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Maximize Productivity with Sales and Service CRM

Learning Objectives

At the end of this unit, you will be able to:

  • Describe how companies can better serve their customers by using Sales Cloud and Service Cloud together.
  • Describe the advantage of using the Salesforce Platform.

Sales and Service: the Perfect Power Couple

Far too often, sales and service function separately within organizations. Sales brings in new customers and hands them off to service teams, with little-to-no communication or follow-up between the two departments.

This way of business is not only outdated, but costly.

By treating sales as the only team responsible for bringing in new customers and driving revenue, organizations miss out on big opportunities. Customer service reps interact with customers beyond the sale, so they can generate customer loyalty, pick up on up-sell opportunities, and ultimately retain customers. That ability or inability to retain customers makes a huge difference to the bottom line. According to research done by Harvard Business Review, companies that focus on loyalty grow revenue as much as 2.5x faster than their competitors. 

To truly retain customers, businesses need to create an excellent experience from the first interaction with sales reps all the way to customer service agents who field customer complaints and concerns—and through renewing their accounts. Roughly 78% of business buyers said they were likely to switch brands if they receive inconsistent levels of service (that includes service from sales reps, too!). In other words, if your sales and service teams aren’t working in tandem to provide a consistently great customer experience, don’t be surprised when you start hemorrhaging customers.

So how do you start breaking down the wall that separates sales and service? The key is to equip the entire organization with the information it requires to offer proactive service that keeps customers happy. For starters, sales reps need to understand a customer’s entire service history, and service agents need to fully understand the business challenges a customer is trying to solve with your product or service, all of which is uncovered during sales discovery.

Service Cloud + Sales Cloud = Lots of Revenue

There’s technology to help! Salesforce is designed to bring together siloed sales and service organizations with Service Cloud and Sales Cloud. They’re built on the same platform, giving sales, service, and the entire organization a 360-degree view of each customer. That complete understanding translates to happy customers and more dollars. Service teams are empowered to upsell and cross-sell to existing customers. And sales teams can use service insights to better understand their customers’ history and current needs and sell more effectively.

Here’s what using Service Cloud and Sales Cloud on one platform can do.

  • Empower sales teams with customer intelligence: Make the sales and service relationship more than just a handoff. When service teams interact with customers, they get deeper knowledge about business problems they’re trying to solve, and what’s working or isn’t with your product. Sales reps can then use that information and the customer’s history to better cater to their needs with just the right solution.
  • Service can help close the deal: Your sales team is impressive, but that doesn’t mean they can’t use a hand from their friends in customer service. If a support agent is on a customer call and spots a cross-sell or upsell opportunity, they can seamlessly pass along that lead—and lots of rich information about the customer—to the sales team.
  • Keep your customers coming back for more: When your sales reps work with a customer for weeks (or months!) trying to close a deal, they want that positive experience to carry through the customer’s entire journey. It’s just good business sense. With Salesforce, you can be confident that all your customers have the best experience. That means offering proactive service once the sale is done. Your customers no longer have to explain their entire history or experience to service agents. Agents have the full story—with rich customer data and insights—to anticipate a customer’s needs. That kind of quality experience leads to much smoother conversations when sales reps are interacting with your customers for renewals or upsell opportunities.

Salesforce Platform Advantage

So you can see the benefits of having your sales and service teams operate as one. But historically, uniting these teams hasn’t been simple. That’s because sales and service solutions are often built on separate systems, which means customer information is also separate, and they feel impossible to integrate. That kind of setup is incompatible and creates friction for the customer. But as we’ve noted, Salesforce changes all that, with our sales and service solutions on the same powerful, integrated platform. The Salesforce Platform is the secret sauce that creates a seamless integration, complete view of the customer, and effortless collaboration.

With the Salesforce Platform, you can stop worrying about losing customers, and start focusing on meeting their needs for the future. And yes, we help with that, too. Salesforce releases new features three times each year, and with the platform, that innovation seamlessly integrates into your CRM. It’s also completely customizable, so you can tailor it to your business processes. And when all that collaboration leads to explosive growth, Salesforce grows right along with you.

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