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A CLOUD COACH ARTICLE

Customer Success Salesforce

Customer Success Salesforce

Salesforce is one of the biggest CRMs on the market. Thousands of organizations use Salesforce to manage their businesses, from everything to sales pipeline, lead management, and even customer support. However, with the flexible nature of the Salesforce platform and the abundant ecosystem of ISV Vendors available on the Salesforce Appexchange, there are so many use cases for Salesforce that it can be a little overwhelming for a lot of people. Users hoping to implement and track customer success using Salesforce would have a difficult time, needing to manually create new automation or bespoke processes for every new client, etc. Even users with a Salesforce Certification might find the process of creating a hodgepodge of Salesforce apps tedious. 

Cloud Coach is built into the Salesforce platform and creates new functionality out of the Salesforce platform. Cloud Coach allows users to track prospects all the way through implementation and to client success, creating new projects out of opportunities at the click of a button. Cloud Coach also enables project managers to take a look at the availability of their staff, knowing at a moment’s glance who has bandwidth for projects. 

Cloud Coach enables project managers to turn prospects into projects in a single click, track timelines and deliverables as you onboard, align your projects to client goals, and assign the best-suited staff member based on their skills and availability. Cloud Coach also has user-friendly time tracking to optimize billable time, as well as a document center so that every stakeholder can remain on the same page. Cloud Coach also helps you to expect the unexpected and protect yourself against the unknown with three unique dashboards – the Risk Register, Issue Log, and Change Requests.

There are a lot of benefits to using Cloud Coach to enable customer success and onboarding processes natively on Salesforce. For starters, it eliminates the need for multiple software systems, keeping important information secure and centralized.

Salesforce Customer Success Platform

At first glance, it might be difficult to fashion a Salesforce customer success platform that gives both your team and your clients the necessary project visibility to create a good partnership. Customer onboarding is an incredibly important process and can set the tone for the entire relationship between that client and your organization. Because of that, it’s important to choose customer success tools that give your team and your client the best chance at putting the right foot forward and creating a partnership together that shows your best work and suits their needs. 

Native Salesforce does not offer traditional project management systems. To create a functional customer success platform without Cloud Coach, administrators would need to cobble together a series of other Salesforce applications. While some of the apps on the AppExchange are free, many of the apps, like Cloud Coach, require a paid subscription to make the most out of the software. To recreate Cloud Coach on the AppExchange, it would require many software tools, resulting in higher costs and decreased functionality.

Cloud Coach is designed to optimize Salesforce administration skills that your team already has. It is built to streamline processes such as creating custom fields, improving the approval process, Lighting flows and components, and creating tailored reports and dashboards. Its many dashboards and functionalities provide a way to work on the most complicated of client onboarding projects with ease. Cloud Coach allows you to share details with clients and view your data in real-time.

Cloud Coach contains powerful project management, resource management, professional services automation, time tracking, security, and reporting tools that turn Salesforce into the project management tool of your dreams. Instead of keeping up with multiple software tools and divided data, you can keep all of your information and processes on one single source of truth. 

Customer Onboarding Software

Good customer onboarding is the key to a lasting client-vendor relationship. The key to creating a successful onboarding experience is selecting the right customer onboarding software for your business. There are many steps in successfully onboarding customers. When onboarding customers, you should keep their entire journey up to this point in mind. A typical customer journey might look something like this:

  • Lead
    • This is when your new client is not yet a client – they’re just curious about your product and services. Leads are accounts that have likely not yet been contacted by a sales development representative.
  • Prospect
    • Whereas a lead is an unqualified account, a prospect is someone who has interacted with your business in some way, probably through a marketing campaign. The first point of contact for a prospect is typically a sales development representative. After they set an initial meeting with an SDR, they are usually passed on to an Account Executive who closes the deal.
  • Onboarding
    • When an Account Executive has received verbal confirmation or agreement, it might be time to look at converting the prospect’s Salesforce track into a project/client onboarding track. You can turn a prospect into a project at any time using Cloud Coach. This is also a critical time in a client/vendor relationship. As the CSM, you are probably the third or even fourth vendor employee your client has met thus far. The steps and people involved can get a little muddled.

That’s why it’s important to have software that can share information with clients in real-time. The Cloud Coach’s document center is also an incredible resource for clients and team members alike, as it helps to keep everyone on the same page and signed with the client’s goals. Cloud Coach sets your CSMs and clients up for lasting success and a long partnership.

Customer Onboarding Best Practices

If you’re wondering how to onboard new customers in a way that sets everyone up for success, there are a few customer onboarding best practices to keep in mind. A customer success framework should consist of:

  • A clear roadmap for your clients
    • Clarity is the friend of CSMs and new clients in an onboarding process. Cloud Coach can help create accessible visuals for clients so that everyone knows what stage a project is currently in and where it is headed now.
  •  A conversation about your clients’ needs
    • It’s important for CSMs to create their own relationships with clients and understand what they need out of the product they’ve selected. Creating a high rate of utilization also begins in onboarding, so it’s important to check-in with clients often to ensure that they understand their software. It could be possible that they need a step-by-step tutorial on how to utilize their product fully.
  • A conversation about setting expectations and milestones for success
    • The sales process for many software tools can be an exciting time. Clients get excited about the possibility of an easier workload, and sales team members get excited about providing a solution. However, you want to make sure from the very beginning that nothing has been over-promised.
  •  A plan for setbacks and unexpected problems
    •  While everyone plans for a customer onboarding experience to go smoothly, unexpected problems can arise. Cloud Coach helps project managers and CSMs prepare for these types of challenges with the Risk Register, Issue Log, and Change Request Dashboards.
  •  Scheduled check-ins after onboarding completion
    • Onboarding is just the beginning of your relationship with the client. It’s important to continually assess client needs as the relationship evolves and as they grow more familiar with the product. 

Cloud Coach creates the automation necessary to keep on top of all your customer onboarding projects so that each client can have a dedicated and curated team to ensure the best experience.

Customer Success Story Examples

When it comes to customer success story examples, you don’t have to take our word for it – there are lots of case studies on our website that will detail Salesforce customer success stories in the clients’ own words. There are many different use cases for Cloud Coach, with customer success project management only being one of them. Clients love Cloud Coach for lots of reasons. Jackson Witherill from AthenaHealth reported that “Cloud Coach has empowered us to move off of different systems to streamline and optimize our processes, which has allowed us to manage projects more efficiently, log time, and have more clear reporting across the business.” Jean Foreman from Hostess Brands said that Cloud Coach allowed their organization to bring cross-functional teams together to make sure that nothing is missed in their projects. 

These are just a few examples of how organizations use Cloud Coach to streamline and optimize their processes to the benefit of their clients and revenue. Other clients call out Cloud Coach’s Gantt charts and time tracking as some of their most used features. One client even said that Cloud Coach’s time-tracking features outweigh all of the major competitors that they had analyzed. Utilizing Cloud Coach effectively to create a truly game-changing customer onboarding experience for clients can have a major impact on product utilization, which can impact customer churn, retention, upsell opportunities, and more.

Aside from Cloud Coach’s features that allow for shared documentation, its powerful automation and digitization mean less paperwork for everyone involved, increased visibility, and stronger communication between team members and client stakeholders alike. Cloud Coach has a 4.9 out of 5 rating on the Salesforce AppExchange and a 4.6 out of 5 on G2. Lynsey Marchwinski of torrent consulting was quoted saying, “we couldn’t imagine using another tool.”

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