6 Easy Ways to Boost Business Performance With Salesforce

Key Takeaways

• Salesforce unifies customer data, automates repetitive tasks, and centralizes workflows, allowing small businesses to focus on growth instead of administrative work.
• By providing a complete view of customers and an organized sales pipeline, it helps teams build stronger relationships and has been shown to increase sales and forecast accuracy.
• The platform breaks down team silos using collaboration tools like Slack, resulting in faster, more personalized customer service and a significant increase in overall productivity and efficiency.

Imagine it’s Monday morning, and you’re already drowning in customer emails, chasing sales leads, managing inventory, and trying to keep your team on track. All good problems to have. Yet, every task feels urgent, and you’re running from one fire to the next. Without a clear system in place, it’s easy to lose sight of what matters most: your customers, your growth, and your future.

Small or medium business (SMB) owners like you don’t have time to get stuck in repetitive tasks or disconnected tools that slow you down. That’s where Salesforce comes in. It’s more than a customer relationship management (CRM) tool — it’s a platform that helps you unify data, simplify daily workflows, connect your teams, and gain artificial intelligence (AI) insights that guide growth. With Salesforce, you spend less time on busywork and more time building your business with confidence. Let’s dig into how this CRM is helping businesses with overall performance.

1. Use customer-centric dashboards

The problem: Startups and growing businesses like yourself need a home for information (or data). Without clear information about who their customers are, what they’ve asked for, how they prefer to communicate, and even what they purchased, every interaction feels like a guessing game.

The Salesforce solution: With a CRM like Salesforce, you’re able to bring all of that customer information — nay, data — into one place. You’ll have access to accounts, contact history, purchase records, customer preferences, and service interactions — all updated in real time. This means you can treat every customer like your most important one, with personalized service that makes them feel seen and heard. 

In fact, according to State of the Al Connected Customer, 73% of customers expect faster service when they share their data. By giving you a clear, unified picture of each customer, Salesforce helps you respond faster and build stronger relationships that last.

2. Centralize and automate your routines

The problem: Every day, you’re juggling a long list of tasks: responding to customer questions, updating contact records, following up on sales leads, managing inventory, and coordinating your team’s work. Without a clear system, it’s easy to feel scattered or let valuable opportunities slip away.

The Salesforce solution: With an automated CRM like Salesforce, you take control by centralizing calendars, task lists, sales activities, and service schedules into one easy-to-use platform. Prioritize your most urgent tasks, automate routine follow-ups, set reminders for key deadlines, and schedule customer appointments without the back-and-forth. This reduces scheduling conflicts and cuts down on repetitive work, helping your team stay organized and focused.

As a result, your team spends more time on high-impact activities like building customer relationships and growing the business, instead of getting buried in admin work.

3. Build a more organized sales pipeline

The problem: As your business grows, managing leads becomes harder. Without the right tools, it’s easy to lose track of prospects, miss important follow-ups, misunderstand what customers really need, and spend too much time on manual tasks. Disorganized pipelines lead to missed opportunities, longer sales cycles, and frustrated customers.

The Salesforce solution: Small businesses are using Salesforce to simplify and scale their sales pipelines without adding more manual work. With one dashboard, they can track lead status, record customer pain points, log communication history, and plan the next steps. Tools like automated follow-ups, task assignments, prioritized lead scoring, and real-time updates give teams clarity and confidence.

According to the State of Sales report, businesses using Salesforce see sales increase by up to 29%, because their teams spend less time on repetitive work, fewer hours searching for information, less energy chasing updates, and more time building meaningful customer relationships.

4. Improve collaboration across your teams

The problem: When your marketing, sales, service, and IT teams work in silos, communication breaks down. Customer information gets lost and priorities become unclear. Misaligned teams also deal with duplicated work, wasted effort, rising frustration, and missed opportunities. Responses slow down, which leaves customers with inconsistent experiences. 

The Salesforce solution: Salesforce helps small businesses break down silos with cloud-based collaboration tools that keep teams connected. With Slack, part of the Salesforce family, you can bring people, information, tools, and conversations together in one place. Teams share customer history, sales opportunities, service cases, and marketing insights across unlimited channels. This setup reduces context switching, centralizes conversations, creates instant visibility, and keeps everyone aligned.

According to the State of Service report, 64% of SMB service professionals say all departments use the same CRM software to work together more effectively. Slack integrates with Salesforce and more than 2,600 apps. This makes it easier to automate workflows, centralize updates, improve decision-making, and free up more time for customer focus.

5. Deliver faster, smarter customer service

The problem: Great customer support builds trust and keeps people coming back. But many small businesses don’t have the right tools to keep up. Support teams end up reacting to issues instead of solving them quickly. Requests come in from email, phone, social media, and chat, but without one place to manage them, the work feels scattered. Teams also spend too much time on repetitive tasks, leaving less energy for solving unique customer problems.

The Salesforce solution: Salesforce gives small businesses one platform to manage customer support across email, phone, social media, and online chat. A shared customer record helps every team member see the full history of interactions, so responses are faster and more personal. Workflows can automate routine tasks, assign cases to the right person, and suggest the next best steps. This means fewer delays, less manual effort, better consistency, and happier customers.

In fact, according to the latest State of Service report, more than two-thirds of small business service teams already use tools like automation, digital transcription, chatbots, and AI to improve service delivery. These tools help shorten response times, resolve cases more efficiently, support employees more effectively, and focus on what matters most — helping customers feel valued.

6. Have the data work for you

The problem: Disconnected teams, scaling volume, and disrupted data make it harder to keep up with customer needs. Every hour spent on repetitive work is an hour not spent strengthening customer relationships. Over time, these inefficiencies build up and leave teams feeling overwhelmed.

The Salesforce solution: Salesforce helps small businesses work smarter by automating time-consuming tasks, centralizing customer data, providing actionable insights, and reducing the need for micromanagement. Teams can set up workflow triggers for follow-ups, automatically capture customer interactions, track key performance metrics in real time, and receive intelligent recommendations for next steps. 

And, according to the latest State of Sales report, businesses that adopt Salesforce see a 34% increase in sales productivity. That means less time spent on manual work, fewer errors to fix, reduced tool switching, and more time engaging customers where it matters most. Can’t beat these numbers.

Boost business performance with Salesforce

You’ve seen how Salesforce helps your business performance, now it’s time to try it yourself. The right technology doesn’t just keep you afloat — it helps you move forward with confidence. Take the next step toward lasting growth by exploring how Salesforce can help your business improve performance and serve your customers better.

Start your journey with the Free or Starter Suite today. Looking for more customization? Explore Pro Suite. Already a Salesforce customer? Activate Foundations to try out Agentforce 360 today.

AI supported the writers and editors who created this article.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)