grow. If you are convinced that Salesforce is the perfect CRM for your business, then look no further; join this increasing community now. Salesforce is committed to excellence and with its outstanding features and marketing automation solutions, it will start paying dividends in no time.

Salesforce community to help manufacturing Industry

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