Living in times of turbulent digital transformation isn’t easy for businesses that are slow at adapting to technology-driven innovation. At the same time, digitally savvy organizations sometimes drop their focus and lose sight of important processes, especially those related to sales.
CRM platforms allow businesses to establish customer-centric automation, simplify collaboration, deliver practical customer interactions, and analyze data and insights. This is useful for digital-first businesses that want to provide integration for all of their organizational necessities.
The Salesforce® Platform is a cloud computing, enterprise platform as a service (PaaS) solution that enables developers to design and build component applications in the cloud before they are deployed. Salesforce® allows software developers to construct, inspect, and fix variable defects quickly.
It delivers the necessary tools and services to effectively automate business processes, provide seamless integration with external applications, and deliver an intuitive and reflexive layout for its users.
How to build a stronger Salesforce sales process
It’s no surprise that the goal of every organization is revenue growth. CRM software such as Salesforce® plays a critical role in the potential generation of said revenue.
Well-defined sales processes should be clear-cut, repeatable, and measurable. Sales ops teams benefit from CRM software that automates processes and facilitates a higher number of deals being generated and closed. However, if processes are outdated or broken, revenue will plummet and key insights won’t offer any valuable information.
Setting up a process In Salesforce
When businesses take the time to invest in and build a sales process in Salesforce, it often revolutionizes their whole business model and significantly impacts return on investment.
Unfortunately, this process is often overlooked because sales ops teams find it difficult to understand a one size fits all approach for the different stages and milestones that are unique to individual businesses.
That being said, here’s how to set up a sales process in Salesforce:
- Clearly illustrate opportunity stages
- Create the necessary fields that your sales process requires
- Add and remove custom features to control and adapt your sales process
- Use structured help and guidance features to help sales ops teams define each stage of the process
Below, we’ve established the top 3 essentials for setting up a successful Salesforce Process.
3 Essentials for launching a Salesforce process
Understand the core object architecture
Salesforce utilizes a standard object architecture that top-performing sales organizations employ to induce leads and generate increased revenue streams. Standard Salesforce processes create records of consumers that have shown a mild interest in products and build records in the lead object.
The lead will then go through a BANT (budget, authority, need & timeline) framework which converts the lead to a potential opportunity by linking a contact to an account.
Businesses that utilize account-based sales and marketing models are still able to grasp leads but care needs to be taken when data points are mapped from the Lead to the account when they are converted. When new accounts are created in the system, they need to be appropriately categorized as Prospect, Customer, Partner, or Type.
Define the different lead stages & a guided selling path
Businesses need to think of leads as a pre-qualification rostrum. Doing so, enables sale ops teams to easily qualify or disqualify a sales lead based on their spending potential. Back engineering techniques are a great way to revert your best sales exchanges back to your first touchpoint.
Ask the following questions:
- Where does this lead come from?
- Why are they interested?
- What steps did you take to qualify them?
- Did the above steps include a product demonstration, meeting, or quote request?
- Did the lead register an early funnel form on your website?
Every organization has distinctive sales processes within the pre-qualification procedure. This means that at this stage, it’s best to keep things simple, streamlined, and think about clear definable categories where prospects easily fit into a Lead funnel.
Define the types of accounts
When leads are successfully converted into contacts, the next stage is to tie them to an account. Accounts act as an umbrella that encompasses all of the contacts within an organization so that they inherit its features. These leads can then be readily stored, accessed, and processed with ease.
Most sales operations teams use numerous types of accounts defined in Salesforce. These include Prospect Accounts, Customer Accounts, Partner Accounts, competitors, media, and more. It’s best to designate the different account types using the benchmark “Type” field, but with values that are customized to reflect your shifting business needs.
If accounts present a Closed Won Opportunity, it’s best to update the “Type” field with the value of the “Customer” or “Active Client” which makes it easier to create a report that provides a definitive breakdown of Customer Accounts vs Non Customer Accounts. This is a key stage that marketing teams should understand fully in order to properly utilize CRM platforms to pull customer segmentation or suppression lists.
Conclusion
Creating a workflow in Salesforce is essential to the ongoing management and measurement of sales ops teams’ operational delivery. Workforce optimization (WFO) and digital workflows help to speed up internal sales processes and guarantee more reliable customer-facing information.
They help to streamline activities across the entire sales team and enable managers to attain higher visibility of team workflows and tasks. Automated Salesforce processes reduce the cost of workforce resources which ultimately saves time, reduces overheads, and allows for quicker response times.
