Used by more than 150,000 companies globally, Salesforce is a staple solution for many organizations looking for a clearer, more holistic understanding of their customers. As one of the world’s leading customer relationship platforms (CRM), Salesforce helps “your marketing, sales, commerce, service and IT teams work as one from anywhere.”
This can feel a bit overwhelming to take in as a solution, as Salesforce has become such an all-encompassing platform, capable of delivering value to numerous different teams within your organization. While Salesforce works to make its set up and use as simple as possible, even the most experienced teams may simply not have the time or resources to ensure that Salesforce is working as well as it can for their specific business needs.
To help your organization experience the maximum benefits of Salesforce, we’ll look at a few of the top Salesforce optimization steps you can take today for your sales cloud.Customize Your Sales PipelineYour sales team needs a clear picture of all the sales deals and opportunities within the pipeline to be truly successful. Salesforce provides a great basis for this with opportunity pipeline management that allows your sales team to view a complete timeline of customer activity, create quotes efficiently, and deliver real-time updates.
However, functionality and reporting may not necessarily meet all the unique needs of your organization. To go beyond and provide the most accurate picture of your organization’s sales pipeline, here are some important considerations for Salesforce optimization:
- Ensuring accuracy – Your reports and understanding of your sales pipeline are only as accurate as the data that’s added to it. Enable views that allow you to ensure sales reps are keeping their activities updated.
- Tracking trends – Having a full view of your sales pipeline is critical but recognizing the intricacies and connected points may not be as intuitive. Proper reporting and dashboards will allow your team to easily recognize trends and derive important insights that define your sales pipeline.
- Pinpointing problems – An accurate view of your sales pipeline will not only reveal the areas of growth but also the areas that need improvement, allowing your business to investigate and expedite remediation.
Create More Accurate Sales Forecasts
Sales forecasts can be critical to not just the sales process but the success and growth of your entire organization. Creating accurate sales forecasts means your business has a clearer picture of how much investment needs to be placed into other areas of your business, such as marketing, product development, and more.
With Salesforce, there are optimization opportunities to ensure you’re providing the most accurate sales forecasts. For instance, pinpointing the amount of time expected for a sales rep to close a sale, whether that is within weeks, months, quarters, or years. Creating an accurate timeline helps all your teams plan accordingly and know when to target their particular efforts.
Also important to the accuracy of your forecasts is understanding how your forecasting stacks up to industry expectations and benchmarks. If you’re able to see that deals are taking much longer to close than the industry standard, this will allow you to dive deeper into what is or isn’t working.Set Sales Reps Up For SuccessSales professionals only spend 34 percent of their time actually selling. A lot of their time is spent entering their data, trying to understand patterns and trends, and doing other manual tasks.
It is important that your entire sales team understands how a tool such as Salesforce can support their process and how they can properly adapt to help them spend less time trying to figure things out and have more time to focus on making sales and going above and beyond for customers.
To ramp up your sales team with Salesforce adoption, there are several key optimization opportunities to consider:
- Look for any opportunities to automate manual processes that may be taking away valuable time from your sales team
- Ensure your sales team has access to essential client information so they can better understand customers and move deals forward
- Take into careful consideration the business processes and goals both your sales team and your organization have in place so that you can make sure your sales team is getting what they need from your solution
With so many opportunities for growth, don’t feel like you need to tackle your Salesforce instance on your own. Lean on the experienced Salesforce experts at Affirma to help evaluate your organization’s specific pain points and needs and how Salesforce can be better utilized to address these areas.
