Small Business Week

Salesforce for Small Business

Small businesses are the backbone of the US economy and we at Relay want to help these businesses and provide the tools and resources they need to manage the business's interactions with existing customers and new prospects as well help every department from marketing, sales, commerce, service and IT teams to collaborate more effectively, even when individuals are working remotely. We know that the decision to implement Salesforce is not an easy one. But when done correctly, you can make sure it's the correct choice now and into the future.

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Customizable, Across All Aspects

The unique nature of Salesforce is that it allows your small business to grow and scale on one platform over time. While initially you may just need Sales Cloud to kickstart your sales pipeline, you may find that you need to expand your reach further as your business grows. If you need to expand your marketing efforts, there is the Marketing Cloud that allows you to create email campaigns and automate expansive campaigns. But if you need to cater to your existing clients, you may want to look into Service Cloud that allows you deliver personalized support to your customers and solve cases faster with a single source of truth. The best part is that it all starts and grows from one platform, so you and your employees never need to learn another complicated tool.

Various Plans to Cater to Your Needs

While Salesforce has the reputation of being a costly platform, this actually could not be further from the truth. With plans starting at $25 per user, per month, the barrier to enter the Salesforce ecosystem remains very affordable. While yes, the costs do go up as you scale and add on more to your Salesforce platform, the initial cost can be quite minimal if you're hesitant to get started with Salesforce.

Connect the Apps you Already Use

Of course we realize that there are many apps that you use everyday to keep your small business running efficiently and effectively. Whether your team is cross-communicating on Slack or using Docusign to generate agreements, once you move to Salesforce you can rest assured that all of those existing apps will play nice with your new CRM. With over 3,000 current apps on the Salesforce AppExchange, there is a great chance that every single one of your current apps have a prebuilt connector to work with Salesforce.

Leveraging the Power of Custom Apps

But say you're scrolling through the AppExchange and you can't find that one crucial app that your business uses, or the current app that is there is just not powerful enough to do what you need it to do. Don't worry, that's where we here at Relay will come in to serve exactly your needs. We will work with you to build a custom app tailored just for your business and for your Salesforce environment. Rest assured it will do everything you need it to do, and nothing you don't.

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Reach Out to Relay

If you’d like to learn more about how we at Relay can help your small business,  please contact us using the form below. We’ll be sure to respond to your message within one business day and have a meeting scheduled to answer any initial questions you may have about our process. We look forward to working with you soon and we can’t wait to learn more about how we can best incorporate our Salesforce skills into your business.

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Contact Us

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According to the U.S. Small Business Administration, there are approximately 30.7 million small businesses in the United States. While our team works with companies of all sizes, from startups to Fortune 1000, we find it particularly gratifying to deliver solutions for small businesses. Small businesses are often challenged by budgets, time, and their team's bandwidth. That's why they benefit more from focusing their efforts on implementing applications and tools that streamline processes and automate manual and repetitive steps. Salesforce is often seen as a heavyweight CRM that is challenging to implement for small businesses, but with a trusted Salesforce partner they too can reap the benefits of a world-class CRM and business process automation platform.

In this week's Small Business Spotlight, we are excited to highlight Industrial Fire Products Corp. Our team worked with IPFC to implement Salesforce for their sales and accounting processes, and we're excited to share some of their insights about their business, their challenges, and their advice for implementing Salesforce!

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What does IFPC do

Founded in 1992, we are a corporation dedicated to serve our customers in all Firefighting, Rescue and Safety Equipment needs. We are equipped with the knowledge, the skills, the experience, and commitment to meet our customer’s requirements. IFPC is a distributor of public safety equipment and vehicles serving Puerto Rico and the Caribbean since 1992. We sell anything from PPE equipment to an emergency vehicle (ex. fire truck). If a first responder uses it, we sell it.

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What are some of your business or client goals?

Our customers main objective is to save lives and property and IFPCs main goal is to protect our communities by providing the best service and equipment to first responders. We help them have the best equipment on the market so they can do their jobs safely and efficiently.

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What would you say was your greatest business challenge before implementing Salesforce?

We didn’t have a CRM so it was difficult to track all of our contacts in one place as well as tracking the actual status of each quote or opportunity.

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What has been the biggest benefit you’ve seen from your Salesforce investment?

We now have visibility, through the use of Dashboards, to structure our sales teams with sales targets and real-time opportunities/sales status. In addition, Sales Reps now receive notifications when all the items from a sales order have arrived and are ready to be delivered. This was not possible with our previous software (Quickbooks).

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What advice would you give to small businesses thinking about whether they should implement Salesforce into their workflow?

Go for it! At first, the president of our company thought it was overkill for our small business. However, thanks to the help our implementation partner, Relay, we quickly were able to demonstrate that Salesforce would provide a solid foundation for our growth plans. I recommend implementing it together with a native accounting software like Accounting Seed to keep all your data in one system. Salesforce is more than just a CRM, it lets you build simple automations that can eliminate busy work.

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If you are interested in learning more about how Salesforce custom apps and integrations can help you run your business processes more efficiently and unlock insights into your operations, schedule a 30 minute consultation with one of our Salesforce Architects today or send us a message!