Top Tech: Salesforce
We’ve been on a mission lately, to share best practices and some of our favorite commercial real estate (CRE)-related technology tools in a series of blogs. This is our fifth in the series, and explores the uses of Salesforce. For clarity, this is NOT a paid or sponsored blog. We are motivated only by sharing information with our network. We want to hear from you too: What are your favorite tech tools? Is there a CRE digital solution we should know about?
Below we provide just a few reasons why they make our top tech list, and you can also visit them directly on http://www.salesforce.com/.
What is Salesforce?
First off, the basics: Salesforce – the company – is listed on the New York Stock Exchange, and Salesforce – the platform – is essentially a customer relationship management (CRM) tool. It is enterprise-focused, providing companies with the means to streamline all their sales and marketing functions, in order to promote goods, services and more sales – and because it is cloud-based, it’s accessible to anyone anywhere with a browser.
It is, we’ve read, the top CRM platform in the world. If you need to communicate with customers and manage your customer base, automate processes, or manage events, these are all to be found under the Salesforce umbrella.
Contacts managed
Real estate is a field that has traditionally been seen as high customer touch and low tech – especially on the residential side of the industry. The scope of the CRE market however demands a lot more than a mental rolodex. A CRM strategy informs how you manage your stakeholder engagements and a CRM system, like Salesforce, brings together all customer touchpoints – email, website, phone, social, and more – and gives you a single, smart view of all interactions with an individual.
For both clients and for customers, you can see how powerful that would be. No more wondering if your colleague followed up or what the last status of your discussion was. It will all be viewable and linked in one place.
Get smarter
In June 2021, Salesforce also announced the launch of their Einstein Relationship Insights (ERI) tool which makes use of artificial intelligence (AI) research to gather meaningful insight into the relationships you enjoy with companies, customers, and prospective clients. This will be a very interesting addition to watch. Venturebeat says “ERI can help sales reps close deals faster by acting as a virtual agent for salespeople in all industries, scanning news articles, social media, collaboration apps, email, and other online sources to uncover and deliver account and contact information”.
Marketing power
The kind of data that goes into a CRM – and can be extracted from one – can give your marketing and communications the edge. For example, you can capture a client’s personal contact preferences, so you always know what’s the best way to start a chat on their preferred medium.
Salesforce also offers things like an email studio so you can send gorgeous and relevant mailers – as well as mobile, social, and advertising studios – and a journey builder so you can guide customers through the steps, channels, and departments as needed.