Over the next few weeks we’ll be publishing a series of blog posts exploring the different areas key to the growth of any organisation, as well as outlining why these areas are so important, and the solutions we can offer through Salesforce to help your business achieve scalable growth now and into the future.

Sustainable growth requires a deep understanding of your customers, personalised engagement throughout the customer journey, operational excellence, and the ability to react and change at pace to the world around-us and the ever-increasing demands of our customers.

We’ll be looking at the following areas in the next few weeks:

• Retention of existing customers

• Creating fantastic customer experiences

• Highly efficient working practices

• Flexibility to adapt to situations

Acquiring new customers.

But to start off with, our first blog post covers the bread and butter of any growing business: attracting new customers.

Regardless of business model, customer group, channel type or industry, at some stage every business is going to have to attract its first customers – and continue to attract new customers throughout the lifetime of the business – and the activity taken to support the acquisition of new customers underpins almost all growth strategies.

And this is all in a landscape where customers demand more from their interactions with businesses than ever before – 82% of consumers rate an immediate response as important or very important when looking to buy from a company, while 84% say that being treated like a person, not a number, is very important to winning their business.

What’s more, it’s getting harder and harder to market to your customers, whether that’s through maintaining visibility on Google or using social media to guide customers to your site. It’s getting more expensive too, the cost of acquiring new customers has gone up 50% in the last five years as the cost of creating content increases and engagement goes down.

That isn’t to paint a picture of doom and gloom, but to understand the varying, and substantial, challenges faced by all businesses looking to acquire new customers.

How we can help.

At Inardua we know that having a properly set-up CRM is crucial to overcoming these hurdles. And the flexibility and power of Salesforce makes it the perfect starting point to help grow your business through smarter marketing; new sales channels; more efficient sales processes; and more sophisticated customer insight.

These are just some of the solutions we can implement to you Salesforce platform to help support your growth through the acquisition of new customers.

Smarter marketing:

Pardot and Marketing Cloud are the marketing automation tools needed to reach your leads in a sophisticated, segmented, personalised manner.

They’ll ensure you’re sending the right communications, to the right customers, at the right time.

Within Sales Cloud, setup Campaigns to help understand your  Return on Investment of different marketing activity, and to know which Opportunities have been influenced by different campaigns.

Ensuring you can be data-led in your marketing approaches will ensure the most effective targeting and communications in future activity. Implement Einstein Lead Scoring to use advanced AI analysis in your prospect prioritisation.

New sales channels:

Lead and Opportunity Management allow you to setup different teams, queues, and automatic assignment of leads and opportunities based on your different channels.

Proper management of different channels ensures you’re able to cater to the different requirements of your customer groups, and customised processes and layouts for Web, Phone, Email, and Face-to-Face selling can be created.

Sales Path guides and advises sales reps depending on different channels, so you can always be sure you’re giving relevant and expert advice to prospects.

Forecasting enables a forward view of expected sales by channel, territory, or other segment – so you can see ahead of time which areas are due to be most successful at bringing in new customers.

Einstein Call Coaching uses AI to give you a deeper insight into the conversations your sales reps are having.

Efficient sales processes:

Ensure that you are focusing on selling rather than needless administration. Send and log email from Salesforce so sales reps aren’t spending time switching between systems.

Products, prices, quotes can all be configured within Salesforce, so you aren’t navigating between various spreadsheets.

Incorporate Validation rules and Duplicate rules to ensure that you are only selling appropriate products to different customer groups.

Setup automated reminders so that reps are always on top of follow-up activity, and approval processes can be implemented to ensure managers are happy with completed deals. Opportunity Splits enable commission to be managed within Salesforce, so reps can be confident that they’ll be rewarded for their work.

Customer insight:

Holding all sales and marketing related data in Salesforce ensures reliable reporting and a single source of truth for analytics.

Configure Social Accounts so your users can view an account’s latest Twitter activity.

Contact Roles mean you can be confident you’re talking to the right people and know exactly who the decision maker at a company is.

Reliable setup of data means you can build a picture of your customer lifetime value by segment, so you can be certain of exactly which types of customer to focus on attracting.

Get in touch.

Whether you’re new to the Salesforce platform and need a quick-start to get up and running and onboarding new customers, or have a mature platform with need for in-depth enhancements to start acquiring more new customers – we can help.

Contact us today and we’ll arrange a discovery call to find out more about your business, your objectives, priorities and challenges, and to outline how we can help you start acquiring new customers to your business.

Or, if you’d like to receive the full Guide-to-Growth straight away, you can!