Salesforce for Sales: Get the Most out of your Sales Cloud Implementation with this Best Practices Guide
Debashis is a Senior Principal Success Manager at Salesforce. Over the last 18 years, he has worked with a multitude of enterprise customers to take them through their digital transformation journeys. He is passionate about delivering business value from Salesforce CRM products.
Introduction
Salesforce offers end-to-end sales process transformation for organisations to thrive in a competitive business environment. Salesforce Sales Cloud integrates rich features and products that enable sales reps to win more deals and build deeper customer relationships through personalised, meaningful interactions.
But very often, organisations struggle to get the most out of their sales tools and sales reps. We have compiled a guide to help you optimise your Salesforce for Sales, and amp up performance of your sales teams. Besides best practices for implementation of Salesforce Sales Cloud, this guide also describes use cases to increase the impact of Salesforce for Sales.
In the following chapters, learn how you, as a sales leader, can get more leads, close deals faster, identify new opportunities to monetise and build efficiency, and track sales performance.
Chapter 1. Automate Business Processes
Automating business processes with Salesforce offers the following benefits:
Easy to learn and use: Since it is low-code, Salesforce allows even non-technical sales workforce to set up automated workflows with just a few clicks.
No external hires: There is no need to hire consultants, developers, or other technical expertise to configure the Salesforce platform – it is ready-to-use straight out of the box!
Self-help modules: Salesforce Trailhead, our free online learning platform, offers engaging bite-sized modules and sessions with Salesforce experts. Your sales teams can learn with hands-on projects available on Trailhead and fast-track their career growth.
Framework for automating business processes
Analyse: The first, most crucial step is to analyse your existing business processes and identify areas that can be substituted or augmented via automation tools and technologies.
Here’s how you can do this:
- Identify the most critical processes that have tremendous potential to help realise your business objective.
- Involve your sales team to understand intended outcomes of the identified processes. This will also help you identify any gaps and inefficiencies that exist in the current process.
- Document the current process in detail (as a process map, or on a spreadsheet or Word document). Capture all the steps involved, along with relationships and dependencies. Your documentation needs to be granular enough for you to identify who does what at each stage of the sales process.
- Now, identify those steps in the process that can be automated.
Hint: look for steps that involve repetitive or time-consuming data entry, or heavy manual intervention.
Redesign: When you identify automation opportunities after analysing sales processes, you arrive at the next step – redesigning the processes with automation built in.
At this stage, you will map the steps identified as candidates for automation to the specific automation features in Sales Cloud (Check out the complete list of Sales Cloud features.) Be sure to identify what benefits you will derive by automating each step. It will help prioritise as well as measure and communicate later.
For instance, you capture leads via the ‘Contact Us’ page on your website by generating an email message. You then manually enter this lead into your CRM. But if you replace the manual entry with the automated Web-to-Lead feature of Sales Cloud, which automatically consolidates all incoming leads, you can easily monitor how much time your sales reps end up saving.
Optimise: Automated the required processes? Check! Now, how can you have a plan in place to ensure that your solution continuously evolves and stays up to date? Everything you build on Salesforce is an ongoing journey, and automation projects are no exception.
Salesforce offers businesses flexibility and scalability by allowing you to continuously recalibrate, improve, and optimise your processes. Some key practices to optimise the automation initiative include:
For a detailed understanding on how to automate your business processes using Salesforce, check out our resource library.
Salesforce Resources
Questions? We’ll put you on the right path.
