February 07, 2017 | Andrew Lawlor

2017 marks Aptaria’s 10th anniversary as a Salesforce partner. That milestone shows our team’s dependability, breadth of experience, and flexibility. We’ve kept up with a fast-moving industry while consistently applying the latest in Salesforce technology to benefit our clients.

In the past decade, Salesforce rapidly evolved and added new products to serve customers. We’re proud to say that Aptaria did the same.

Why is Salesforce the world’s #1 customer relations management (CRM) software? Because the company is passionately committed to meeting its customers’ needs—like we are. The CRM giant prospered by listening to businesses and organizations, then designing products to solve their problems.

Salesforce started out with tools for managing sales data, pricing, and quotes. Over time, the company expanded into more “clouds.” To summarize how Salesforce products fit together in the sales cycle:

• Marketing Cloud nurtures, scores, and prioritizes leads.
• Sales Cloud closes leads and handles billing.
• Service Cloud supports customers and keeps them happy.
• Community Cloud offers a forum for customers, partners, and staff to communicate and stay engaged.
• Analytics Cloud links the other clouds through a shared database with dashboards and alerts.

The synergy of these clouds gives you a 360-degree view of prospects over their life cycle. You can track customers’ data in one place and review that information on a single screen.

As Salesforce grew with its customers’ needs, Aptaria mastered Salesforce’s growing suite of products in order to help our clients achieve their goals.

Indeed, we have often paralleled Salesforce’s evolution through our long-term associations with clients. A company that comes to us for Sales Cloud might then decide that it needs a Salesforce Community for customers. And then a mobile app to coordinate its sales reps. And then a better tool for cultivating prospects… and so on!

So, what was Aptaria’s Salesforce evolution over the past 10 years? Let’s take a look.

Sales Cloud: The Beginning

Salesforce’s original cloud product still forms the backbone of Aptaria’s work. Of our 100+ Salesforce projects, nearly all of them involved Sales Cloud. We’ve implemented Sales Cloud for large corporations like CitiBank and small companies like Amaryllis Event and Floral Design.

Throughout our 10 years of Salesforce experience, the versatility of Sales Cloud has never failed to impress us. Not only does Sales Cloud give our clients visibility into their sales pipelines, but it also integrates with apps and add-ons for a variety of uses.

Service Cloud: Delivering World-Class Customer Support

Once businesses gained customers through Salesforce, they turned to the CRM system to assist in serving those customers. With Service Cloud, Salesforce enables companies to address users’ questions and concerns while reducing human error and cutting costs.

We’ve implemented Service Cloud for software companies like SecTek and Amber Road, as well as nonprofits like NCQA and National Association of Corporate Directors.

Community Cloud: Connecting and Motivating Users

Once you’ve converted customers or signed up volunteers, how do you keep them engaged? How do you interact with your audience and encourage users to interact with each other?

Community Cloud provides an efficient answer to these challenging questions. We build Salesforce Customer Communities, enabling users to log in through secure portals, have discussions, access information, and work together. We can also implement Partner Communities, allowing companies to collaborate with their vendors or other associates, as well as customers.

For Concerned Veterans for America, we set up a branded community to organize grassroots campaigning efforts. Our game-like features are sparking friendly competition and spurring veterans to take action.

Marketing Cloud: Understanding and Shaping Customer Journeys

Salesforce launched Marketing Cloud to help businesses collect information about potential customers—down to individual users—and tailor persuasive messaging for them.

We typically use Marketing Cloud tools in conjunction with Sales Cloud. For major hair salon brand Ratner Companies, we recently integrated a day-to-day operations system with ambitious email marketing campaigns. Now Ratner employees can cultivate their leads more effectively and track leads through the sales cycle without reentering data.

Einstein and Commerce Cloud: The Future of Salesforce?

After Dreamforce, Salesforce’s annual conference, our team always returns to the office abuzz with exciting ideas.

In October 2016, we learned about the revolutionary possibilities of Salesforce Einstein, which will incorporate artificial intelligence to yield CRM insights. For example, Einstein could automatically analyze your sales data, score leads for you, and report which leads have a higher likelihood of closing.

Commerce Cloud promises to draw on Einstein’s predictive intelligence to deliver a fluid customer experience across all interactions. Tailored insights from Salesforce’s algorithms will advise you and your employees on how to guide individual customers through the buying cycle.

Our team is currently experimenting with Einstein’s and Commerce Cloud’s machine learning capabilities. We will start to apply these clouds for our customers’ benefit in the near future.

App Cloud: Building Apps with the Power of the Salesforce Platform

Shortly before Aptaria became a Salesforce partner, the burgeoning CRM leader launched App Cloud and the AppExchange, its business app store.

Today, with over 100,000 customers, the AppExchange is an advantageous marketplace for app developers and entrepreneurs. The app store also lets Salesforce users choose add-ons and customize their cloud implementation with ease.

After earning certification as an App Innovation Partner (formerly known as an ISV Partner), we built dozens of Salesforce apps. Our clients include WealthEngine, KZO Innovations, InfoFree, and CQRollcall. In every case, we combined our expertise with our clients’ vision to create products that pass Salesforce’s security review and offer convenient solutions.

After a decade of Salesforce success, we look forward to the next 10 years. We’re ready to explore and implement the innovations we know we can expect from the world’s #1 CRM.