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How to be a Salesforce Consultant?

salesforce consultant

Being a person who has been with the Salesforce environment for more than 10 years, I always dreamt of being a consultant. The opportunity to work on numerous Salesforce implementations for varied clients in a wide ranging business verticals allured me a lot. I really enjoyed the process of understanding how companies perform their business.

As a Salesforce customer, I was associated with various kinds of consultants, some were very good and others not very good. However, what I always marveled at was the depth and breadth of their Salesforce knowledge.

Understanding Salesforce from scratch

I began my association with Salesforce in 2008 when my VP of Marketing told me to find the team for new CRM. I assessed various products and zeroed in on Salesforce as the required solution. I swiftly got to know that the potency of the tool lay in the platform and the capability to create new functionality that wasn’t very innovative. To put it simply, I got convinced fully that I should forgo AVP title for pursuing Salesforce full time.

One Salesforce Administrator post resulted in another and then finally I ended up being in charge of all Salesforce products for a pan Indian, privately held company with numerous business units under a shade. My task was to work with these business units to learn their individual business requirements and then devise a tailored Salesforce solution for their group in a manner that also integrated their data with all of the other business units within the company. Consulting was a tough task and when the time was ripe to take my next step, I felt I was game for the change.

Willing to describe my journey

When I began my quest for the ideal Salesforce consulting shop, I spoke to a few different firms that I thought was a perfect fit for my requirement. As I talked to several prospective recruiters one sentiment cropped up inside my mind. It seemed that only those who were consultants previously were meant to be consultants. I mean it was the usual problem of not being able to gain experience till you already have experience.

Eventually, I lended up as a Solution Architect at a reputed entity — but it was not a cakewalk. So, if you experience similar kind of feeling and want to get into consulting, here are some valuable resume and interview tips:

Speak regarding your internal clients: Simply for the reason that the product owners or subject matter experts that you associate with are working in the same company as you, does not imply they are not your clients. You get additional points for speaking about tough as nails clients and the way you handled them.

Highlight your work with regard to projects: Salesforce is a continuously growing product and it might come across like one giant body of work, however, try to dissect those features that were made into individual projects and speak regarding the problems and successes that you achieved during those projects.

Speak about certain business woes: We very well understand that the Salesforce is an amazing tool but where it actually shines is in its capacity to simultaneously handle puzzling business issues and make the lives of end-users very convenient, so showcase those stories.

Highlight the numbers: You can speak about the amount of time saved by your Salesforce solutions or a certain dollar rate of new business wound up as a result of improved workflow. This explains lucidly why your solutions got a genuine ROI.

I am of the belief that these tips will help you get your next or maybe first Salesforce consultant. I am working as a Solution Architect with Winklix for a little more than a year now and it is a call I am really proud of. All the best.

Thanks ,

Mithitesh

Salesforce Consultant

Winklix

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Advantages of implementing FSC in businesses

salesforce service cloud

These days Business represents relationships. This is not something unheard of. Now, the way you manage and maintain those ties is totally different in the present business world. In case you wish to forge ties with prospective and current customers, enhance revenue, and provide the apt information at the right time, you require industry knowledge and appropriate technology. Salesforce Financial Services Cloud (FSC) is an ideal tool that can perform everything for your financial services team. It’s a platform that offers instant access to important data, peek into novel customer journeys, and logical insights at every stage of the customer lifecycle. Irrespective of the area of the financial services industry you’re into FSC assists you in dealing with any challenges confronting your business.

How FSC benefits banking and lending

Customers desire an increasingly connected and incredible experience from their financial institutions these days.

Banking and lending bodies vie with each other based on timely and apt communications, realizations, and access on all devices. Financial Services Cloud has the ability to find with ease and monitor customer relationships, origin and prioritize referrals, organize handoffs and coordination among major stakeholders, and offer visibility all through banking and borrowing methods.

Through Financial Services Cloud, banking and lending institutions are able to:

Familiarize with regulatory overhauls in mortgages and consumer lending

Systematize advanced customer care for retail banking

Expecting requests for member services on the basis of the customer sojourn

Monitor and automate financial lending process

Satisfy statutory demands for commercial banking

Consider the example of Lake City bank, Indiana’s oldest state-chartered bank. The institution in question had got tired of their legacy operating system and took up a multi-phased Salesforce and nCino implementation to maximize bottom line. In order to provide Lake City Bank with a clear view of their customers and accelerate functional efficiency, Silverline executed Financial Services Cloud in an existing nCino org.

“The humongous benefit of shifting everything to Salesforce was the increased system dynamism and acceleration to market, along with the capability to create improvements and align our program while moving forward,” said Jolene Howard, Vice President at Lake City Bank.With fresh features and abilities, Lake City Bank, at present, is endowed with a platform that is scalable and helps businesses to grow, instead of a old, irrelevant system with limited operational capacity.

