7 Reasons to Run Sales and Services Together
Projects with billable hours require careful orchestration between what resources you have and what projects you’re producing for your customers. As your company grows, so does the need to balance input and output.
Professional services automation can give your organization a huge leap forward as you seek to get more done — at higher profits — with your resources. The goal is to sell and deliver services in a way that turns new buyers into loyal customers for life.
But all kinds of problems arise when a company has the sales team working from Salesforce while the services team uses a separate project management system. The two teams — Sales and Services — can’t see what the other is doing. Nor can they review notes during the handoff after a customer makes a purchase. As a company, you’re trying to create an exceptional experience that starts with the experience with the salesperson and flows seamlessly through service delivery.
We at Klient Software have identified seven ways your organization could benefit from using a PSA software that’s built natively within Salesforce, rather than separate systems between your sales and services teams.
1. Visibility for Everyone
Customers are prospects first, and the transition from one to the next can be rough if your front-end teams can’t easily communicate with your service and fulfillment specialists. Sales needs to fully understand what they’re selling to ensure your prospects aren’t set up to become instantly dissatisfied customers. Likewise, services teams need to be able to grab the baton from Sales and run with it.
Having access to detailed customer information in a CRM will make their jobs that much easier — and the customer’s experience that much better.
2. Mobile Access
Another benefit to using a PSA system built natively within Salesforce is having mobile access to the platform and the information it contains. Because Klient’s professional services automation exists natively within Salesforce, any information related to accounting, document management, project management, resource management, or any other PSA data can be pulled up on the smartphone or tablet of your choice.
This gives sales reps, service and product teams, and leadership easy access to the information — and an easy way to input data, too.
3. Planning
When information is added to a centralized system, leadership and operations teams can strategize and forecast with greater clarity than ever before. Instead of needing reports or data from individual departments every time a planning session occurs, the information is easily accessible from one software system. This will cut down on the time it takes to organize results, strategize for improvement, and implement changes so your company can grow faster and provide even better services or products.
Current customers will be happier, and new customers will start out that way.
4. Accountability
When your PSA system runs within Salesforce, any data collected there becomes easier to monitor and extract. This gives the teams responsible for auditing your business a better, faster way to assess the state of each department and your entire organization. Additionally, because triggers can be set up within the system, it can be used to ensure approval processes are adhered to across the entire company.
This can speed up delivery and production, ensuring your customers see the fastest turnaround times you can offer.
5. Configuration
Salesforce is the world’s number one CRM for many reasons, but one of those is its configurability. Using a PSA that’s native to Salesforce combines the automation of accounting, invoicing, project management, proposals, and resource management with the customizable setup of Salesforce. Instead of trying many different software systems to find the one that works best for your organization, use one powerful system the way you need to by creating labels, forms, and workflows that work for your business, not the other way around.
When you can set up the system to gather the information you need, your PSA system is that much better at making business happen for you.
6. Data Security
With Salesforce, you have the ability to restrict access to objects, fields, and records, so only the people in your org who need to see sensitive information have access to it.
If you aren’t sure how your CRM is set up regarding these security features, you can run a quick Health Check in Salesforce to increase security with one click.
7. Client Satisfaction
Every feature we’ve discussed so far adds up to one thing: increased client satisfaction. When a prospect converts to a customer, you want them to stay as excited about your product or service for their entire customer lifecycle as they were when they signed up. Having visibility across internal teams, more robust reporting and planning capabilities, and enhanced information security features.
This will ensure jobs are completed faster, products are delivered with the highest quality, and clients are as happy as they possibly can be.
Conclusion
Many organizations know what the power of a capable, customizable CRM brings to their business, and many also know the benefits of having a PSA system to run both project management and resource management.
Combining CRM and PSA into one easy-to-use, mobile-accessible platform gives your organization even greater control, visibility, and output. And we know your customers are going to love the results.
