In January, we had the pleasure of participating in a LinkedIn Live session with Tammy Jones about how CRM data can drive your sales strategy. Salesforce is a powerful CRM tool that can help your business manage marketing, customer service, and sales. Today, we'll focus specifically on how optimizing your Salesforce configuration to your sales process can help you leverage CRM data to drive your sales strategy.
To make good sales decisions, you need good data, and the best way to generate good data is by accurately configuring Salesforce to match your sales process. However, before you can do that, you need to know what your sales process is.
Map it out
To get the most out of Salesforce, it's crucial to have a well-defined sales process tailored to your business needs. By mapping out your sales process, you can gain a better understanding of your sales cycle and identify areas where Salesforce can be optimized to improve efficiency and increase revenue.
Mapping your sales process helps you:
- Identify key sales stages
- Streamline sales processes
- Standardize sales processes
Every industry and company has its unique sales process, so there is no one-size-fits-all approach. You can take yourself through your customer's or client's sales experience to ensure you don't miss any critical steps.
This map also shows areas where the sales process can be streamlined for efficiency. Redundant steps not only slow down the sales process, but they can also decrease sales rep adoption of the process due to frustration.
Once the sales process is streamlined, you can standardize it across your organization. By creating a consistent sales process, you can ensure all leads are treated in a consistent manner, regardless of which sales rep is assigned to them. This also creates a shared understanding of what different terms mean, ensuring consistent data reporting across all reps.
Configure with Confidence
If you're already using Salesforce, audit your current Salesforce configuration to see if it aligns with your sales process and make adjustments accordingly. If you're new to Salesforce, start off by mapping your configuration to your specific sales process.
Salesforce enables you to input your sales process, create paths to highlight certain fields and guidance for each step, add industry-specific automations, reminders, and more, so your reps don't need to remember which specific steps to follow. You can also customize which data is required, increasing data integrity.
Less is More
Because Salesforce has many capabilities, it can be tempting to use as many of them as possible and track every piece of data imaginable. However, this can overwhelm your team and lead to resistance to using the new configuration at all. Your organization likely does not need to use all the features available to effectively capture CRM data.
Ask yourself these questions:
- What information do we need to track?
- Why do we track that specific information?
- What is the minimum number of field requirements that we can use to track this needed information?
Following this tip can be challenging. If your Salesforce is a mess or if you haven't implemented a CRM before, it can be intimidating to start thinking about the bare minimum. But don't let that stop you. Decide to track only necessary data moving forward.
Be Adaptable
Remember that your configuration doesn't need to be perfect from day one, and your processes may change as you optimize your configuration. Your configuration should be evaluated yearly to adjust as your business needs change and your organization grows. Staying up to date with Salesforce maintenance is necessary to keep your configuration optimized.
Get help from the Professionals
Working with a Salesforce consultant can be ideal for optimizing your Salesforce configuration for several reasons. They:
- Provide expertise and insider knowledge
- Save you time
- Can provide training and support for your organization
Overall, working with a Salesforce consultant can help ensure that your Salesforce configuration is optimized to meet your business needs and provide a positive return on investment.
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!