What is Salesforce?
Salesforce is the world’s number one Customer Relationship Management platform – known as CRM for short. Based on a cloud format, Salesforce applications are applicable for sales, services, marketing and more. The application is really simple to use, and doesn’t require IT experts to set up or manage the software – you simply need to log in, and you’re able to connect customers in a whole new way!
Salesforce is the perfect solution to understanding your customer’s needs, solve problems and identify opportunities in your chosen marketplace, by managing information of consumer interactions with your company online.
Why would a business need Salesforce?
With over 150,000 companies using Salesforce, the ease of this platform makes it easy to manage and analyse all of your customer activity in one place. You’re able to constantly monitor everything, from sales leads to account support, to channel marketing and website analytics.
Salesforce helps you to produce amazing customer service for all your consumers, by monitoring:
– Service: Easily manageable customer service support across every marketing channel
– Marketing: Craft and deliver personalised messages across any traffic channel
– Commerce: Unify shopping experiences with all tools on one platform
– Quip: Create, edit, discuss and organise your team’s work within the platform
– Platform: Connect, build and integrate apps within the cloud
Implementing Salesforce
With so many great advantages to using Salesforce for your business, here are some of our top tips to follow to implement Salesforce in your business. (We always recommend getting in touch with a Salesforce Consultant before any implementation.)
Step One: Re-Design Your “Lead to Opportunity” Process Successfully
Successful Salesforce implementation leads businesses to re-design their processes of achieving leads, with the most important part of that being how leads are generated into potential opportunities. However, during this process, businesses tend to redesign their “lead to opportunity” processes in complicated manners, resulting in confusion, therefore the project fails.
To achieve Salesforce project success, there are a few key areas with you need to pay attention to when you are re-designing those crucial steps:
– Don’t transfer potential leads to salespeople too early – salespeople tend to quickly begin to ignore what is perceived as a poor quality lead.
– Convert each potential Lead to an Account > Contact > Opportunity process before transferring a customer to a salesperson – these are crucial steps to create accurate campaign metrics.
– Optimise separate pipeline reports and dashboard charts for early-stage opportunities.
– Educate your salespeople and managers on what is acceptable to disqualify early stage opportunities – don’t waste time on leads that will prove empty.
– Create feedback systems from every lead that is transferred to sales – then you can review this feedback regularly to improve your lead generation and qualification processes.
An effective re-design of this “lead to opportunity” process puts your salesforce projects at risks – however, by following our key steps, you can ensure that you don’t put your project in liability.
Step Two: Use Our Four-Step Approach to User Adoption
When users do not fully engage with your system, no matter what happens, your Salesforce project will be unsuccessful. As much as you train and inform your team, you cannot guarantee Salesforce project success, as user adoption doesn’t always come down to your internal team.
Applying these four steps will help secure full user adoption and a successful Salesforce team:
– Creating an advantage to using the system will allow easier processes: for example, those selling your products need to be able to use the system with ease which makes their job easier, rather than the other way around.
– Create a disadvantage when your team aren’t using the system – the system you have in place should aid salespeople to do their jobs, and it should be hard for your team to work without it. Your approach should be integral to your sales team.
– Measure your user adoption rates – you can’t manage how your system is working, without measuring the results. Collect metrics that measure user adoption within your business.
– Proactively manage user adoption – make it clear what’s expected of your product/service to customers, and use the metrics you’ve collected to manage and adapt your processes.
Step Three: Train Your Managers To Coach
A positive manager helps team members to grow, rather than point out a team member’s mistakes, errors and performance. A manager that leads success explains how to do things better, teaches techniques that lead to improvements and recognises that mistakes happen and these mistakes represent ample learning opportunities.
Be picky about the people you have to head your sales team – a Salesforce project’s success depends upon not just managers, but the team as a whole. Therefore, ensuing sales managers are helping your team to improve and manage expectations in a positive and encouraging way, you’re guaranteed better results.
Step Four: Set Up Workflow Rules to Automate Your Tasks
Salesforce helps you increase the efficiency and organisation of your internal processes – therefore using workflows within Salesforce is integral to help you automatically perform certain procedures and processes.
You can set email alerts when a salesperson reaches certain goals, you can set messages to alert your HR department when a salesperson submits a response to a report or request, and you can even set notifications to alert managers to follow up for feedback from a customer within a certain number of days after a sale has closed.
Creating workflows allows you to establish business tasks in an easy manner that are usually mundane and straightforward. Therefore, you have more time to work on tasks which will allow you to drive larger sales.
Step Five: Connect other Apps to Salesforce
Salesforce becomes a more powerful tool when you’re leveraging additional applications and integration with other programs. By connecting Salesforce to another platform, you can enjoy additional functionalities, as well as share data from one system to another.
You can connect Salesforce to software programs like Oracle and SAP, customer communication tools like MailChimp, or marketing automation platforms such as HubSpot or Marketo. When you connect these platforms you can increase the speed and efficiency of certain tasks and business functions, allowing you to do more with fewer programs, as all your information is stored in one place.
When you add in these connections, make sure you follow data-entry procedures you have in place, to ensure your information remains clean and usable.
At Purus, we offer Salesforce Development, support and more for a range of marketing and business industries. For more information on Salesforce tips and implementation, or you’re looking to discuss a new project, please get in touch with our team.