A New Partnership Could Solve Common CRM Problems

A customer relationship management system (CRM) can greatly improve how your business interacts with your customers, analyzes patterns of behavior, and follows through on prospective leads. That said, it’s not a panacea. The limitations of current technology often create new problems for your sales teams, but the popularity of CRM platforms mean that some of the smartest innovators around are taking measures to improve these issues. One of the most promising developments involves a new partnership between Salesforce and Apple, and it could change how we interact with CRM systems in some pretty fundamental ways.

Smarter Solutions That Require More Work

Sales are inherently about two things. It’s about the salespeople out on the front lines using their persuasive talents to draw in new customers, but it’s also about making sure that they have the quantifiable intelligence that they need to make the right pitch. Traditional CRM does the latter by analyzing and parsing data available and making it easier for salespeople to connect with their clients; but as CRM becomes more prevalent, salespeople are spending more time focused on data entry and less on making actual sales. The problem with integrating your sales team with your new CRM manifests in other ways as well. Veteran salespeople are often set in their ways and slow to adopt new technologies, especially when threatened by the notion that such tech could be replacing them, and simple clerical errors in data entry can have a significant negative impact on your company.

The Power of Einstein

The Einstein system draws off the strength of Salesforce’s proven CRM system and fuses it with Apple’s voice-activated Siri technology. While the two plan to produce a number of new ease of use programs to bridge the gap between your sales teams and your CRM, the first comes in the form of Einstein Voice. This handy mobile app allows sales teams to complete a range of tasks with their voice alone. The ability to send and receive notifications, transcribe meeting notes and analyze the data from the CRM could be a major game changer. This isn’t the first app that accomplishes such a goal, but it’s the only to work natively within the Salesforce ecosystem, and that should drastically cut down on compatibility issues. It’s a strong step forward in integrating sales and CRM, but it’s only the first initiative we can expect to see. The two partners already have plans to launch a mobile software development kit that’s built from the bones of Apple’s Swift programming language.