The business landscape today is more competitive than ever. Finding prospects, closing deals, establishing strong relationships, and growing a company—all of it comes with its unique challenges. 

But the right CRM tool, combined with powerful automation, can help you stay ahead of the game. This is because roughly 80% of customer interactions happen over the phone, email, or chat. And companies using CRM see a whopping 45% increase in sales!

Salesforce, a CRM stalwart for nearly two decades now, is a household name among Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success teams. It is a cloud-based CRM tool that comes with seemingly limitless features to help businesses succeed by lowering the cost and effort involved in customer service. It dominates the CRM software market with a 23.8% share and its revenue reached about $31.35 billion in 2023.

In this blog, we take a deep dive into how you can multiply the effectiveness of Salesforce by using Salesforce automation and pairing it with a text expander. 

Why Salesforce is considered the best CRM tool

Before we talk about supercharging Salesforce, aren’t you just a tiny bit curious why Salesforce is considered the best CRM tool?

A survey of 10,500+ Salesforce customers revealed them witnessing “38% faster decision-making, a 25% increase in revenue, and a 35% jump in customer satisfaction.” 

Here are the top 3 reasons teams prefer Salesforce over other CRM tools:

1. Wide-range of cloud-based solutions 

Salesforce pioneered cloud-based CRM solutions, freeing small and medium businesses from the excessive expenses of on-premise hardware installation or IT support. Maintenance also takes place automatically. The result? Less downtime and lower overall costs.

2. Powerful customization and scalability

As if it weren’t enough for teams to build a variety of customized record types to match their needs and tailor each record type further with custom fields and layouts, Salesforce also offers customization at the development level. This means you can adapt the code to build a bespoke solution for your company. Salesforce users can also access the business app store for Salesforce—AppExchange—and integrate with third-party apps, e-commerce, and ERP systems etc. for higher efficiency. 

3. High degree of security and trustworthiness

Like any enterprise solution worth its salt, Salesforce has an impeccable reputation for ensuring data security. Salesforce Admins can secure individual records to grant custom access to only those employees who need it. Salesforce further keeps the platform up-to-date by rolling out upgrades, fixes, new features, and innovative applications of the latest technologies automatically, three times a year for free. 

Salesforce takes the tedious work of customer relationship management, from lead generation to nurturing and pipeline monitoring, and even analytics, off your plate.

With its set of robust automation tools, Salesforce lets you focus on growing your business minus the hassles of busywork.

What is Salesforce automation?

Salesforce has a host of automation features to help you save time and resources. There is a dedicated automation tool for each use-case, based on the nature and complexity of the tasks to be automated.

Salesforce automation streamlines different types of business processes including guided visual experiences such as product onboarding etc., behind-the-scenes automation, and workflow approval automation. The best part is that anyone can use them; they’re all no-code point-and-click tools.

How and when to use which Salesforce automation tools 

Here’s a quick lowdown on which Salesforce automation tools to use when.

1. Workflow Rules: To automate internal if/then business processes.
2. Process Builder: To automate parts of your standard, repetitive processes including task assignment, email delivery, record updation etc.
3. Flow Builder: Combines the capabilities of Workflow Rules and Process Builder in one tool. 
4. Flow Orchestration: To automate complex workflows that require inputs from multiple users across various departments (and possible, locations)
5. Einstein Next Best Action: Create and show recommended offers and actions for users (such as free add-ons, discounts etc.) that are tailored to meet the right needs at the right time.

Apart from entire processes, you can also automate individual parts in complex workflows using external automation apps with Salesforce. One of these is repetitive typing. And you can reduce the time and effort spent on it with the help of a text expansion app.

How to boost Salesforce automation with a text expander

Entering the same records dozens of times a day in multiple places, replying to the same FAQs over and over, greeting each customer with the same pleasantries, making similar notes for each account post calls/conversations…it can get pretty annoying pretty fast. And don’t get me started on how much time it wastes—both for employees as well as customers. 

Enter text expanders. A text expander is a productivity app that lets you replace frequently used words, phrases, sentences, and even paragraphs with custom shortcuts. When the shortcut is typed, the text expander automatically substitutes it with the full text, saving you hundreds of additional keystrokes and productive minutes. The combination of the shortcut and the full-length text is called a snippet.

So the next time you wish to set up a meeting with a prospective client, all you need to do is type the shortcut o/meet and it will expand to:

‍

Salesforce already comes with the ‘Quick Text’ tool that allows you to insert pre-written text into emails, chats, or even forms, tasks, records, and knowledge base articles.

