Real-World Salesforce Use Cases: How Companies Boost Sales with CRM

January 25, 2024
9 min

For over 20 years, Salesforce has built a brand that is strongly associated with innovation, customer focus, and reliability. According to a study by Nucleus Research, companies that use Salesforce CRM see an average ROI of $8.71 for every dollar spent on the platform.

These obvious benefits have helped Salesforce attract and retain over 150, 000 customers worldwide, and gain a competitive advantage over other CRM solutions on the market. Thanks to it, International Data Corporation (IDC) named Salesforce the #1 CRM provider for nine years in a row.

Let’s look at how you can use different Salesforce CRM products to deliver a transformative business experience.

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What Are Common Salesforce CRM Use Cases?

 

Salesforce offers a wide range of CRM products and tools including Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, and Commerce Cloud. Their primary Salesforce use case examples include:

 

Primary Salesforce CRM Use Cases Ascendix

Primary Salesforce CRM Use Cases| Ascendix

 

Sales Management

 

Salesforce Sales Cloud helps sales teams get more visibility into the sales pipeline and track leads, opportunities, and deals. For additional pricing, primary Sales Cloud features can be enhanced with sales cadence builders, AI-powered sales forecasting, and advanced business intelligence tools.

 

Customer Service Management

 

Salesforce Service Cloud empowers customer service teams with tools for providing support across multiple channels, getting insights into customer satisfaction, and tracking customer issues and queries. Service Cloud can be improved with advanced reporting features, AI-powered case management, and telephony tool integration.

 

Marketing Automation

 

Salesforce Marketing Cloud enables marketers to automate marketing activities across email, social media, mobile apps, SMS, and websites. It helps them manage campaigns, nurture relationships with prospects, and track how effective their marketing efforts are.

With Pardot aka Marketing Cloud Account Engagement, marketing teams can streamline lead segmentation, nurturing, and conversion, via advanced email automation, customizable landing pages, and web forms. It can be integrated with other solutions like Google AdWords, Google Analytics, Webinar, Eventbrite, Olark Chat, and others.

Further, marketing agents can boost core features with advanced analytics and reporting tools.

 

Collaboration Improvement

 

Salesforce Experience (Community) Cloud facilitates collaboration among employees, partners, and clients. It provides a central secure portal for exchanging data, knowledge sharing, and communicating.

 

Reporting & Data Analytics

 

Salesforce CRM provides advanced analytics and comprehensive reports for a complete view of a business’s sales, marketing, and customer service performance. With customizable dashboards, you can spot trends, opportunities, and areas for business improvement.

Now, let’s look through typical Salesforce use cases and how industry leaders use Salesforce products to succeed.

How Sales Cloud Propels Sales Processes Forward

 

Sales Cloud is Salesforce’s flagship CRM product with a collection of features for effective sales activity management and speeding up deal closing.
The key Salesforce Sales Cloud use cases include:

  • Centralization of sales data sources
  • Lead capturing, management, and tracking
  • Automated lead assignment to sales representatives
  • Opportunity management and sales progress tracking
  • Account management and customer interaction tracking

It also offers additional functionality like sales analytics to track sales key performance indicators (KPIs), measure the effectiveness of sales strategies, and identify activity patterns as well as sales forecasting to predict sales revenue.

Different business domains use Sales Cloud in different ways. Here are two illustrative Salesforce CRM use cases examples of how Southwest Airlines and T-Mobile leverage its features.

Southwest Airlines, a Dallas-based transportation company with over 120 airports around the world, used Sales Cloud to manage its corporate and cargo sales divisions. With process streamlining and data visualization capabilities provided in Salesforce CRM, Southwest’s sales teams can track leads, opportunities, accounts, and customers’ activities on a single dashboard.

Additionally, Sales Cloud helps Southwest simplify the business travels of their corporate customers by making last-minute bookings or itinerary changes with a just few clicks and at no extra cost. Thanks to Salesforce implementation, the company has seen an increase in customer and employee satisfaction which gave Southwest a competitive advantage over other major airlines.

In another example, Sales Cloud enabled T-Mobile, one of the leading mobile communication and data services providers in the US, to capture information about potential buyers in stores and move it across digital channels with personalized follow-ups.

