Let’s face it: these days, everyone’s trying to squeeze more out of every dollar. And when it comes to cutting costs, technology often takes a hit. But to stay ahead of the curve, you need to think twice. Especially now that AI is changing the game.

Harnessing AI and Technology for Long-Term Success

When a business embraces AI and technology, it undergoes a digital transformation that fundamentally alters its operations. The digital age, now increasingly driven by AI, has reshaped customer interactions, leading to heightened expectations for seamless, personalized experiences. To remain competitive, businesses must leverage AI to meet and exceed these expectations by being accessible online, providing self-service options, analyzing customer data for insights, and more.

Leveraging AI and Tech to Stay Competitive

Despite the perception that technology is an easy area to cut costs, the reality is that AI and other technologies are becoming more affordable and more powerful. Consider the following ways your company can leverage AI and technology to remain competitive:

• Workflow Automation with AI: Are we using AI to automate routine tasks and workflows, freeing time for critical business operations and innovation? A recent study shows that AI-powered automation can reduce operational costs by up to 30% (Deloitte, 2022).
• AI-Powered Chatbots: Have we implemented AI-driven chatbots to handle customer service tasks, such as answering routine questions and routing calls? These chatbots can enhance customer satisfaction while reducing costs. Gartner predicts that by 2027, chatbots will be the primary customer service channel for a quarter of organizations (Gartner, 2024).
• Social Media Management Tools: How do we manage social media? AI-driven tools can optimize social media management, reducing the time spent on repetitive tasks and increasing effectiveness. According to a recent report, AI can boost social media ROI by 30% or more (McKinsey, 2024).
• Online Project Management with AI: Should we adopt AI-enhanced project management tools that streamline communication and task tracking? These tools can increase project success rates by 15% (LinkedIn, 2023).
• Cloud-Based Accounting Systems: Do we need opportunities by not using cloud-based accounting systems with AI integration to manage invoices, track expenses, and generate financial reports? Cloud-based systems can reduce accounting errors by 90% and save businesses significant time (WifiTalents, 2024).

These are just a few examples of how AI and technology can transform your business processes, reduce costs, and enhance your competitive advantage. The potential benefits are significant—what are you waiting for?

Summary

Cutting technology, especially AI, to save costs is a short-sighted approach that can undermine your competitive edge. Instead, businesses should invest in AI and digital transformation to streamline operations, enhance customer experiences, and ultimately, drive growth. The question isn’t whether you can afford to invest in AI, but whether you can afford not to.

How AdVic Can Help

Businesses must carefully consider the challenges associated with AI and GenAI before implementing these technologies. But do not worry, AdVic’s Team is well-equipped to design your personalized AI roadmap to success. If you have any questions or are ready to start today, book a meeting with us now.

Related Resources:

Boosting Sales with AI & GenAI: The Game-Changers for Productivity

Enhancing Data Security: The Role of AI

Meet Salesforce’s Einstein Copilot: Revolutionizing Business with AI

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The post The Hidden Costs of Ignoring AI in Your Tech Strategy appeared first on Ad Victoriam Solutions.

As a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool, Salesforce® helps businesses of all sizes manage their customer relationships more effectively. However, to get the most out of Salesforce, it’s important to optimize it for your specific needs.

For this Ad Victoriam Salesforce Blog, we offer numerous general tips to optimize Salesforce, then we go deeper and offer specific tips for using AI and GPT to optimize Salesforce, how to ensure data cleanliness, tips on getting user buy-in, and more.

