Businesses frequently buy Salesforce as a cure-all for all their sales woes, but when it fails to provide results quickly, executives and managers are left with an enterprise-level solution without enterprise outcomes and catastrophically low Salesforce adoption.
If a company plans to budget for Salesforce, individuals in charge of sales management and operations must devise a strategy for using Salesforce as their CRM in a timely and cost-effective manner.
The following five adoption hacks are ideas that firms have utilized to successfully integrate the CRM and increase Salesforce adoption revenues while also lowering costs.
Employees can be cross-trained across the entire sales, and customer care environment or a hackathon can be used to get a complete company enthusiastic about Salesforce's capabilities.
As you can see, the following five ideas only scratch the surface of how your company might save money while enhancing salespeople's effectiveness by utilizing innovative training and comprehensive software.
The Top 5 Salesforce Adoption Cheat Sheets
1. Host a Hackathon for Salesforce
What is a hackathon, exactly?
It's a strategy devised by software companies to spend a few days familiarizing everyone on the team with the program and figuring out how to get the most out of it. Setting development objectives is critical for developers. A hackathon provides a secure environment for sales reps to experiment with software while also bringing together team members from various areas such as inside sales, customer support, and outside sales.
A hackathon's most basic concept is that a large group of individuals gather over a short amount of time to play with software and figure out how to make the most of it. See Tips for Organizing a Hackathon for a basic tutorial on how to organize your own hackathon. A hackathon can be utilized by management as a one-time tool to familiarize employees with the Salesforce interface and customization options. You may also utilize hackathons to re-engage employees on how to use Salesforce to produce the greatest results for clients on a regular basis (annually or quarterly).
2. Identify Your Selling Methodology
How much does it cost to acquire a new customer? How many encounters does it take for a customer to make his or her first purchase? How many interactions do they have before they have to reorder? What is the lifetime value of a customer? The answers to these questions are crucial in creating a map of the entire sales process.
Any new CRM will be tough to use if you do not have the lead lifecycle and customer interaction cycle planned out. If you've ever managed a legacy sales team, you know that the worst thing for sales is a new rep who hasn't created her own sales template or hasn't had the expertise to do so.
Then plan how that lead will be contacted when they move closer to a transaction and if they exhibit a clear lack of involvement. This map will aid in the planning of Salesforce tracking, specialized actions of various people and departments, and Salesforce integrations.
Take the time to walk through the sales map with customer support representatives, internal sales representatives, and outside sales representatives. If you want to ensure adequate service and Salesforce connectors, any organization that deals with client needs to have their input into the sales map. This map can highlight which activities need to be recorded and can greatly assist your Salesforce vendor or internal development team in developing a system that will deliver the best return on investment.
3. Become Familiar with the Entire Sales Environment
Many personnel will become fixated on particular aspects of the sales process, such as closing transactions or generating new leads.
You'll need to track activities and manage personnel to ensure that specified tasks are completed as needed in order to maintain a smooth-running Salesforce system. Even if he is an outside salesperson whose primary function is prospecting, a salesperson must be able to enter leads into Salesforce, close them, and track client engagements for upsells.
Finally, managers should don the garb of a consumer or have people dress up as potential clients on a frequent basis to uncover bottlenecks in the sales process. When leads sign up for a demo, do they receive follow-up emails? Do your salespeople have a clear presentation of the service/product that your company provides? Training is not a one-time event; you must evaluate your sales process and people and retrain them as needed to use the software and sales map.
4. Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) Phone System
It's difficult to keep track of inbound sales calls; keeping track of outbound sales calls is even more challenging. Integrating calling databases with Salesforce allows salespeople to keep better track of interactions with leads and customers, as well as enter data more quickly, resulting in more Salesforce adoption.
5. Relationship Intelligence Analytics
The relationships that analytics help facilitate are just as vital as the analytics themselves. All the data in the world won't help if salespeople and management can't see how the interactions and data are contributing to better customer relationships. Although Salesforce data is broad and robust, many firms find that adding an additional analytics product that facilitates communication and connection building improves ROI dramatically.
Relationship analytics gives a 360-degree perspective of client interactions, combining email and Salesforce to provide clear, actionable insights for each customer account. With a focus on relationships, an analytics platform will allow staff to edit customer records from within Chrome, allowing them to do customer research and easily update Salesforce data without having to switch programs.
In Summation
Salesforce implementation with a Salesforce solutions provider is fine, but Salesforce adoption is where the true value is found. Following the implementation, you must consider how end-users will adapt and use Salesforce in a way that is beneficial to your company.
Salesforce adoption refers to the process of making your org intuitive, simple to use, and relevant to the organization and its users. And this is where the value of a Salesforce implementation consultant comes in. It's all about maximizing your Salesforce investment while increasing the value of your company.
We trust that this article will prove informative. Until next time, happy bizops.
