Building a Successful CRM with Salesforce Consultants

Imagine self-implementing a system as vast as Salesforce to find out 6-8 months later that you cannot prove its ROI. Meanwhile, you’ve already spent quite the investment already so that your budget is locked up for the rest of the year. For the past 10 years we’ve seen this all the time, and it is all caused by self-implementation.

Whether you have decided to pick Salesforce as your customer success platform or are strongly considering to do so, what usually follows is, “Can I self-implement? Why do I need to hire a consultant?” Yes, you can do implement Salesforce yourself, but it’s not recommended unless you have a Salesforce admin with over five years of hands-on experience. Although, we highly suggest against self-implementations as it usually does not lead to the proper transfer of business processes onto the platform. This comes from the Salesforce client not having the knowledge of what Salesforce can do as a platform when implemented company-wide.

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The Differences Between Buyer Personas and Ideal Client Profiles (ICPs)

When discussing Account-Based Marketing, the strategy that almost 85% of marketers measuring ROI say outperforms other marketing investments (ITSMA), there is usually some confusion between Buyer Personas and Ideal Customer Profiles (ICPs). Since they both represent characteristics of your company’s ideal target, they do have some similarities but are focused on two different objects: companies versus people.

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Know Thy Customer: Buyer Personas

Know the customer

Only .75% of B2B leads generated become revenue through a traditional marketing strategy (Forrester). Why? One of the many possible explanations is due to a batch and blast email campaign approach where marketers don’t take the time to identify who their audience really is, leading to a quick unsubscribe. Your clients expect personalized marketing these days, and if you don’t know who your customers really are, you won’t be able to personalize the content to what they’re actually interested in, and keep them engaged in nurture programs. While you may still be sending generalized content, your competitors are doing their research and using personalized content. That personalized content is seeing 6x higher of a transaction rate than content that is not personalized to the prospect (Marketing Land).

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Salesforce Campaigns versus Pardot Campaigns: Which one to use?

If you’ve used Salesforce’s Sales Cloud prior to using Pardot, you’re most likely familiar with how Salesforce campaigns function. They are objects used to manage and track outbound marketing campaigns, ranging from a simple email campaign to large, in-person conventions. Contacts and leads can be associated with multiple Salesforce campaigns as part of a multi-touch outreach. Pardot campaigns are similar but think of them more as the first outbound marketing campaign that the prospect (contacts and leads are called prospects in Pardot) interacted with from your company. Prospects can only be associated with one Pardot campaign; acting in more of a ‘source’ field type of way here.

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Overnight ROI and Sales Alignment with SalesHood

Imagine an environment where sales managers don’t have insight into how each individual on their sales team makes the company pitch. Managers don’t have the time to attend every sales call, leaving them to only hope that the company’s onboarding program paid off. This causes problems such as disconnected sales, overall company value not being communicated effectively, and many others.

Enter SalesHood, a sales enablement tool that reinforces your sales team’s knowledge by allowing them to share and collaborate on content, including their sales pitches. SalesHood allows you to train, test, and certify your team to ensure everyone is on the same page. It even has a large library of videos to view ranging from Sales 101 to advanced selling techniques. In addition to the video library, SalesHood allows your team to create their own videos to enable feedback from your entire team.

Take a look below to see what our team has to say about SalesHood!

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Dashboards that Boost ROI: 6 Examples and Characteristics

The Benefit of Salesforce Dashboards

Salesforce dashboards are a data visualization tool that displays real-time metrics and executive KPIs for a company. They’re implemented company-wide, displaying data from your Sales Cycle, Marketing Campaigns, CSAT scores, and much more. Dashboards are crucial for a company to grow and succeed as they give real-time insight into how your departments are performing, aligning some departments along the way (e.g. Sales and Marketing).

Great dashboards take time and patience to perfect as they require collaboration within your company. At the end of the day, you’ll want your entire company to love these dashboards so much that they keep them open all the time. This post contains dashboard characteristics that will guide you towards doing just that.

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Stay Ahead in Account Based Marketing with Einstein Analytics

account based marketing

84% of Marketers are seeing higher ROI with Account Based Marketing (ABM) than other Marketing programs. Source: ITSMA

What is Account Based Marketing (ABM)?

Account Based Marketing applies time-tested B2B Sales and Marketing principles to the selling cycle by going after company accounts, or decision-makers instead of individual sales leads. This results in spending your time with more qualified prospects. If you would like to learn more about what ABM is, or how to take it a step further, view our past blog post – Go Beyond ABM with Account Based Management.

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5 Tips to Improve Your Email Marketing

Email Marketing

Despite what many bloggers may say, we can confirm here at Corrao Group that email marketing, in fact, is not dead- it’s actually growing. According to the The Radicati Group, worldwide will top 3 billion users by 2020. Not only is email marketing growing, but also it delivers the highest ROI over SEO, SEM, and content marketing (Econsultancy)

This just means it is going to get harder and harder to grab ahold of your audience’s attention. This means your email marketing strategy is going to become a critical key in how you run build your marketing campaigns. Let’s take a look at what email strategies you can start implementing today:

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New ’17 Pardot Summer Releases: Engagement Studio

Pardot summer releases

Summer is here! That means Pardot recently announced their new ‘17 summer updates. Just in case you missed it, they are making improvements to Engagement Studio.

For you long time users who may be familiar with Drip Programs, Engagement Studios are a new way to nurture prospects, customers, employees and more. Pardot is continuing to add new-and-improved functionality to Engagement Studio to improve how you can nurture and market to your audience.

Let’s take a look how these new 2017 Pardot summer releases can help effectively manage your nurturing programs:

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