An Introduction into The Power Of Salesforce Automation

Managing sales, marketing, and customer service processes are some of the most technically challenging, time-consuming, and resource-intensive tasks in businesses today. Dozens of hours are dedicated to these roles every week — making each one a high priority for effective business automation. Done well, automation can streamline workflows, reduce the use of resources, and provide new insights into existing processes. Yet, this is only the start of what Salesforce automation can unlock for businesses.

With more than 15 years of experience in the technology industry, Salesforce accreditation, and an in-house team dedicated to Salesforce implementation — we've seen extensive examples of the way Salesforce automation can transform, strengthen, and streamline companies.

Here, we break down the knowledge and experience we've gained in the field to introduce Salesforce automation and its benefits. We take a look at how it can improve business processes and capabilities, highlight what it can do within your business, and describe how you can get started in utilizing its advantages.

What is Salesforce Automation

As one of the most talked about and highly productive tools available to companies today, Salesforce automations feature a broad array of tools and features available to enhance businesses. Crucially, this means taking the most repetitive, time-consuming, and inherently manual tasks from your workflows and handling them with automated capabilities.

The ethos behind building great Salesforce automations is in giving people hours back to teams. — something that's now being done across every industry and organisation at a vast scale.

Far from being an overnight transformation in industry, these are tools that have been over a decade in the making. When surveyed, 74% of businesses said that they were already deploying process automation internally with further plans to increase its use in the coming months.

Process automations, such as those Salesforce offers, have proven to be highly productive in a number of key areas. These include:

• Accounting and Finance. By taking care of tasks such as scheduling, invoicing, and approvals automation can free up space for employees to make bigger impacts in strategy, analysis, and business intelligence.
• Sales. Well-applied business automation can have an outsized positive impact on sales. Planning, management, pricing, strategy, and lead identification can all benefit from automated processes that leave more time for staff to focus on more challenging tasks such as securing the sale itself.
• Customer Service. One of the biggest transformations to take place in businesses is the increased use of automation in customer services. Currently available AI tools and IoT devices can often be used to detect, predict, and schedule service events to be resolved through existing digital channels.
• Marketing. Salesforce is highly adept at configuring audiences and channels with relevant tailored content, automated messaging, and automated strategies to help businesses reach their customer base.
• Human Resources. Automation can take the biggest headaches out of the hiring process from beginning to end. Salesforce tools can be used to automate the processing of applications, track responses to ongoing campaigns, schedule interviews, and handle much of the onboarding admin that needs to be done.

The capabilities of Salesforce automations in each of these departments are continually evolving in every business. Whether choosing to implement automated capabilities in part alongside existing workflows or building completely new processes that are automated end-to-end, organizations can realize a great deal of advantages in a short space of time.

Why Deploy Salesforce Automation

Efficient, intelligent, and well-applied automations provide companies with a triple boost of increased productivity, reduced costs, and improved customer service.

In pricing alone,  intelligent automation is capable of cutting costs by 31 percent and boosting revenue by almost as much again. The return on investment typically comes back to companies within two years of adopting automated technologies — leaving a long future for systems to generate profits.

The precise mechanism that enables Salesforce automation to boost revenues, reduce costs, and enhance what a company can provide will be specific to every team, workflow, and organization but general improvements intelligent automation can make to companies today include:

• Reducing the resource requirements and time taken for manual data entry. One of the most grating, yet necessary areas of admin is inputting data into the system or transferring data from one system to another. Automation is ready-made to do this faster, with better accuracy, and with more consistency than can be achieved manually.
• Rapid customer service and internal systems response. Automated processes can take care of the vast majority of tasks and requests coming in. This results in less time spent processing queries from customers and staff, happier users, and more resources to dedicate to complex problem-solving.
• Improved visibility into operations. Automated processes are highly adept at gathering data from diverse systems and reporting on them in real time with unparalleled accuracy. Applied well, increased visibility enables better performance, faster response to change, and resources being rapidly deployed to where it's needed most.
• Increased scalability. The capability to do so much more with the same amount of resource readily translates into being capable of handling a larger volume of customers with little to no changes in existing processes.

In practical terms, what these advances deliver for companies is an increase in flexibility and capability in the marketplace. More importantly, engaging automation to improve efficiency has been shown to have a marked effect on employee engagement, morale, and productivity.

Simply adopting automation to tackle some of the most common tasks and processes within a business can have a transformational effect on efficiency and an ongoing impact within the company.

How to Get Started With Salesforce

The advantages of diving headfirst into Salesforce automation are self-evident but the process of getting started in deploying them can often seem overwhelming. This is, however, a process that can be readily streamlined into a series of simple steps.

The first of these steps is to identify areas where automation can have the biggest possible impact in your firm. Are business processes, sales, management, or customer service the biggest bottleneck to your future growth? Knowing what the biggest roadblocks are within departments can help simplify the decision on where to start and what to improve. Some key questions that are often worth considering are:

• Does it take too long to onboard new clients?
• Is Your existing hiring process too slow?
• Is data coming into your system propagated in the right way? Does it reach the right people?
• Are manual processes taking too much time?

Understanding the highest priority targets can help you to identify the tools and processes you can use to find literal overnight efficiency and productivity improvements within your business. Think about what you'd fix if you had a magic wand to wave over your systems to increase speed, improve productivity, or catch errors. Chances are, there's an automated solution to do just that.

Calling in the necessary professional expertise and resources in a Salesforce provider will apply industry-specific knowledge and experience to Salesforce automation to reach these goals.

Our in-house Salesforce teams are focused on helping clients understand what Salesforce automation can do in practice and how it can be applied to use cases within a business.

Whether extending existing teams with Salesforce-specific capabilities or outsourcing automation and tooling to industry-leading experts — we can find the most efficient and effective automation tools to transform your company.

We achieve this by deploying a team of multi-disciplined professionals with decades of combined knowledge and experience. Utilizing comprehensive business automation tools we've shown that it's possible to re-imagine the digital tools of businesses, break down silos built into existing processes, and eliminate bottlenecks entirely instead of shifting them up or downstream.

Salesforce Business Transformations

Salesforce automations are transformational for companies in a number of ways. On top of their capability for efficiency, productivity, and speed they also offer teams a chance to rethink processes and solutions right from the ground up. It effectively asks teams to question whether the way things have always been done is still right for today's highly competitive business and technology environment.

The introduction of Salesforce automations can transform businesses rapidly — enhancing their competitive advantage, boosting employee wellbeing and morale, and enabling so much more with the same level of resources.

To help your business explore Salesforce automation in concept or in practice get in touch with our expert team to get their ideas on how the Salesforce suite can unlock automation for your business.