Salesforce is a perfect solution for professional service firms because its two core features are all about what all firms focus on:
All professional service firms do two things:
1) They market and sell to bring in new clients.
2) They service their clients and depend on their existing clients to be a source of new business.
The Cloud Edition of Salesforce address these two key needs that all professional service firms have. But out of the box Salesforce is not ready to be used to its maximum effectiveness by your firm.
For Salesforce to be valuable to the professional service firm it needs to be modified to accommodate what makes your firm unique and effective at what it does.
Your employees are busy and any tool they use needs to be easy to use and work the way they work so it makes their job easier and/or it makes them more effective. So it makes sense that the vanilla version of Salesforce that every company starts with won’t be right for your firm until you make it your own though some customizations.
Because of this StarrForce has Quick Start packages designed to get any professional service firm up on Salesforce in as little as two weeks.
Part of the customizations the best professional service firms make to Salesforce is automating their processes. If you’re going to scale your business automating processes is an important way to ensure consistency and enforce that things are done the same way every time.
Salesforce has a variety of automated work flow features that almost any firm can benefit from.
For example, if a client complained about something and the account manager had not contacted that person back within 24 hours, would the account manager’s manager want to know about this? You bet. And you can also bet the account manager is not going to tell her, so why not have Salesforce do it automatically?
I’ll be writing more about all of these issue in future blog posts.