Let the (Sales)force be with you.

Salesforce, in so many ways, is like Star Wars: You either love it or you hate it.

I, personally, have a love-hate relationship with Salesforce. I love it when the data is clean, reporting is accurate and it is used as ‘one source of the truth’. On the other hand, if the data is dirty it contaminates the entire system and inhibits your ability to pull meaningful information & insights.

I wanted to write this blog as a useful guide to Salesforce. There are so many best practice documents out there that are full of rigorous processes and to be honest it’s stifling! And who has the time to actually sit down and read copious user manuals on Salesforce anyway!? If you do have some spare time on your hands, check out trailhead. It breaks down every aspect into nice learning modules. Another resource I would recommend using is your Salesforce Account manager or customer success manager. For those companies with an enterprise account, reach out to your account manager and schedule a workshop if possible. This will set you off to a great start! Or it will help you to get back up and running if you have inherited what feels like a “dirty” system. For smaller companies that don’t have an account manager, here are some useful tips to get you on your way to Salesforce Master in no time!

Remember, salesforce is designed so that you adopt their best practices. If you customise your system too much to adapt it to your company’s processes, quite frankly, you’re not going to get the desired outcomes.

Top Tip 1: Deal Stages & Close Dates

Accurate deal stages is a quick win for any sales person looking to get more from Salesforce. By having your opportunities in their correct deal stages, you will not only get a realistic view of your pipeline but you will also be able to judge if a deal is likely to close in your specified timeframe. For example, if I have an opportunity in the pipe for next month that is only on 30% close rate, I can bet my bottom dollar that it’s not going to close! Be hard on yourself, don’t put unrealistic dates against your deal, especially if it is in the very early stages of the lifecycle.

Speaking of close dates, this is another quick win for any sales person. Identify your champion in the company and throughout the deal keep yourself in check to ensure you are still on track for that close date you mutually defined.

Isn’t that a bit pushy; to keep asking your champion when the deal is coming in? You may ask…

What I really mean is that at the beginning of your sales engagement, map out a mutual close plan. Hell, even ask your champion to contribute to creating that close plan. Then keep referring back to your close plan. Use that close plan in every meeting as more of a ‘project plan’ than anything and together with your champion ensure that close date is still on track. If the deal slips out for whatever reason, flag it as a risk in Salesforce and update it as you go. Management will know that you have the deal under control.

One last top tip for sales is to be honest with yourself. Don’t keep pushing out your deals month, after month because the decision maker has not yet made a decision. We all do it: I know I have! But you’re only fooling yourself. If you know in your gut that the opportunity is not real, “close/lost” that opp and put it into a nurture campaign. Marketing will keep your lead nice and warm until they are ready to re-engage. As the famous star wars villain Nute Gunray said, “In time, the suffering of your people will persuade you to see our point of view.” If you have built a strong enough business case for your customer, this will have highlighted a real need/pain-point and they will come back. If they come back, well in good; you have a nice blue bird to add to your pipeline.

If you’re a sales manager and want to encourage your team to be religious about their deal stages and close dates, why not try tying an EOY bonus to each sales person’s number. Regular 1-2-1 pipeline reviews are another great way to encourage your team to prepare their opps before the meeting. Don’t be afraid to switch it up, eventually you will figure out what works for you and your team. To quote Yoda -

Top Tip 2: Log your activities

Nobody likes logging their activities. It’s an administration nightmare that I can relate to. As a sales person you are juggling about 100 tasks at once. The last thing you want to do after a long meeting or call is go into Salesforce and log all your notes. But the advantages are tenfold.

For example, if you are new to an account and have the ability to go back on all the conversations with that customer, you are immediately at an advantage and you will be thanking your predecessor that they were so diligent in logging their activities. Similarly, for prospecting accounts, by logging all activities you can show that you were working this account so if a hot lead comes in through the marketing funnel, you can prove that it is rightly yours.

