The average sales rep is known to be spending only 10% of their time actively selling, the majority of the other 90% is taken up by administration tasks and travelling. Although travel times mostly cannot be helped, admin doesn’t have to be a problematic part of you sales team’s day. To fix this, and regain some of that much desired selling time back, here are 8 top tips for speeding up your Salesforce administration practices:
Sales Path in Lightning
Use the fully customisable Sales Path at the top of the Lead or Opportunity in Salesforce to separate your sales processes into easily manageable stages. This allows users to see what is required to move to the next stage in a fast and accurate way. Defining progression areas and focusing on one stage at a time will allow users to effectively keep track of where they are up to in the sales process, saving time and eliminating confusion when assessing sales efforts on leads or opportunities.
Use templates
Use templates as much as you can to save a lot of time and energy further down the line. Users are able to create templates for areas such as emails and quotes in Salesforce. Although they take a little time to set up at the start, you’ll be thankful you created them further down the line when your quotes are consistent and easily set up when needed, without having to recreate them each time.
If it isn’t in the system it doesn’t exist
The easiest place to start saving admin time is to ensure everything is in the system. If it is not in the system it doesn’t exist. Not having all the data when you need it will definitely slow things down. Inputting data and keeping a record of actions in Salesforce for everything users have done allows for a full view to speed up referring back to certain points at a later date, as well as ensuring things are not being repeated.
Monitor changes with Setup Audit Trail
Sometimes users try new things to help speed up progress, and they’re not always successful. Thanks to the Setup Audit Trail however, you are able to revert back to older versions when things go wrong. This also allows Admins to monitor what users are doing and see changes in the org that should or shouldn’t have been made.
Ask the community
If you find an issue you can’t work out or something you’re hoping you can do on the platform but not quite sure how, chances are someone else has been in the same position. Asking a community group can help with a range of administration queries and best practices that fellow users have learnt along the way. You are able to post questions and answers in a variety of community groups, some for specific platforms or areas and others for general Q&A, simply request to join the groups that you feel would benefit you most.
Updates
Salesforce releases updates three times a year to ensure the system is constantly improving and becoming more user friendly. When this happens there are always release notes available. It is definitely recommended to read the release documents (or at least some blogs on them as they can be very long) to see if there are new features to speed up processes.
Use the AppExchange
The AppExchange features thousands of Apps created to fill in the gaps in functionality or extend those already there for added personalisation. There may already be an app for whatever you’re trying to do and around half of those featured on the AppExchange are free so it is definitely worth taking a look.
Automate Admin tasks as much as you can
Using automation you can cut down the time it would take you to manually do a number of tasks and have them run automatically in the background instead. A hugely beneficial time save is to use ‘Task Creation’. When a lead is created, you are able to utilise the task creation automation option to automatically create a relevant task to follow up after a certain time period. There are a number of things you can automate to make users lives easier and save time. Approval processes for example, notify users directly to approve or deny any areas that require approval. Lead or Case queues are a great help to allow incoming data or queries to be automatically held in one place before they can be shared or picked up by the most appropriate user.
Ultimately the best time saving option is to have someone else do your admin for you. If you would like to know about our MyAdmin options to do just that, take a look at our support options here. If you liked this blog, have a look at our services and how we support companies like yours. Alternatively if you would like some more Salesforce tips, check out our other blog posts.