By Swatil Binte Mahmud, Blogger, Lava Protocols
Businesses flourish when your customers are happy and satisfied with your products and services. The ongoing pandemic has shown the world how vulnerable businesses can get in a matter of days. Many companies shifted from their offline business model to online platforms to survive. In recent years, we have also observed businesses installing online software and applications to smoothen their daily activities. Connecting cloud applications and platforms such as Salesforce and Google to your business is the best thing you can do to secure your business activities.
A Malaysian property developer present since the 1990s with established presence and success grew and flourished but fell behind in keeping up with cloud technology. These are some of the challenges they faced.
They had a website, used emails for communication with customers, and ran marketing campaigns to ensure good business profits. However, one of the challenges this property developer faced was in managing the customer enquiries that came via their website, emails, and marketing campaigns. Their individual sales representatives used to manually export customer-submitted enquiries. Consolidating data manually into spreadsheets was time-consuming and lead to a possibility of data loss. Also, there was no proper system in place to monitor follow-ups and direct sales efforts effectively.
The previous on-premise system required sales reps to be logged in at the office to view available units or lots and make a booking. This led to delays in the booking process as the sales representatives could not view units or lots that were still available and make an on-the-spot booking when they were out of the office. Additionally, the company did not have a system that allowed its management to track the performance of the sales team effectively.
The company did not have a systematic email marketing tool to send out newsletters to their contacts and customers. Their initial modus operandi manually sent out individual emails to each contact which was a redundant and tedious task.
Lava implemented Salesforce to enable lead capturing, determine lead progress, and track lead conversions. With Salesforce in place, all customer enquiries submitted to their website, email and marketing campaigns are captured and stored in one platform. Through filtering functions of the system, sales reps can now view and focus on enquiries that indicate a genuine interest in quotations. Once a quotation request is made, sales reps convert the lead into a contact and create an account that automatically pulls in all the details from the contact.
The customer relationship management system also enabled their management to view the lead progress of each sales rep in real-time by running a report on the lead status or lead source. They are even able to determine which channel brought in the most leads.
Lava helped to build a property booking module within their Salesforce system to allow sales reps to check the availability of property units or lots in real-time and to make bookings from anywhere, anytime. Through the module, sales reps and management can view all ongoing projects, the phase of the project, and other pertinent information, in just a few clicks.
The implementation of the property booking module sped up the booking process and minimised lost opportunities.
Mailchimp is an American marketing automation platform and email marketing service. Lava implemented Mailchimp to conduct systematic email marketing and integrated it with Salesforce to ensure that all data from Mailchimp are synced to the latter for easier access and tracking by their sales and marketing team. Using Mailchimp, the teams can automate the process of sending out regular newsletters to their contacts and customers, view campaign performances through reporting analytics, and identify potential customers based on their engagement with the content sent in the emails.
The use of Mailchimp simplified the email marketing process and enabled them to monitor campaign effectiveness, and from there customise marketing campaigns to suit their customer’s needs accordingly.
Lead Management is the process of acquiring and managing leads (potential customers) up to the point a purchase is made. The result of the implementation of the lead management system led to the elimination of manual administrative tasks, simplified operational data management, shortened lead conversion process, eased performance tracking, and overall improvement in productivity.
With the growing need to compete regionally, enterprises in Malaysia are spending on application modernization, extending the capabilities of their core applications, or substituting their applications with a cloud-based model. Lava Protocols is a certified cloud solutions architect that mainly implements Salesforce.com, Custella, and G Suite solutions and integrates them with other systems. InvestKL, an award-winning federal government agency in Malaysia used to store data manually which slowed down their process. Khairul Anwar, a business analyst working at InvestKL said, “We teamed up with Lava Protocols as they work with organizations like us to increase our company’s efficiency. The team at Lava Protocols are very helpful and resourceful.”
Lava supports corporations of any size by reducing their cost and helping them achieve a competitive edge via customer touchpoint technology and applications. Perhaps, the next big thing to happen to your company can be enhanced with Lava Protocols.
Lava Protocols is an authorized Salesforce Partner. Looking to adopt Salesforce? Drop us an email to schedule your demo: hello@lavaprotocols.com.