In January, we were part of a Linkedin Live with Tammy Jones about Ways CRM Data Can Drive Your Sales Strategy. Salesforce is a powerful CRM that can handle many aspects of your business, such as marketing, customer service, and sales. In this post, we'll focus on how your Salesforce CRM data can drive your sales strategy.
Not sure where to start?
Salesforce is highly customizable, so it will look different for each organization. However, there are common threads that can be utilized to ensure data integrity that meets your sales team's needs. If you want your CRM data to drive your sales strategy, prioritize these tips:
- Optimize your configuration to fit YOUR sales process
- Use your dashboards and reports wisely
- Get your sales team on board
- Be patient
- Bring in the professionals
Optimize your configuration to fit YOUR sales process
Optimizing your configuration is crucial for obtaining good CRM data. You need accurate data to make informed sales decisions. Salesforce provides a generic sales process, but it may not be the best fit for your organization. Various factors, such as different types of clients, can influence how you configure your Salesforce Sales Process.
When optimizing your Salesforce Configuration:
- Map out your current sales process. This will give on what steps to capture for good data
- Configure your Salesforce once everyone agrees on what the sales process should look like and why
- Remember less is more. Use only necessary features. Too many features will slow your team down
Use your dashboards and reports wisely
You have your Salesforce configured and have started getting all of this useful data. How can you use it to its fullest potential?
Dashboards and reports are valuable assets with good CRM data, informing business decisions for individual representatives up to senior-level leaders. However, these reports are only as useful as the data used to generate them. Your team needs to understand how this data helps both the organization and individual sales representatives. Training your team ensures data is thoroughly and correctly collected.
Get your sales team on board
A well-configured Salesforce Sales Process and comprehensive reports are only useful if your employees use Salesforce. Employees may not buy into this new implementation for several reasons, such as not understanding the benefits, confusion with the configuration, or thinking it creates more work. Training employees and making it easy for them to adopt the new configuration will help. They should understand why this system is necessary and how it can help them personally with their sales.
Be Patient
Salespeople may not have an affinity for administrative tasks, so getting them started on a new system may take time. Additionally, sales cycles can take months to close, so you may not immediately see the desired results after implementation. Set incremental benchmarks that will become more measurable and feed into monthly, quarterly, and annual goals. If you're still not seeing the results you were hoping for, use the CRM data to evaluate how to reconfigure your sales strategy.
Bring in the professionals
All businesses start somewhere, and having a dedicated Salesforce resource is an excellent way to ensure your system is optimized, and your team uses it to the best of their ability. A Salesforce partner can help you co-strategize and fill in any gaps to make Salesforce work for you. Spend less time keeping Salesforce up-to-date and more time reviewing your data and making strategic decisions.
CRM data is vital for building a solid foundation for your sales strategy, based on reliable information rather than guesswork. In the future parts of this blog series, we'll discuss more ways that CRM data can drive your sales strategy.
Find out what CRM Growth Strategy can do for you.
CRM Growth Strategy offers boutique consulting services to help you get the most out of Salesforce. Learn more about combining our services as a Salesforce Partner with in-house staff to best help your growing business.
CRM Growth Strategy may be a good fit as your Salesforce implementation partner (and beyond) if you are a growing organization with up to 100 team members who will be working with Salesforce. If you need guidance on getting ready for Salesforce, or need help updating your current Salesforce systems, schedule a discovery call with us and find out how we can assist!