Salesforce is the world’s most popular CRM, with an impressive 23.9% of the global CRM market share. This naturally leads Salesforce to be used across all types of industries.
However, as any good consultant knows, Salesforce will be implemented in totally different ways across different industries, all depending on the type of business processes being run on top of the platform. In this guide, we aim to take a look at the more important characteristics of each industry to help you implement Salesforce more effectively.
Retail
The Retail industry is having to pivot to bend to many different pressures – a drop in footfall, and an increase in international competition with easier global accessibility to brands to name a couple. Additionally, there is also an increasingly conflicting desire by the customer to be known but to have their privacy respected, indicating that hyper-personalization and customized brand engagement is the key to many customers’ hearts.
Where brand loyalty was once king, today’s consumer drives their own purchasing journey, and it’s often the brand that knows them best and that meets the customer on that journey on the channel and device of their choice that succeeds.
Building on the success of its core Service Cloud offering, Salesforce offers seamless multi-channel engagement through Digital Engagement, where customers can talk on WhatsApp, Social, and Live Chat, with agents or bots, in order to reach that brand at the right moment in their journey. However, this journey doesn’t need to only rely on service agent engagement. With omni-channel marketing and personalization, Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud can extend the reach of any brand through social media engagement, ads, tailored content, and hyper-personalized experiences.
None of Salesforce’s products deliver this experience better than Interaction Studio. Going way beyond clicks in monitoring digital behavior, Interaction Studio has a wide array of features. It can leverage attribute and transaction data from any source, and enable you to meet your customers where they are (offline or online, in the channel of their choice). It also helps you provide personalized messages, content, recommendations, and offers, across web, your app, email, in-store with humans, in-store with tech, and through service interactions.
What are some of the main challenges and things to consider when getting ready to implement Salesforce for Retail?
- Who are your customers: How much do you know about them, and how much do you want to know about them?
- Where is your data: How can you connect the offline and online customer experience, and meet your customers seamlessly in each interaction?
- Recognize your inconsistencies in customer experience: Address those with both technology and people.
- Understand the voice of your customer: They are telling you what they love and what they don’t – loudly – across many different channels. Monopolize on your wins and strengthen your weaknesses to cater to your customers.
- Understand the power of digital: Customers who use social media as part of their shopping journey are four times as likely to spend than non social media users. Social commerce is here to stay, so how can this be optimized for you and your customers?
TTH
TTH stands for Travel, Transport and Hospitality, and so it encompasses a wide range of companies from hotels, holiday providers, airlines, private members clubs, and more. Whilst these companies may be wide apart in terms of business models, there is a consistent trend in terms of technology: most of these company types will leverage traditional, industry-specific tools.
Often, these tools and systems have been the only option in the market, cover very niche requirements, and have seen little change or development over recent years. Salesforce doesn’t pretend to replace best-in-class industry systems and software, however with the rise of disruptive, API-led technologies in the space, Salesforce is an obvious choice for a centralized CRM which enables smoother integration and the holy grail of the Single Customer View.
Hospitality has been hit hard over the last few years, suffering huge losses due to the almost complete shut down during the pandemic; businesses had to pivot their offerings quickly to survive. In addition, Brexit has resulted in staff shortages as many people have decided to return to their home countries. That has a massive impact on service levels throughout the whole sector, and it is now a priority for businesses to overcome this challenge by improving their service levels with fewer and/or less experienced staff.
Meetings, Incentives, Conferences and Exhibitions (MICE) businesses and travel companies are experiencing issues with delayed replies, and organizations are losing business as they can’t get back to the customer quickly enough. Additionally, the industry has seen a change in their market segmentation. Corporate travel has been dramatically decreased, which leaves a gap during the working business days midweek. At the same time, other segments such as Meetings & Events, staycations, and private parties have increased.
Salesforce can help with the above challenges by utilizing key CRM functionality:
- Open integration to challenge industry technologies ensures a scalable and flexible approach with Salesforce at the heart. For example, restaurants that were able to quickly pivot to online ordering or dark kitchen operations during the pandemic were able to maintain their customer base, whilst gathering key data points about them (preferences, orders, frequency of purchase). This is combined with core data to build customer profiles in Salesforce that are now helping them shape their approach.
- Clicks, not code configuration means that you can build a scalable solution that can adapt and react to market changes, enabling your product to do so as well.
- Access data instantly, wherever you are, on the device of your choice.
- Monitor the trends in demand and act efficiently to win market shares during this continuously changing environment.
- Drive loyalty and direct bookings through the website, reduce third- party costs, and increase profitability.
- Automate and simplify the client’s booking journey to provide a seamless experience, build trust and win repeated business.
- Increase collaboration and make data visible between all departments (front office, sales, marketing, management) to enhance the customer experience.
Manufacturing
The UK manufacturing industry really had to adjust their way of working when Brexit occurred. With more regulations put in place around exports and increased paperwork causing delays, they were given no choice but to change their current ways of working. Change has been a word that is often avoided in the industry, however, with the pressure growing on them to do so in early 2021, manufacturing companies saw it as an opportunity to look at ways they could decrease their costs and improve their bottom line.
With manufacturers experiencing challenges with their existing processes such as siloed information and manual work, Salesforce Sales Cloud and CPQ became an important tool for them. Salesforce allowed them to streamline their processes by having one central system for all their customer data and quoting needs.
