Small businesses have two priorities in common: a need to reduce costs and the desire to grow faster. Automation and AI present new opportunities to solve these challenges.
If you speak with any small business leaders about their priorities, conversations typically follow two key themes. The first is around finding ways to increase revenue and drive growth. The second is around finding ways to reduce costs and increase efficiency. Almost universally, business leaders are trying to achieve both of these things at the same time.
A solid sales strategy and basic hygiene like effective pipeline management can help, but these are really just essential parts of doing business.
To significantly cut costs and accelerate growth, business leaders need to think about how sales automation and AI can help their small businesses unlock new opportunities to drive efficient growth.
For example, with automation and AI, they can empower every facet of sales—from business development representatives, sales reps, and account executives to sales managers and sales operations—to collectively contribute to achieving cost reduction and growth priorities.
AI empowers everyone to help drive efficient growth
For a small business to succeed, every employee must be working towards the same goals. So how do we empower all employees—across teams and functions—to contribute towards efficient growth?
AI is a game changer in this regard, powering solutions that help every employee work faster and make every customer experience more impactful.
Consider Einstein for Sales. It can generate summaries from meetings, draft email follow ups, and create custom action plans. It can also help with prospect and account research.
The demo below showcases these use cases and more, illustrating how Einstein help reps work smarter and faster to close deals.
MadeComfy accelerates growth with sales automation
MadeComfy is a property management company, specialising in short-term rentals. It also provides technology and services that help real estate agents manage their own short term rental businesses.
Prior to bringing in Salesforce, the company used around 40 disparate systems to run its operations. Employees had to frequently switch between systems, impacting the efficiency of functions like sales and customer support. This simply wasn’t scalable.
When Chief Technology Officer Ben Willis joined MadeComfy, one of his first priorities was to consolidate and bring all data and workflow into either Salesforce or the company’s proprietary system.
“We’ve been able to grow exponentially with the changes we’ve made. Our sales reps spend a lot less time working with different systems and manually looking after things.” – Ben Willis, Chief Technology Officer, MadeComfy
The automation of proposals is a great example of how MadeComfy has increased sales efficiency. Proposals include Tableau visualisations that illustrate the returns owners can expect from working with MadeComfy.
“Using Tableau and our data within Salesforce, we’ve built an interface where reps can go in, put in the address of a property and that automatically generates a proposal they can drop into the opportunity,” said Willis. “The time this has saved our reps is unbelievable.”
MadeComfy drives additional efficiencies with AI
Like many small businesses, MadeComfy is excited about the possibilities presented by AI and has encouraged its teams to experiment.
“We went through a process with our staff where we asked them to actually experiment as much as possible with AI, just to get in there and do whatever they could and come up with ideas.” – Ben Willis, Chief Technology Officer, MadeComfy
One idea from the property performance team has saved time spent determining which property listings need optimisation.
“Rather than coming in each day and working out which property listings needed tweaking or price updates, we can use AI to decide for us. So now a process that would take one hour, takes five minutes. The team just needs to quickly check the AI response and make sure it’s doing the right thing,” said Willis.
MadeComfy has also used Salesforce in many other ways to drive efficiency with automation and with AI. One such example is improving guest communications using Einstein Bots. The AI-powered chatbot uses the information already in Salesforce to automatically respond to a large share of the 15,000 questions they receive monthly.
“We’ve surpassed our initial goal with Einstein Bots and are now resolving an average of 41% of chat requests daily using AI. That represents a successful start for us when it comes to AI and frees up our team to help guests with their most important needs,” said Willis.
Small changes lay groundwork for big results
Willis suggested to small business owners setting out on similar journeys to start small.
“You don’t have to implement everything in one go. It’s actually a terrible idea,” said Willis. “I say if you start with sales and marketing, it sets up your data for the rest of your processes. You can then follow the flow of data and implement everything else along the way.”
Learn more about how you can sell faster and drive productivity with Sales AI.
Salesforce is a proud Principal Sponsor at CommBank SmallBiz Week; register for our Workshops today to hear more from Trailblazers like MadeComfy.