With Salesforce CRM, sales representatives can schedule retail appointments and be completely prepared for them having a full picture of their customer’s account history at their fingertips. What’s more, T-Mobile noticed that they reduced their weekly work report effort by 7 hours, and speeded up the renewal process by 85%.

 

What is Salesforce CPQ Used For?

 

Quite often companies extend Salesforce Sales Cloud functionality with Salesforce CPQ (Configure, Price, Quote) – a powerful tool for automation of the quoting and ordering process of products and services. Top Salesforce CPQ’s use cases include:

  • Automated generation of quotes
  • Complex product and services pricing configuration
  • Creation and customization of complex product and services bundles
  • The streamlined renewal management process for subscription-based products and services
  • Facilitated pricing management and customization for specific partner channels based on partner-specific discounts.

BetterUp, a US-based online platform housing over 3,000 career and leadership coaches worldwide, uses Salesforce CPQ features to transform their go-to-market strategy via progressive automation. This tool helped BetterUp to accelerate the process of getting internal approvals for quotes and sending them out to customers for review which resulted in faster deal closing.

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How Salesforce Service Cloud Bridges the Gap Between a Company and a Customer

 

Service Cloud is a robust platform that allows customer care agents to automate routine service tasks and streamline operations to deliver exceptional customer service experiences. Salesforce Service Cloud use cases include:

  • Streamlined customer inquiries capturing from multiple channels and assignments to a support agent
  • Automated case management for automated handling and tracking
  • Ability to create self-service knowledge bases for customers and simplified knowledge management
  • Omnichannel support enablement via phone, email, chat, social media, and SMS to deliver consistent service experiences.

In addition, this Salesforce platform can be bundled with Sales Cloud and extended with AI-powered service analytics to gain insights into service performance and Field Service to support field service roles, schedule appointments, dispatch technicians, and track service activities.

Service Cloud can benefit businesses differently and we’ll talk about some of them.

L’Oréal, a renowned beauty industry giant and one of Salesforce’s long-term customers, enjoys the advantages of its multiple products, and among the most praised ones is Service Cloud.

It facilitates the management of millions of customer queries while delivering the ultimate personalized customer experience. Also, with Service Cloud, L’Oréal support team can consolidate and track communication across various channels, such as SMS, chat, and email. Customer care teams can tune up built-in dashboards to display consumers’ service and purchase history, the status of their orders, and activity updates in real time.

Moreover, automation reduces significantly the risks of errors and addresses issues as soon as they appear. Let’s say a customer places an online order for lipstick. However, due to problems in the supply chain, an error occurs. But based on the information about the product and its shipment already residing in the system, the Salesforce platform quickly generates a case for an agent to handle automatically.

Hence, the support agent can promptly fix the order issue before the customer becomes aware of the situation and guarantee timely delivery of their products to customers.

But Service Cloud made happy not only L’Oréal customers but also the customer support department by reducing manual workarounds and bringing more creativity into the process.

Another household appliance titan – GA Appliances, also embraced the value of a new level of customer-centricity. Running a business with over 2,000 call center agents and technicians nationwide can be tough, but Service Cloud streamlines it flawlessly.

Having all customer data in one place helps the support team grasp customers’ needs and know all their customer purchases and warranty history at the time when the customer makes a call. It results in a decrease in customer issues resolution time and resolving more customer requests per day.

How Does Salesforce Experience (Community) Cloud Help Improve Collaboration?

 

Experience Cloud is a powerful solution that allows organizations to connect with their customers, partners, and employees in a more engaging and collaborative way.
The most common Salesforce Community Cloud use cases are:

  • Self-service portals for enhanced customer support and fast issues troubleshooting and cases escalation
  • Partner portals for easier and more secure collaboration with partners, suppliers, and distributors
  • Employees’ portals for centralized access to corporate information, collaboration with colleagues, and staying updated on company news and events
  • Virtual knowledge base for storing help articles, documents, and guides.
  • Ideation portal for ideas and feedback exchange on product/services
  • Event portal for easier management of events such as webinars, training, and conferences.