Most Important Tips to Optimize Salesforce 

1. Set Your Goals: What do you want to achieve with Salesforce? Once you know your objectives, you can start to customize Salesforce to meet your needs.
2. Clean Up Your Data: Salesforce is only as good as the data you put into it. Make sure your data is clean, accurate, and up-to-date. You can use Salesforce’s Data Loader tool to import data from other systems or to clean up existing data.
3. Customize to Your Heart’s Content: Salesforce is a highly customizable CRM tool. You can add custom fields, objects, and reports to meet the specific needs of your business.
4. Let the Robots Work: Salesforce offers a variety of automation tools that can help you save time and effort. For example, you can use automation to create tasks and events, send emails, and update records.
5. Unleash the Analytics: Salesforce also offers a variety of analytics and reporting tools that can help you gain insights into your customer relationships. You can use these tools to track sales performance, identify trends, and make better business decisions.
6. Power Up with AI and GPT: Salesforce offers several AI and GPT-powered features that can help you optimize your CRM. For example, you can use AI to predict customer churn, identify sales opportunities, and personalize your marketing campaigns.
7. Rally the Team: Salesforce is only as effective as the people who use it. Make sure your team is trained on how to use Salesforce and that they understand the benefits of using it.

Let’s Go Deeper…

Tips for using AI and GPT to Optimize Salesforce

• Use AI to Predict Customer Churn: Salesforce offers several AI-powered tools that can help you predict which customers are at risk of churning. This information can help you take proactive steps to retain these customers.
• Use AI to Identify Sales Opportunities: Salesforce offers several AI-powered tools that can help you identify sales opportunities. For example, Salesforce Einstein can analyze your customer data and identify opportunities to cross-sell and upsell.
• Use AI to Personalize Your Marketing Campaigns: Salesforce offers several AI-powered tools that can help you personalize your marketing campaigns. For example, Salesforce Einstein can segment your customer base and create personalized marketing messages for each segment.

Tips for Ensuring Data Cleanliness

• Establish Data Quality Standards: Define what clean data means for your business and establish standards for how data should be entered and maintained.
• Use Data Validation: Salesforce offers a variety of data validation tools that can help you ensure that data is accurate and complete.
• Implement Data Governance Processes: Data governance processes help to ensure that data is managed and used consistently across your organization.

Tips for Getting User Buy-In

• Involve Users in the Implementation Process: Get users’ input on how Salesforce should be configured and used.
• Provide Training: Make sure users are trained on how to use Salesforce and that they understand the benefits of using it.
• Offer Support: Support users when they need it. This could include creating a knowledge base, providing one-on-one training, or offering a help desk.

Tips for Customizing Salesforce to Meet Your Specific Business Needs

• Identify Your Business Requirements: What are the unique needs of your business? Once you know your business requirements, you can start to customize Salesforce to meet those needs.
• Use Custom Fields and Objects: Salesforce allows you to create custom fields and objects to meet the specific needs of your business.
• Create Custom Reports: Salesforce also allows you to create custom reports to track the data that is most important to your business.

Summary

Salesforce is a fantastic tool for businesses, making customer management a breeze. To maximize its benefits, double down on these helpful tips:

• – Set clear goals.
• – Tidy up your data.
• – Customize for your needs.
• – Automate tasks.
• – Add analytics.
• – Try AI and GPT.
• – Get everyone on your team on board!

How AdVic Can Help

AdVic’s THRIVE Managed Services for Salesforce® & MuleSoft® offers the expertise, support, and solutions to help your business continue to thrive. So, if you need a cost-controlled flexible, yet full-service solution to fit your exact needs in the short- or long-term, talk to Ad Victoriam’s THRIVE Managed Services team today.

*Images courtesy of Salesforce.com

Related Resources:

Decoding Salesforce: Unveiling the Messaging Behind AI+Data+CRM

4 Ways Salesforce CRM Improves Lead Conversions

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The post Supercharge Your Business with Optimized Salesforce CRM appeared first on Ad Victoriam Solutions.

B2B companies often have long sales cycles, complex decision-making processes, and multiple stakeholders. Therefore, it’s important for B2B companies to follow certain best practices to maximize their chances of success. Here are 10 best marketing practices that B2B companies should follow.

1. Define Your Ideal Customer Profile: B2B companies should have a clear understanding of their target audience. This includes identifying the industries, company size, job titles, and other relevant factors that define their ideal customer. This helps in creating more effective marketing strategies and sales outreach.

