9 Signs You Should Be Using Salesforce Classic

If you aren't keeping on top of administrative efficiencies for your growing business, this could lead to a lot of headaches. But it doesn't have to, if you make the right choices. Using a customer relationship management (CRM) platform like Salesforce Classic can help you out in more ways than you'd initially imagine.

Here are nine signs that you should be enlisting this awesome tool to help you out, if you aren't already.

1. If you have ever lost an email or forgot to respond to a client.

Salesforce Classic has you covered! With the ability to track activities related to an account or contact, you can add your emails directly to the account or contact record. Years from now, if you need to refer back to an email for reference, or a week from now if you need to remember where you left off; Salesforce has the email.

You can also set reminders or create tasks so that you can follow up with customers when you say you will.

2. If you have lost track of your opportunities.

Have you physically misplaced a potential opportunity for a sale because you wrote it on a napkin and left it in the restaurant? Or have you started approaching a lead but never went back to check in? Track every opportunity, in various stages, with the ability to make notes on what to do next, and when, and easily move that opportunity from stage to stage with a few clicks.

Salesforce even has a mobile app that lets the sales team members work on the go, wherever their clients want to meet, and still input their data! Talk about convenient, and I think we all know the easier a product is to access and use, the more likely we are to use it.

3. If you generate leads and have nowhere but your Post-It notes to jot them down.

Losing money? No thanks! Now take those golden leads and pop them directly into your funnel. Salesforce Classic gives you the ability to input leads, one by one or hundreds at a time, and when the time is right and you have them on the hook...turn them into contacts and accounts and create the opportunity.

Salesforce Classic also has a Web-to-Lead functionality that allows you to use your website to grab leads and completely get you out of entering any data!

4. If you have to send out communication to your customers one by one.

Emailing customers is time-consuming, and if you have to send those emails one by one, you are usually copying and pasting, or typing sentence after sentence and correcting your mistakes. Never fear, Salesforce Classic is here! Salesforce Classic gives you the ability to mass email contacts, so all you have to do is choose who you want that communication to go to and with a few clicks, the emails are sent. You can even create Campaigns with leads and track your efforts.

Don't worry, there are still easy ways to ensure those emails make the customers feel like you are talking directly to them with the ability to populate the recipients' names.

5. If you want an easier way to track your pipeline.

Are you still using spreadsheets or paper to track your potential sales? Are you tracking potential sales at all? One of the best ways to plan your business goals or KPIs is to determine what is going to be happening for you during the year, and this is especially true if you want to attract some investors.

Salesforce Classic allows you to set your fiscal year, or use the standard year, and then enable Forecasting. You already started to track opportunities after reading above, so it makes sense that you start tracking what deals you might win! Stop guessing and start gaining more insight into your sales cycle.

6. If you want to see how much money you are making.

What are you using to track your sales? Is it easy to access? Does it let you take a deeper dive into the actual details of the sale or customer accounts? If you are using more than one system, stop. Start using Salesforce Classic and make your life a whole lot easier. Adding in your opportunities and your leads into Salesforce Classic has the added bonus of being able to report all of your hard work. No more guessing, or jumping around from system to system or account to account to figure out all those glorious numbers.

You can also create graphs and charts! Nothing beats a visual representation of your biggest sales, customers, and best account reps. And nothing is more valuable than being able to visualize a plan for the future growth of your organization.

7. If you are using Outlook to track all of your accounts and contacts.

It's never too late to start using Salesforce Classic to input your contacts and accounts. Whether you keep them all in Outlook, in spreadsheets, or in your Rolodex, it's time to transition to Salesforce Classic. Salesforce Classic has ways to mass import spreadsheets, or you can enter contacts and accounts one by one. With everything in one central location, stored securely on servers around the country, your data has never been easier to access. Using the Salesforce Classic mobile app, you can access all of this data even while traveling.

You can make sure key contacts at your company can see the information, and you can create custom fields for those accounts to make sure you track all of the right information.

8. If you have to constantly keep track of your sales reps by meeting with them.

Let's face it, you're a busy person with lots of meetings and projects to work on. They last thing you want to have to do is micromanage your sales team. They need to spend their time selling, not wasting their time talking to you! With Salesforce Classic, you can track exactly what your sales reps are doing with activity history related to contacts and accounts and you can report on the opportunities they are logging. How many calls did Joe Salesman have this month? How many of those calls turned into meetings and opportunities? And how many of those opportunities led to a win for your team? Report on it all and watch those bar graphs rise with the power of Salesforce Classic.

9. If your laptop or computer has ever crashed and you have no way to recover your data.

A really important reason for you to use Salesforce Classic is to keep all of your data centralized, secure, and accessible at all times. Computers crash, external hard drives break, and Post-It notes get lost. Salesforce Classic stores your data in the cloud, on its servers. Seamless upgrades are a benefit of their platform, and it is improving with every new release.

Salesforce Classic also lets you schedule data exports of all the work your organization has done, monthly or on-demand, so you can still back up all of that data externally. Trust the cloud, and keep those rainy-day disasters away!

These nine reasons to start using one of the leading CRM platforms in the industry are solid, but there are plenty more out there that you'll discover as you become a Salesforce guru.