But it has some striking limitations including 

• restricted availability in selected versions of Salesforce
• restricted support for only up to 2000 quick text and folder records
• limit of 4000 characters for each quick text (or snippet)

This is why pairing Salesforce with a third-party text expander like OSlash makes a lot of (business) sense!

How can you use a text expander in Salesforce

The number of use-cases for a text expander in Salesforce is limited only by your imagination. 

Here is a list of the top 5 tasks you can automate with a text expander in Salesforce.

1. Entering prospect titles in records

Let’s start with the most basic, most repetitive, most annoying thing you’ve to type into your records every time an MQL (marketing qualified lead) makes its way to your Salesforce records. The job titles of said leads. Chief Technological Officer, Director of Marketing, Senior Product Manager, VP of Engineering and so on. 

What if you could replace them with shortcuts such as o/cto, o/di, o/srpm, and o/vp-eng respectively? 

They seem like inconsequential changes but if you consider the average typing speed of 40 words per minute and end up typing them 10 times a day each, you might end up saving 80-90 minutes every week just with these four snippets. Not a bad deal, huh?

Recommended reading: How to type less using text expansion apps

2. Adding the right topics and tags effortlessly

Salesforce has two great features to let you organize your records in a fast and easy way. ​​Topics let you organize Salesforce records around common themes. Tags allow you to describe and organize them in a personalized way.

For example, your Topics could be Customer Data, Sales Platform, Internal Communications, Customer Experience etc. while your tags under Sales could describe the status of an account (new vs. existing), size of the account (small, medium, or enterprise), whether the lead is cold or warm etc. 

Topics and Tags will be most useful to everyone on your team when they are consistent across users and departments. The system will be a mess if one executive tags an account as ‘existing’ and another sticks with ‘repeat’. 

A text expander such as OSlash will ensure not just consistency but also accuracy and speed in adding tags and topics. 

Think o/data, o/pltfrm, o/comms, o/exp for invoking the topics readily for each of your records, for example, so that there is no confusion no matter who’s entering the record.

3. Templating and streamlining customer notes

You can also use a text expander to create a quick fill-in template with placeholders for adding and streamlining customer notes after every conversation.

The template could look something like this:

Name of the prospect: [Insert name]
Job title: [Insert title]
Company name: [Insert company name]
Company size: [Custom dropdown]
Length of the meeting: [ ] hours [ ] minutes
Purpose of the meeting: [Custom dropdown]
Stage of the funnel: [Custom dropdown]
Success/failure: [Success or Failure]
Follow-up required: [Yes or No]

And you could summon it into Salesforce just by typing o/notes, just the way our Sales team does. (They’ve a thing for brevity, though 😅)

Recommended reading: How to use a text expander to simplify sales communication and CRM success 

4. Creating snippets for qualifying questions

Sealing the deal may be the main objective of a sales conversation. But it’s crucial that we don’t end up selling ice to an eskimo. Qualifying questions help do exactly that. While evaluating prospects on calls, jotting down the answers to the following questions can come in handy. 

• Whether the problem statement applies to them
• If they’ve the budget for the product
• Who the decision maker is going to be
• Expected timeline for closing the deal

Use a snippet like o/ques to insert your set of questions into your CRM notes instantly. 

5. Preparing and inserting canned responses

As we mentioned, Salesfirce uses built-in Quick Text to let you send canned responses to customers via email and chat. But it suffers from many shortcomings. 

You can use a full-blown text expander to overcome them. 

Text expanders can help you create a library of preset replies that can be quickly accessed using simple, memorable shortcuts such as o/hi, o/refund, o/feedback, o/apology etc. depending on the use case. A lot of text expanders (including OSlash) let you search and find the right shortcuts seamlessly using hotkeys or input-widgets. You needn’t memorize abbreviations; your customers needn’t wait endlessly for redressals.   

Worried about personalization? With dynamic snippets you don’t have to. Create templates in a jiffy by leaving placeholders for variable inputs such as customer names and you’re good to go!

Recommended reading: How to boost productivity by using text expanders 

Get the most out of Salesforce with the fastest text expander out there—OSlash

If you wish to use Salesforce to its full potential, you can’t just limit yourself to its built-in automation tools. Try coupling it with a text expander like OSlash that keeps you and your entire team on the same page with a shared library of snippets including email templates, quick replies, and canned responses among others. 

It’s the cheat-code for improving output, especially across your customer-centric teams (such as Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success) while reducing their effort massively. 

Why waste time on repetitive typing when you can get your very own writing assistant to do it for you, 30x faster? Salesforce automation is incomplete without a powerful text expander like OSlash. 

Download OSlash text expander for your browser or Mac for free. And enjoy a taste of the lightning fast way to work. You’ll never want to go back, we promise.