2. Develop a Strong Brand Identity: A strong brand identity helps B2B companies stand out in a crowded market. It’s important to develop a consistent brand message across all channels, including website, social media, and sales collateral.

3. Create Valuable Content: B2B buyers are looking for information and insights that can help them make informed decisions. Therefore, B2B companies should create high-quality, informative content that addresses the pain points and challenges of their target audience. Create content that has value to your audience, minimizing “selling” content.

4. Measure and Analyze Results: Finally, B2B companies should measure and analyze the results of their marketing and sales efforts. This allows them to identify what’s working and what’s not, and make adjustments to improve their strategies over time. Key metrics to track include website traffic, conversion rates, customer acquisition cost, and customer lifetime value.

5. Leverage Social Media: Social media is an effective tool for B2B companies to reach and engage with their target audience. LinkedIn is particularly effective for B2B marketing, but other platforms such as Twitter and Facebook can also be used to build brand awareness and drive traffic to the company’s website. Maximize your social posting with employee engagement. Encouraging employees and leadership to post independently and share company posts maximizes exposure and is shown to increase sales.

6. Embrace Account-Based Marketing (ABM): ABM is a targeted approach that focuses on a specific set of accounts that are most likely to become customers. ABM allows B2B companies to personalize their messaging and outreach to each account, which can lead to higher conversion rates and stronger customer relationships.

7. Use Marketing Automation: Marketing automation tools such as Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Management (formerly Pardot) can help B2B companies streamline their marketing efforts and automate repetitive tasks. This allows marketing teams to focus on higher-level tasks such as content creation, strategy, and analysis.

8. Focus on Customer Experience: B2B companies should focus on providing a seamless and positive customer experience. This includes everything from website design to customer service to post-sale support. A positive customer experience can lead to repeat business and referrals.

9. Emphasize the Value Proposition: B2B buyers are looking for solutions that will help them solve their problems and achieve their goals. Therefore, B2B companies should focus on emphasizing the value of their product or service and how it can benefit the customer.

10. Prioritize Sales Enablement: Sales enablement refers to providing sales teams with the tools, training, and resources they need to be successful. B2B companies should invest in sales enablement programs to ensure that their sales teams are equipped to sell effectively.

Summary

Initiating these 10 best practices can go a long way toward helping B2B companies improve their marketing and sales efforts, build stronger customer relationships, and drive business growth. By focusing on their target audience, creating valuable content, leveraging social media, embracing Account Based Marketing (ABM), using marketing automation, prioritizing customer experience, emphasizing the value proposition, investing in sales enablement, and measuring and analyzing results, B2B companies can achieve success in a competitive marketplace.

Need to jump-start your B2B initiatives? Have a look at how quickly you can get in the game with AdVic’s B2B Commerce Accelerator.

How Can AdVic Help?

Ad Vic’s dedicated B2B Commerce team is ready to apply their knowledge and passion to your challenges. Whether you are migrating from a legacy eCommerce solution or just starting to dip your toe into the B2B eCommerce world, our U.S.-based team, who works on your hours,  has the skills and expertise needed to get your branded storefront up and running quickly so you can drive new revenue. Reach out and talk to us today!

Related Resources:

B2B Customer Success Story
B2B Commerce Accelerator
B2B Marketing Tips You Have Not Thought Of

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In a recent episode of AdVic’s “Salesforce Simplified” podcast, we focused on Salesforce’s Field Service – and in particular – how its automation features have become a game-changer for field service teams. Our guest was Salesforce Senior Solutions Engineer, George Higgins.

