Shirish Ashwat
February 16, 2018
Salesforce® CRM is an award-winning solution created by Salesforce®, as part of its extensive sales and marketing solutions under the Salesforce® brand. It includes separate systems such as analytics, marketing, service, and community cloud.
As a CRM tool, the software helps you track all customer information and interactions in one location to follow more leads. The Lead Management, Marketing Automation, Sales Data, and Partner Management apps let you follow these leads until they are ready for conversion.
Our Salesforce® practice is helping companies understand how a CRM system can work for their business. If a Salesforce® application is configured correctly to manage data and improve data quality by making it accessible in real-time, users of the application are empowered to make more informed decisions, thus helping grow sales. However, CRM will not work to manage revenue, increase customer satisfaction, manage market share, or increase customer retention, as one needs to measure and report on activities that will influence these areas.
If you talk about hub-and-spoke implementation, Salesforce® could be the hub for a business or a spoke as a downstream application for a business. The hub could be a centralized data management system feeding spoke applications like the Salesforce® CRM application, ERP systems, and other applications. This could be very true to a company in the manufacturing industry, which has SAP installed as a hub, and other applications feeding off SAP data for orders, product information, or account information.
In some companies, Salesforce® could be the hub application while spokes are applications like Business Intelligence tools, home-grown applications, or pricing and quote management systems that feed off Salesforce® data. Any which way we view the implementation of a Salesforce® CRM application (hub or spoke), the push and pull of data between applications must be optimally configured based on business needs. This is easily configurable and possible only with cloud-based technology.
Given whatever implementation method or architecture one chooses to implement; clean data and data integrity are the key elements for any enterprise to ultimately drive business success. You may have heard, “Data is the new oil.” Unlike oil, the value of data doesn’t grow by merely accumulating more. It is the insights generated through analytics and combinations of different data sets that generate the real value.
Large Fortune 500 companies and small startup businesses alike turn to Salesforce® for their CRM needs. Mastech Digital’s Salesforce® practice, along with our Data Management & Analytics practice, helps many such companies implement the rightly-configured application with a heavy concentration on ensuring high data integrity. This has helped our customers derive meaningful insights from their information assets.
Shirish Ashwat
Salesforce Practice Director