The modern business world recognizes Salesforce as a worldwide leader in driving sales growth. As a cloud-based Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform, Salesforce excels at automatically tracking and analyzing customer interactions through the sales lifecycle and ensuring sales and marketing teams are optimally positioned to target and follow up with customers. Since its inception in 1999, however, Salesforce has become much more than just a CRM platform. Today, Salesforce is an interconnected network of cloud environments that manages business services of all kinds, from IT help desks to agile development when building custom apps. As Salesforce has become increasingly embedded in the fabric of organizations, it’s also become better positioned to serve as the foundation for organization-wide digital transformation.

Digital transformation refers to the use of best-practices methods and technologies that automate, streamline, and reshape business services across an organization. In our last blog post, we chronicled how many organizations underestimate and inadequately prepare for digital transformation, leading to subpar results and widespread confusion among employees. A 2018 Salesforce survey found that two out of every three employees don’t feel confident they could explain digital transformation to someone else. To avoid this fate, you want to have workflows and systems in place that can support your efforts to fundamentally change business operations and employee competencies across your organization. Salesforce provides this critical foundation for digital transformation success, offering an all-in-one platform on which to build your digital change strategy. Let’s explore the four main reasons that every business should be using Salesforce as the foundation of digital transformation:

1. Salesforce provides all the core tools of digital transformation.

To be successful at digital transformation, experts agree that an organization needs to deploy four main types of technologies—social, mobile, analytics, and cloud—that are collectively referred to as the SMAC bundle. Salesforce comes with all four technologies, and they’ve all been preconfigured to immediately begin supporting your digital transformation goals. First, Salesforce lives entirely in the cloud, which means it offers full access from any personal mobile device. Second, Salesforce provides a simple, powerful way for companies to create and manage their social media presence. Third, Salesforce helps effectively integrate mobile technologies into the sales lifecycle, ensuring companies can digitally transform the customer experience and take advantage of breakthroughs like the Internet of Things (IoT). Fourth, Salesforce serves as an analytical powerhouse, using artificial intelligence (AI) and powerful algorithms to convert millions of your data points into insightful business intelligence.

2. Salesforce motivates employees to rethink workflows.

One of the most challenging aspects of digital transformation is getting employees to adjust to change. From altered workflows to new software systems, many employees struggle with change and can’t wrap their heads around how to revise their daily workflows to optimally support change. Salesforce is an intuitive, user-friendly platform that employees will quickly master. In fact, it doesn’t take long for employees to embrace Salesforce, to prefer Salesforce, and to come up with new ways to use Salesforce. Salesforce excels at helping employees automate some of their difficult, complex, and repetitive tasks. Salesforce users get an average ROI of 478% in just five years. Furthermore, Salesforce’s popular drag-and-drop functionality ensures that employees don’t become frustrated trying to develop custom apps and functionality within the Salesforce platform. Finally, when employees see how Salesforce is being used in another department or service unit, they tend to intuitively recognize how to adapt the platform’s features and functionality to serve their own needs.

3. Salesforce makes collaboration a cinch.

One of the top goals of digital transformation is improving communication and connectivity among siloed departments and service units. When Simplus worked with Alcon and McAfee, we did just that using Salesforce CPQ and Sales Cloud. Both of these Salesforce features encourage teams to work together by providing collaboration tools and creating full visibility and transparency across the organization. When employees have access to hard data and business intelligence, they feel empowered to be more ambitious and forward-thinking. Furthermore, all employees, vendors, and other partners can work from the Salesforce platform from any personal device; that means that off-site collaborators don’t end up being treated like second-class citizens with limited access and voice.

4. Salesforce emphasizes continuous process improvement.

Digital transformation is truly a journey that requires sustained dedication and focus. In many organizations, digital transformation initiatives become derailed by other organizational priorities and challenges. Salesforce helps keep leaders focused on digital transformation by continually serving up real-time business insights that spark process improvement. Managers, supervisors, and front-line employees alike automatically receive updates in areas such as resource allocation, purchasing, scheduling, and forecasting. Even sales commissions can be calculated and managed from within Salesforce, encouraging employees to set sales goals and then track their progress and productivity. No matter how much an organization may drift away from its digital transformation goals over time, Salesforce is there to help keep these goals front and center.

Organizations need all the help they can get to achieve successful results during digital transformation. This process starts with putting in place workflows, technologies, and methods that can support your transformation goals. Salesforce is optimally positioned to serve as the all-encompassing foundation on which you build your digital transformation success story. Salesforce comes preloaded with the core tools you’ll need to jump-start digital transformation. Salesforce also motivates employees to rethink their workflows in ways that support change, encourage collaboration, eliminate silos, and prioritize continuous process improvement even as your focus wanes over time.

This is Part 2 of Simplus’s 10-part blog series on reaping the full benefits of digital transformation. In Part 3, we’ll explore how to use Salesforce to reinvent your customer experience and drive the digital transformation you desire.