An Overview of Salesforce Field Service

“Field service in general,” Higgins explains, “that’s a part of an organization that’s going to deploy a worker to actually go in person and perform a service for your customer, and that includes a lot of different use cases. There’s transportation, repair services, telecom, waste management, and financial services. All types of different in-person services are being provided across all types of different industries and that’s where Salesforce Field Service – part of a Salesforce Service Cloud solution – comes in. It’s an automated system that can really help with all the different moving parts that go into actually going on site and helping a customer solve their issue. You think about all the different factors that go into that. We need to schedule an appointment with the customer. Often that’s done with a service agent. Then somebody needs to actually dispatch a resource, and then that resource needs to show up to the appointment and actually help that customer. Field Service is built to kind of automate that process and optimize and give your customers that delighted experience they’re expecting.”

How Automation Improves Field Service Management

Without question, automation is a huge piece of the Salesforce Field Service solution. Higgins remarks, “There’s so many factors that go into executing out in the field. Does the tech have the right skill set? Can they actually help the customer? Are they physically close to the location? We obviously don’t want to be sending techs all across town if we don’t need to. Other factors such as, maybe a customer prefers a certain tech to come on site, and then also does that tech have all the materials with them to actually complete the work? Maybe a plumber doesn’t have all the right equipment on his truck that given day. Definitely don’t want him assigned to complete a job that requires that missing equipment. All those factors really multiply together and make it hard to find, what is that perfectly optimized schedule?” 

He adds, “Automation is key, and of course, there’ll always be some need for a human element, but automation can really ease that burden on the dispatcher and help guide them towards scheduling that really helps your business, and ultimately, your customers in the most efficient way possible.”

Field Service Use Case Example

There were several use case examples Salesforce’s Higgins talked about during the podcast, but one in particular had to do with speeding up the time at a job site.

“There’s several different ways we can do this, and we do know that drive time, that per appointment travel time, is such a critical KPI for pretty much every Field Service organization, and we have a few different ways that we can help impact this KPI. There’s aerial routing, which is going to compute the shortest distance between two locations based on a straight line, so kind of as the crow flies. We also do street level routing, which is going to compute the distance along roads or transportation routes. It’s based on actual road speed measurements and the expected travel speed based on the type of road.”

Additionally, Higgins pointed out, “We also have predictive travel, so that builds on top of that street level routing and it incorporates time of day data into the calculation. Is it rush hour or is this generally a busy time on this road? We’ll factor that into what that drive time’s actually going to be. Lastly, we also have point to point predictive routing. That’s going to estimate travel time using the exact service appointment location, and it also considers that time of day. That’s the routing that is used across all scheduling and optimization operations within Field Service.”

Improving Customer Retention

Higgins highlighted several ways that Field Service automation helps with customer retention. 

“There’s the unseen ways to the customer that happen behind the scenes that ensure the right tech is coming, they arrive when we’re expecting them to arrive, they do have the ability to fix my problem, and they’re able to do it on that first time. “

“Additionally, Higgins explained, “customers can now get that DoorDash or Uber-like real-time location experience that’s starting to become expected, and not just a nice to have. With appointment assistants, something a lot of our Field Service customers are adding on, you’re able to see on your phone, you can get text notifications, ‘Here’s the driver who’s on your way. It’s Alan. He’s 20-minutes away and here’s where he is on a map,’ getting that real-time location. That experience is something customers are expecting and we’re able to offer it with Field Service and it definitely helps with customer retention.”

There is much more to our conversation with Salesforce’s George Higgins. Listen to the entire podcast here. And if you would like to explore other ways a Salesforce Field Service solution can benefit you business, the AdVic Field Service Team is just a click away.

Related Resources:

Top Field Service KPIs Impacted by Field Service Cloud (Podcast)

Energize Salesforce Service Cloud with Field Service

3 Ways to Unleash the Speed and Efficiency of Your Field Service Operation

Subscribe to the AdVic Salesforce Blog on Feedly:

The post How Top Field Service KPIs are Impacted by Salesforce Field Service appeared first on Ad Victoriam Solutions.

As is the case every year here in the middle of winter (depending, of course, on where in the world you are), our thoughts turn to… spring! And the same goes for Salesforce®, who has packed their platform with exciting new Spring ‘22 Release features that all orgs will be experiencing by February 12, 2022.