How FSC helps capital markets

Salesforce Financial Services Cloud assists capital markets entities to organize their methods with potent workflow tools. For example, bankers can monitor transactions and investment pipelines with strong prospect management characteristics, while operational plans aid client services and investor relations teams bring in new clients. Relationship modeling capabilities assists entities see their assets under management and offer a solid base for developing tailored solutions for investment banking, private equity, real estate, and more.

With Financial Services Cloud, capital markets entities will be able to:

Oblige stringent safety, compliance, and data statutory obligations

Devise a robust analytics program that offers insights when you desire

Maximize competitive edge with AI

Stonebriar Commercial Finance, a privately held company providing financing solutions to several industries was confronted with humongous competition as a new kid on the block. Stonebriar had restricted executive insight into their pipeline and the new lead qualification and loan origination prospects for five chief business platforms (General Equipment, Rail Leasing, Aviation, Sponsor Finance & Real Estate).

Their procedures were very manual, needing to enter new prospects into several systems for loans, leases, and post-book servicing. An old and obsolete website with less content handling abilities posed an insurmountable challenge to create a flexible external marketing presence — and create relationships with current and prospective customers.

Our customized Salesforce can easily gel with any needs — humongous prospects with external data sources to compound risk and portfolio exposure, monitor workforce needs, get approvals for requisite credit, asset and funding tasks, and monitor underwriting progress.

How insurance companies benefit by FSC

Financial Services Cloud assists insurance companies to specifically deal with personalized requirements. Agents and customer service personnel get a clear picture of every policyholder’s achievements, and instant insights and analytics to notify coverage suggestions, and unique dashboards. Salesforce Financial Services Cloud gives the imminent, in depth look for policyholders and insurers to materialize.

Financial Services Cloud enables insurance companies to:

  • Integrate PAS/AMS for clear-cut view for customers
  • Onboarding task workflows
  • Before and after transaction customer journeys
  • Upcoming best offer

One of our clients, a well-known life insurance carrier, did not have a clarity over their policyholders, resulting in an overall negative customer experience. To make it worse, they were handling very high agent and policyholder assistance representatives leading to extra expenditures and productivity losses.

We fully optimized Salesforce Financial Services Cloud to refurbish their procedures. With Financial Services Cloud’s insurance native data mode and its robust customer profile and policy lifecycle method characteristics, our client’s agents and service representatives were strengthened with intuitive and simple collaborative tools. By opting for the Salesforce solution the productivity touched new heights and this led to immense satisfaction, and positively impacted the aspect of agent retention. We even devised and executed a wholesome agent recruiting and onboarding process which assisted the company to gain lost grounds.

Benefits of FSC to wealth and asset management

Financial Services Cloud makes the job convenient for wealth and asset management firms to reflect trust and clarity. With a potent FSC, you can access and see all account information within and across clients, households, and networks; curate and make available important client information and partner solutions for advisors — everything in one place; strengthen advisors with Next Best Action suggestions driven by Salesforce Einstein. With Financial Services Cloud, wealth and asset management firms will:

Obtain valuable data of Financial Accounts integration of assets Held Away and other data sources

Get tools to offer personalized advice on every channel

Automate householding to provide useful client insight

Strong marketing automation increases time spent on assisting clients to accomplish their goals. One of our clients, Tiedemann Wealth Management, used various, different Salesforce instances and triggered an inability to get a clear picture of its relationships. Also, the varied Salesforce instances were not adopted in a big way, as they were developed strategically over the past few years.

By fully extracting the potential of regular Salesforce Financial Services Cloud (FSC) cloud features together with custom features to satisfy its requirements and deal with challenges inhibiting business processes. Tiedemann got the exact view of client data to proactively address their client requirements. With Financial Services Cloud, advisors were strengthened with intuitive and simple collaboration tools and full client information in a linked platform, enabling advisors to turn more productive and get a lot of time to concentrate on developing client relationships.

Our strategy that worked

By minimizing clashes and enhancing efficiency, Financial Services Cloud facilitates daily and immediate communications and work plans between your teams and the one you serve. The financial services arena is regularly changing and turning towards increased personalized experiences, instant internal and external collaboration, predictive analytics, and the abolition of paper procedures. Financial Services Cloud is in fact at the centre of a major revolution, and we are better equipped to assist you in deriving the benefits.

Being a Salesforce Partner with a wealth of experience in financial services, we take recourse to fair practices gained via over a thousand implementations and we have a major financial services team with abundance of industry knowledge across every business. We are very familiar with Financial Services Cloud, and can deliver what you desire through the strength of the platform.

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Why has the Salesforce Marketing Cloud assumed significance among businesses?

Why has the Salesforce Marketing Cloud assumed significance among businesses?

In case you have a business or want to start one, what is the most significant thing you should work on? Without a doubt financial assets are critical. But, business isn’t only about trading goods or services. It is a must to have cordial relationships with your clients. Marketing is all about Customer Relationship Management (CRM). CRM is an integral aspect on which every business is based upon.

However, in case you require the best CRM for your business, you would want the best tools as well. This is where Salesforce Marketing Cloud fills in the blanks as it accelerates your business through specially designed tools. These tools happen to be technically superior and help you in knowing your customers inside out and this in turn, maximizes your profits. Hence, let’s delve into Salesforce Marketing Cloud and its various benefits.