In addition to logging all your communications with your customer, why not customize your interface. Personally, I always include a ‘Status update’ field at the top of my page. This is great to get a snapshot of where the deal is and you can easily include in a report or ‘view’. I also like to include a ‘next step date’. Not only will you not miss that follow-up on an opportunity but it is also a lovely report you can bring into pipeline reviews which help make them as efficient as possible.

Hint: Get the outlook plugin. Trust me, it will make your life so much easier. This logs all email communication with your customer in Salesforce as an activity. This is such a quick win for sales. You should also check out the Salesforce App (Salesforce1) so you can update your activities on the road!

Top Tip 3: Reports & Dashboards

You can pull reports to show you virtually any information that lies within your CRM system. You can pull reports based on your pipeline for a month/quarter/year or pull a report of contacts for a specific sales/marketing campaign. They are extremely useful for ‘call down’s’. ‘Views’ are another great way to group customers with a common set of characteristics into a nice, easy to navigate repository and thus increase your cold calling efficiency.

My advice would be to grab a coffee, sit down and build a simple view or report of contacts, turn off your mails, block out your diary and start working your way down the list, while updating the report as you go. This is a great quick win to get you comfortable with Salesforce and some nice opps in the process! You will build efficiency this way as you will be pitching a specific message to a specific group of people. Time is money but it is also sales greatest asset. Use it wisely and you will reap the rewards.

Dashboards are a great way to visualise data. They are created from reports. Virtually anything that can be pulled into a report, can subsequently be visualised in a dashboard. If you are new to dashboards, start with a simple pipeline dashboard. Picture yourself logging into your CRM account only to be greeted with a gorgeous graphical representation of all your deals in your pipeline or what about a quick view of all your leads for the day or even a dashboard to highlight your gap to target. The dashboard will enable you to quickly see the health of your pipeline and act accordingly. The possibilities are endless when it comes to visualising your number so take the plunge and dive right into a sea of insights.

Top Tip 4: Campaigns

Salesforce is a great tool for ensuring the Marketing and sales lifecycle is working in concert. Marketers; Start with building a list of contacts for your campaign. Then use either Pardot which is a Salesforce product or your own marketing automation tool to create a slick marketing campaign targeted either towards a specific region, territory or segment of people. Schedule the time you want to send out the campaign and from there you have two options. Marketing can either transfer the leads (‘Clicks’) from this campaign directly to the sales representative or qualify those clicks further to gauge the level of interest by inviting them to join a follow-on webinar or to download a whitepaper. If you choose the latter to further qualify, at this point marketing can automatically transfer their MQLs (Marketing Qualified Leads) to sales through Salesforce and Sales can begin working their magic.

Here is a nice visualization of what the lifecycle could look like:

Warm MQLs are the hottest leads a salesperson can contact. Marketing has already done the hard part by identifying and contacting these leads on your behalf. I would suggest that you begin your day by following up on your MQLs every morning with a call first. If they don’t answer then send a mail informing the lead that you called and asking if they would be available for a call to discuss their interest further.

Top Tip 5: Sales Management

My last top tip is for sales management. Salesforce is not only a powerful tool for sales and marketing but also for Sales management. You have the power of understanding your entire sales organization’s performance at a touch of a button!

“Power! Unlimited power!” — Darth Sidious

The insights that come from good, clean data are invaluable to any sales Director or VP. Some sales representatives may view this as micro-managing or not trusting them to do their job correctly, but there are ways to overcome this. Sit down with your team, ask them where they are struggling and inform them that you will build reports and dashboards to gauge their level of weakness. Bring your dashboards to every pipeline review and work together to implement ways your team can improve.

So ladies and gentlemen, there you have it. Salesforce is more than a tool. It is a living, breathing organ, that without, you simply cannot survive. It is the force behind sales and you know what?

“I’m one with the Force. The Force is with me.” — Chirrut Îmwe