Swissbit, a leading manufacturer of storage, security, and embedded IoT solutions in Switzerland, put Salesforce Experience Cloud at the heart of their operations. Since reseller projects bring them around 40% of sales, they decided to turn Community (Experience) Cloud portals into reseller communities. These communities allow partners to register and track their new products without manual interference from agents from the company side.

The National Telecommunication and Information Administration (NTIA) bureau used Salesforce Experience Cloud to create an online community portal. Via this portal, users can apply being guided through a series of fields that capture information. The system automatically generates the standard federal grant forms on the backend which makes the applicant experience more intuitive.

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How Organizations Leverage Marketing Cloud

 

Marketing Cloud is a flexible and customizable platform that allows businesses to create and execute highly personalized, multi-channel marketing activities.
The most common Salesforce Marketing Cloud use cases:

  • Execution of email marketing campaigns
  • Customization of email templates with the drag-and-drop email builder
  • Segmentation of email lists based on customer data
  • Automation of email sends based on customer behavior
  • Enablement of mobile marketing campaigns, mobile-responsive landing pages, SMS campaigns, and push notifications
  • Social media marketing, publishing and scheduling social media posts, monitoring brand mentions, and engaging with customers on social media channels
  • Management of targeted advertising campaigns across multiple advertising channels
  • Creation of customer journeys based on customer behavior for delivering personalized marketing messages.

Formula 1 turned to Marketing Cloud to create a clearer roadmap to deliver the ultimate fan experience. With this technology, marketers can analyze and segment their existing fan base, send personalized email and push notifications and, as a result, increase the number of contactable fans and improve their loyalty.

Casey’s General Stores, the convenience chain with 2,400+ stores in the US, use Marketing Cloud to send 170 million personalized messages across channels, including email, SMS, and app. This marketing tool also helps segment customer data into unique groups based on online and in-store interactions and personalize offers based on the type and number of goods bought.

How Leading Companies Make The Use of Pardot

 

Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (formerly Pardot) is a robust marketing automation tool. It helps businesses align sales and marketing teams, improve customer engagement, and achieve measurable results.

Pardot also helps:

  • Get visibility into lead activity and behavior, tracking, assignment, and lead qualification
  • Capture leads from multiple sources, such as website forms, social media, and events
  • Nurture leads with personalized content and communication, based on their interests and behavior
  • Create landing pages and forms, personalized email campaigns, and automated drip campaigns and measure their performance and ROI
  • Integration with social media to sync with marketing campaigns and track their success

NBCUniversal is a telecommunication network that owns and operates over 20 different businesses across 30 countries. The company adopted Pardot to execute targeted communications via automated, personalized email campaigns, based on user interactions like page visits.

These personalized messages have increased open rates by 100%, which helps this company build a more solid sales pipeline and close more deals. Pardot also allowed NBCUniversal to enable intelligent notifications to follow up with leads once they proceed to a certain stage of engagement.

Key Takeaway

 

Salesforce’s flexibility and customization options make it an ideal platform for businesses across various industries. Moreover, Salesforce users can extend the functionality of their CRM seamlessly integrating it with almost any external solution on the market.

However, to create the truly unique digital experiences your business deserves and tailor them to your industrial needs, you may need professional help from Salesforce partners like Ascendix. Drawing on our two decades in CRM business and our extensive ecosystem knowledge, we can help you maximize the Salesforce power, drive more productivity in managing high volumes of data, and save time on manual tasks.

To uplevel your operational efficiency, we provide a wide range of professional services:

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Salesforce Use Cases FAQs

What are Salesforce use case example?

The primary Salesforce use case examples are sales and customer service management, marketing automation, secure and streamlined collaboration, lead, opportunity, contact, and account management, reports and analytics.

What are Salesforce Service Cloud use cases?

Salesforce Service Cloud use cases include automation of customer inquiries capturing, escalation, tracking and assignments to a support agent, enablement of multi-channel support and also creation of self-service knowledge bases for customers and simplified knowledge management.

What are Salesforce Marketing Cloud use cases?

Salesforce Marketing Cloud use cases include automated execution of email marketing campaigns, advanced segmentation of email lists based on customer data, automation of email sends based and social media marketing.

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