Also Read : What is Salesforce ? It’s Features And Pricing ?

Main attributes regarding Salesforce Marketing Cloud

In a nutshell, salesforce brings companies and their customers together. Salesforce has got an integrated platform which aids you in handling marketing, sales, commerce, and services in one go.

‘Salesforce Customer 360 Platform’ is really trustworthy and you can count on it to get your work done. It gives an individualized experience to your customers by which you can gain other customers as well. If you employ Sales Cloud to tackle sales tasks and customer contacts, you’ll witness an increase in:

  • Win rates by 43%
  • Enhance rep productivity by 44%
  • 37% in bottom line
  • These apart:
  • Provide incredible shopping experience to your customers
  • React instantly to customer support matters
  • Automate time-consuming activities with customized apps and so much more.

Why opt for Salesforce?

Prior to getting into the reason behind selecting salesforce and Salesforce Marketing Cloud Benefits, it is pertinent to emphasize their values. Values imparted on their platform are unique in ways that they separate them from other companies in digital marketing solutions. Salesforce has developed a tradition and legacy of trust through which they encourage each other and the industry via their ideologies. Salesforce is devoted to transparency and total sincerity. They are of the view that profits can spike via honesty as well. While utilizing Salesforce users get several benefits. It is up to the user how they leverage the platform to enhance the scope of their business and CRM. These happen to be some of the Salesforce Marketing Cloud assistance.

Some of them are:

It maximizes your power to spread business across several markets by assisting you to connect with the bigger market. For example, you have merged apps with AppExchange, which helps you connect to the world’s biggest marketplace. Going by its name, it aids you in increasing your sales by linking directly to each customer. The sales employees in your company can obtain access to this platform with ease to learn the requirements of your customers well.

7 advantages of Using Salesforce Marketing Cloud

1.Customize with ease

Salesforce bestows you with the authority to customize online marketing tools as per your market base. With customization tools, you are free to offer a personalized touch to every customer devoid of any hiccups.You can even utilize integrated apps to learn about the several requirements of your customers. The customization aspect helps you in dealing with different customers in line with their issue. This facility apart from bettering your revenue also assists in multiplying customer base.

2. Aids in adapting to changes

There are some businesses that are very trustworthy and the reason for the same is that they have a good knowledge of the psychology of their customers. To take your business to new heights, you should be flexible enough to change in line with the transformation in the market. This is where Salesforce gets into action. It assists you in adapting to the change better in line with the variability of your customers. It even aids you in learning the underlying shift in the pattern of customers. Through this platform, you derive the power to make right decisions at the right time. This is the best part of Salesforce Marketing cloud.

4. Absolute safety

We are living in a world where data gets stolen every minute. Salesforce platform is ideal to counter such a threat as it provides ultimate protection against the misuse of data. By evaluating the data, you can secure your business from all threats emanating from cyberspace and your business rivals. It even assists in the encryption of data between your company and the customer. Also through Salesforce you can safeguard your customers from different kinds of stealth. And by providing high security, you can build loyalty and trust among your customers which can be beneficial for you in the long run. So, security is very vital when it comes to customer and company management, and Salesforce provides you with the same in abundance.

5. Increased Sales

With all the salesforce Marketing Cloud features at you disposal, the sales will also go up. The spike in sales differs in proportion to the security you offer to your customer. Also, it got custom-specific platforms and apps, which aid you in establishing connection with your customers via a single touch. This facilitates increased sales as well. Further, through data analytics offered by salesforce at an economical price, it becomes convenient to concentrate on big data to hike your sales by a huge margin.

6. Innovate easily

When the sales part is taken care of very well by Salesforce, you get plenty of time to involve with your customers and this leads to innovation. That’s the reason Salesforce is considered ideal. With this platform, you can come up with innovative ideas and execute them directly to learn the optimal returns of ideas. It is assumed that innovation can come out at any level in the hierarchy. Considering the same, this platform offers opportunities at various levels to every user. So as to have innovation to benefit the entire community and business.

7. Helps in making decision

Decision making is very critical in an organization. Now decision making can only be effective if you have administered information presented professionally. So, Salesforce aids you in better decision-making as well. The platform assists you by providing every information collected graphically. Also, it enables you in foreseeing the future trends, thereby rendering your choices very precise.

Spreading happiness

Armed with these features and your toil and diligence, delight of your customer is totally assured. It goes without saying that, if your customer is satisfied and content, you will benefit immensely as well. This is what Salesforce does for you: It can take your business to a new level altogether. That is the reason why Salesforce Marketing Cloud has gained currency across the globe as well.

Finally

In the end, it can be safely said that Salesforce isn’t only about buying or selling. It’s got to do with increasing happiness via connectivity and power for the benefit of customers as well as business. Salesforce tools are not merely materialistic assets, but they serve the purpose of entertainers, who give immense joy in several ways while toiling excessively internally.