AdVic’s consultants have once again poured through every one of the new features and have highlighted the ones they are most excited about, focusing this time on automation, and specifically “flow.” So, let’s take a look at six of this release’s platform highlights:

1.  Enable Stronger Protection for Your User’s Personal Information (Release Update)

AdVic Note: This feature helps to lock down personal identifiable information (PII) from portal users. This is customizable with field sets as well to provide flexibility if any custom fields are utilized. 

Salesforce Overview: Enable Enhanced Personal Information Management to prevent external users, such as portal or community users from accessing other users’ personal information. This feature, which replaces the Hide Personal Information setting, secures more personal identifiable information (PII) user record fields. You can also decide which custom and standard user fields are considered PII. 

2. Visualize All Your Record-Triggered Flows in One Place with Flow Trigger Explorer

AdVic Note: With Process Builder and Workflow Rules slated for deprecation in the coming years, this update will go a long way in helping admins manage their org. This view will provide a single location to review flow automation providing improved debugging and troubleshooting. 

Salesforce Overview: See and manage your record-triggered flows with Flow Trigger Explorer, a new tool that’s more visual and interactive than the Flows list view. Flow Trigger Explorer shows all of the flows that are associated with a specified object and that run when a record is created, updated, or deleted. For example, quickly see all flows that are triggered to run when a case record is created.

3. Filter Items into a Collection in Flow Builder

AdVic Note: This update for flow allows admins better control when modifying multiple records in a collection variable. Previously, a series of loops and additional collection variables would need to be constructed when attempting to perform advanced logic on sets of records within a given collection. Going forward, this is now a task that Flow Builder can handle in a single action. 

Salesforce Overview: Now you can filter unwanted data from your collections in Flow Builder. Use the Collection Filter element to select a collection and define conditions. When the flow runs, the element outputs a collection with only the items that meet those conditions, leaving your original collection intact.

4. Define the Run Order of Record-Triggered Flows for an Object

AdVic Note: With Spring ’22, record-triggered flows now allow for configuration of the order of operation. This update will allow admins to group flows by the logic that is being completed rather than creating one giant flow with many components. 

Salesforce Overview: Specify a trigger order value to determine the run order of before-save or after-save flows for the same object. Declaratively configure a flow to run before or after another flow. Order your flows to help ensure consistent results without creating overly complex flows, letting you divide automation by teams or logical owners.

5. Convert Workflow Rules to Flows with the Migrate to Flow Tool (Beta)

AdVic Note: Workflow Rules will be the first piece of non-flow automation to be deprecated in the coming years. Spring 22 comes with a tool that is currently in beta to migrate these to flow. 

Salesforce Overview: We know it’s a lot to process, but it’s time to begin the transition to using Flow Builder, the future of low-code automation. Use the Migrate to Flow tool to convert your workflow rules into flows. Flow Builder can do everything that workflow rules can do—and more.

6. Set Organization-Wide Sharing for Products (Release Update)

AdVic Notes: Starting in Spring ’22, organization-wide sharing can now be applied to the product object. This provides an added layer to an organization’s security and allows for additional customization. Note: Sharing rules and manual sharing will still be unavailable for this object. 

Salesforce Overview: To better protect your Salesforce data, this update adds org-wide sharing settings for product records. As of Summer ’22, in new orgs only, the update sets the org-wide sharing default for products to Private for external users. Sharing rules and manual sharing aren’t supported. This update was first made available in Winter ’22 and was scheduled to be enforced in Spring ’22, but we postponed the enforcement date to Summer ’22.

If you have any questions about the Salesforce Spring ‘22 Release – or anything Salesforce-related – AdVic’s consulting team is standing by to help! Reach us now, here.

Related Articles & Resources

Go with the Flow – Highlights from the Salesforce Spring ’22 Release (Podcast) 

Top 6 Salesforce Winter ’22 Release Highlights

Follow in a Reader

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