Email Marketing

Why should salespeople have to start with a blank page when writing emails to customers and prospects? HTML email templates that sales reps can personalize are big time-savers for the sales team and also ensure that even individual communications are accurate and on-message. Email Marketing allows marketing managers to identify the correct target for a given campaign, design offers that convey the brand identity of the organization, and track the response rates once a campaign is executed.  This feature provides following advantages:

• Ensure campaigns are brand consistent and coordinated across customer channels
• Monitor campaign execution to ensure offers reach the targeted audience
• Track and assign opportunities to campaign leads
• Control opt-in and opt-out lists
• Fully customizable and you can deploy without hassles in your Web site
• Secured access to the Customer Self Service Portal
• Search Knowledge Base articles before submitting trouble tickets
• Constantly improve the quality of Knowledge Base by threaded discussions
• Notify trouble ticket update to the customers through E-mail
• Follow up the trouble tickets by threaded discussions
• Auto response of e-mails can be generated for this the users can also create e-mail templates.
• The above e-mail templates can be sent to accounts as per pre-set schedules.
• Improve the Effectiveness of Email Communications
• Create email templates for all your sales team’s common types of email correspondence.
• Track the number of times the email was opened by the recipient to gauge interest and plan appropriate follow-up calls or other sales activities. Monitor the usefulness and popularity of individual templates.
• Insert company branding and graphics into templates as appropriate to create high-impact, professional-looking emails.
• Attach relevant materials from document library to email templates so that customers and prospects always receive the most up-to-date versions of your materials.

Collaborative Environment

• Manage schedules, calls, meetings and emails from a single location
• Create, assign and manage key projects across teams
• Can be integrated with popular applications such as Microsoft Outlook (Optional)

File Attachments & Uploads

• Attach files of virtually any type
• Attach files to many different types of information including:

• Contacts/customers, Companies, Events, Marketing campaigns & Projects.
• Quotes, Orders, Agreements, Support correspondence.
• Financial transactions etc
• Government related correspondence

• Keep files centralized within the system so you can easily share files with other staff
• Required documents and correspondence can be attached with each customer.
• The data will be managed from a single location, with audit trails and minimum entry point to ensure data quality
•  Easily update files with new versions

Shared Calendars

• View calendar information by month
• View calendar information by week
• "Quick Add" a calendar item for the current day with 1 click
• Fully customizable calendar item types
• Set particular appointments as public (visible by all users) or private (visible only by owner)
• All day classification for calendar items
• Set a subject and detailed notes on appointments
• Easily set reminders for calendar appointments
• Combined calendar with appointments, projects, milestones and events
• Create customized calendars by grouping users into calendar filters (eg: executive staff calendar, sales team calendar, etc)

Improve Productivity on the Road

Mobile CRM solutions from salesforce.com keep sales reps connected while they are away from the office. With support for disconnected laptops, wireless email devices (such as the BlackBerry), and wireless PDAs, traveling reps are never out of touch with their critical data.

Salesforce CRM Mobile

Force.com Mobile is a powerful mobile platform that helps your field teams succeed by keeping them in touch with the latest data, whenever and wherever they need it with complete mobile computing capabilities.

Force.com Offline

With Salesforce CRM Mobile, you can manage your key customer data using salesforce.com's easy-to-use interface on a disconnected laptop with Force.com Offline.
Front office operations — Direct interaction with customers, e.g. face to face meetings, phone calls, e-mail, online services etc.

Back office operations — Operations that ultimately affect the activities of the front office

Business relationships — Interaction with other companies and partners, such as suppliers/vendors and retail outlets/distributors, industry networks, lobbying groups, trade associations. This external network supports front and back office activities.

Analysis — Key CRM data can be analyzed in order to plan target-marketing campaigns, conceive business strategies, and judge the success of CRM activities e.g., market share, number and types of customers, revenue and profitability.

The sales manager can configure the system so as to automatically analyze the information using sophisticated statistical techniques, and present the results in a user-friendly way. This gives the sales manager information that is more useful in:

• Providing current and useful sales support materials to their sales staff
• Providing marketing research data: demographic, psychographic, behavioral, product acceptance, product problems, detecting trends
• Providing market research data: industry dynamics, new competitors, new products from competitors, new promotional campaigns from competitors, macro-environmental scanning, detecting trends
• Co-ordinate with other parts of the firm, particularly marketing, production, and finance
• Identifying your most profitable customers, and your problem customers
• Tracking the productivity of their sales force by combining a number of performance measures such as: revenue per sales person, revenue per territory, margin by customer segment, margin by customer, number of calls per day, time spent per contact, revenue per call, cost per call, entertainment cost per call, ratio of orders to calls, revenue as a percentage of sales quota, number of new customers per period, number of lost customers per period, cost of customer acquisition as a percentage of expected lifetime value of customer, percentage of goods returned, number of customer complaints, and number of overdue accounts.

Advantages to the marketing manager It is also claimed to be useful for the marketing manager. It gives the marketing manager information that is useful in:

• Understanding the economic structure of your industry
• Identifying segments within your market
• Identifying your target market
• Identifying your best customers in place
• Doing marketing research to develop profiles (demographic, psychographic, and behavioral) of your core customers
• Understanding your competitors and their products
• Developing new products
• Establishing environmental scanning mechanisms to detect opportunities and threats
• Understanding your company's strengths and weaknesses
• Auditing your customers' experience of your brand in full
• Developing marketing strategies for each of your products using the marketing mix variables of price, product, distribution, and promotion
• Coordinating the sales function with other parts of the promotional mix (such as advertising, sales promotion, public relations, and publicity)
• Creating a sustainable competitive advantage
• Understanding where you want your brands to be in the future, and providing an empirical basis for writing marketing plans on a regular basis to help you get there
• Providing input into feedback systems to help you monitor and adjust the process

Strategic advantages

Sales force automation systems can also create competitive advantage. Here are some examples:
As mentioned above, productivity will increase. Sales staff will use their time more efficiently and more effectively. The sales manager will also become more efficient and more effective. (see above) This increased productivity can create a competitive advantage in three ways: it can reduce costs, it can increase sales revenue, and it can increase market share.

Field sales staff will send their information more frequently. Typically information will be sent to management after every sales call (rather than once a week). This provides management with current information, information that they will be able to use while it is still valuable. Management response time will be greatly reduced. The company will become more alert and more agile.

Honeycomb®ERP increases customer satisfaction if they are used with wisdom. If the information obtained and analyzed with the system is used to create a product that matches or exceeds customer expectations, and the sales staff uses the system to service customers more expertly and diligently, then customers should be satisfied with the company. This will provide a competitive advantage because customer satisfaction leads to increased customer loyalty, reduced customer acquisition costs, reduced price elasticity of demand, and increased profit margins.