Published on
September 7, 2017

How a Nonprofit Uses Salesforce to Grow Sales

A nonprofit has found a clever way to use Salesforce to create leads and grow sales. It's just one of various innovative ways an organization can use Salesforce to be more successful.

Using Salesforce to Track Prospective Members

Salesforce has three purposes for this Organization:

  1. Generate leads in Salesforce with the web-to-lead form.
  2. Track the prospective agency's progress.
  3. Keep the process updated through the use of communities.

The Organization created a website to promote what it does and how a similar agency can do what it offers. Its goal is to expand its local services to a wider geographic area.

When a prospective agency wants to learn how to mimic the Organization, it fills out an application on the website. That web-to-lead form creates a lead in Salesforce. It also alerts the Organization to follow up, which starts the process of determining whether the prospective agency would be a good fit. (Yes, this is much like any sales process.)

To qualify and join the Organization's network, a prospective agency must complete multiple tasks and within a period of time. Salesforce helps the Organization effortlessly track and monitor how the potential new member accomplishes its tasks.

Benefits of Using Communities in Nonprofits

Once a prospect joins the Organization, the new member can ask questions and share information with other members in Salesforce Community Cloud. This is an online portal that allows members and partners to get answers fast. It's like an interactive knowledge base. This feature also enhances the nonprofit organization's customer service.

Since members and partners use communities to ask and get answers to their questions, it can be faster than contacting customer support. Plus, all the questions and answers remain in the community. So members who have the same question can find it when they search the community.

With members finding answers in the community, it relieves some of customer support's workload. The team can spend more time on more challenging problems.

The community also aids with information sharing. Members can share ideas on how to make the most of the organization's resources, products, or services. It compels members to do more, which would grow the organization.

Result

The Organization uses Salesforce to track prospective members' performance or completion of tasks. This helps the Organization personalize its communications with the agency prospect.

After the prospect joins the organization, its team gains access to communities. There, the new member will learn different ways of doing things, find answers, share advice and experience, discover creative solutions, and connect with other members.

The main benefit for this nonprofit has been the ability to quickly decide if an agency meets the established standards for joining their network. It also allows them to monitor the prospective agencies performance on tasks. Then provide a very simple way to keep everyone on the network informed.

This gives the Organization more time to focus on important tasks. Its staff doesn't get bogged down with managing a predictable process. Salesforce has automated almost every step of the process for a prospective agency to join the network. Not only has it simplified the process, but also the approach of adding agencies to the network is more professional.

Implementing Salesforce made it easier for the Organization to track leads, monitor performance, and retain contact information. This is just one of many ways nonprofits use Salesforce to improve efficiency, enhance processes, and save time.

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To discover more possibilities with Salesforce for nonprofits, please contact us at sales@appshark.com.