There are a few Salesforce CPQ features that have been key to helping manufacturing change, such as:
- Contracted Pricing: This allows sales reps to store the negotiated product prices that have been agreed with customers for future use. This removes the need for siloed customer price lists.
- Product Rules: These rules help ensure sales reps are putting together the right products and bundles every single time. This removes the chance of human error when creating quotes.
These features have made it a simple process for sales reps when they are quoting customers and have significantly reduced the time it takes for reps to create quotes.
What are some of the main challenges and things to consider when getting ready to implement Salesforce for Manufacturing? Ask yourself the following questions:
- Does your ERP have an open API? What information will you need to share between the two systems?
- What other systems are involved in your quoting and order process? What role do they play?
- How do you understand where your current process inconsistencies are? Think about how they can be improved.
Media
The media industry has continuously adapted and evolved to different changes and demands over the last few decades, including the print vs online debate, changing distribution channels, and new customer demands. In the modern media world, different consumers will want different things, but integrity, personalization, high quality, and efficiency are all aspects that a media organization needs to consider.
Salesforce Media Cloud works to help media organizations achieve all of these things, focusing closely on cultivating loyal audiences and advertisers faster. For efficiency, it offers the opportunity to create automated experiences with specific workflows and automations designed to keep existing consumers engaged, and entice new consumers. For personalization, Einstein Recommendations come in to suggest new ideas, offers, and focus points that will tap into what your consumers specifically want. AI audience segmentation and tracking helps you continuously stay on top of these consumer trends.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Service Cloud, Experience Cloud, and Customer 360 can all work alongside Media Cloud to meet these goalposts, and promote the integrity and high quality expected by modern consumers.
Some questions that can help you work out which Salesforce products to utilize include:
- Who are your customers? How much do you know about them, and how much do you want to know about them?
- More specifically, what are their habits, and what do they need from you to meet their media needs?
- Utilize the power of digital, multimedia content, and try to reach your target.
- Consumership in different areas. Where will you find most of them, and what are some untapped areas you could look more closely at?
- How streamlined is your relationship with your advertisers? What inconsistencies or pain points can be worked on?
- How well are you currently tracking trends within your own consumer space and directly outside of it?
Nonprofit
Traditional business models have been increasingly disrupted with the advancement of AI, IoT, and cloud-based systems, and the nonprofit sector is no different. Accelerated by constituents adopting these technologies in their personal lives, a global pandemic, and the move to remote working, we are seeing nonprofit organizations make transformational decisions over the last several years.
More and more nonprofit organizations are moving to the cloud, meeting their constituents in spaces they already occupy and adopting technology that produces meaningful and personalized engagement.
Salesforce is deeply committed to the nonprofit sector in both its business model and its product roadmap and development. Over the last few years, we have seen a wave of innovative products that go beyond Sales Cloud and are as varied as the nonprofit subsectors, sizes, and technological maturity.
Nonprofits that are currently using on-premise systems or even spreadsheets start their journey to the cloud by migrating to the Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack. The NPSP offers organizations a pre-built set of donor management functionality to get on the platform quickly:
- Track both one-off and recurring donations.
- Differentiate between different types of donations such as grants, individual, or corporate
- View and track relationships between constituents (such as familial relationships) and between constituents and other organizations (such as employers).
- Manage soft credits.
Organizations more mature on their Salesforce journey have been expanding from the NPSP to tools that bring familiar yet personalized experiences to their constituent engagements. Experience Cloud and Salesforce CMS have seen significant adoption in the nonprofit space in the last few years. These two technologies combined allow organizations to:
- Create a branded community space for their donors, volunteers, and clients.
- Extend their services and engagement with donors, volunteers, and clients into a digital space.
- Share personalized information to constituents based on any data point, such as location, interests, giving level, or role.
- Empower constituents by providing at-hand information and resources.
- Connect constituents through online groups.
- Relieve staff members by allowing service users to self-serve.
When implementing Salesforce for nonprofit organizations, there are a few topics to keep in mind:
- Accessibility standards: There is an increasing requirement for digital properties that meet accessibility standards. This particularly pertains to building community portals on Experience Cloud. As you design your digital experience on Salesforce, consider the accessibility standards your organization may have and ensure those are built into the solution.
- Volunteer board: Organizations may have a volunteer board or a group of volunteer Super Users with whom you collaborate when adopting a new system. These volunteer groups are crucial to the technical success and adoption of Salesforce, and as such, your project timeline will need to consider feedback and testing from these groups.
- Stakeholders: Nonprofits engage with a wide variety of stakeholders and constituencies: donors, volunteers, clients, and staff to name a few. The lines between these stakeholders is not always clear and the Salesforce solution will need to meet the layered needs of these groups. The manifold relationships organizations have with their constituencies will need to be considered with designing data models, process flows, and Experience Cloud or marketing journeys.
Summary
It’s easy to say that Salesforce can be beneficial for anyone in any industry, and although it does offer a lot of future-proof capabilities, it gets a lot more complex when you break it down by industry.
Salesforce understands that different organizations in different sectors will have different needs, which is why industry-specific clouds, features, and implementation characteristics exist. Of course, it does get more specific than that, but knowing what tools are available to you and your business is a great place to start.