We are often asked what is the point of Salesforce is when we all have email….well can email tell you what your sales people are actually doing?
Salesforce, really?
If you’re responsible for the sales performance of your company, the question of what your salespeople are actually doing might well keep you up at night. After all, salespeople are naturally blessed with the gift of the gab, which means they can tell you one thing, whilst potentially doing another!
Of course, you know that they are all performance driven and naturally motivated to achieve! However, without the latest figures to hand, reliably and on an ‘on demand’ basis, it’s difficult to have confidence in the team’s position at any one time.
How Salesforce helps
In our experience when our clients move to Salesforce they suddenly have the power to track, analyse and measure the most detailed of performance analytics. The system puts a wealth of power at their fingertips, ranging from daily snapshots of sales performance, through to annual summaries. Salesforce has surveyed over 4,000 of its customers and found that the system helped them to slash reporting times by 52pc on average.
With the ability to always see where you stand, based on indisputable data, you have the ability to spot trends, flag up concern areas, manage opportunities and threats, and make proactive decisions for your business.
Some of the benefit highlights are:
Being able to track which of your salespeople are and are not logging meetings – and making the team accountable to input this information as part of their roles. With the mobile app versions, there is no excuse for your sales team to not capture this key data, even whilst on the road.
The ability to create custom reports and dashboards that track the most important metrics for you – from appointments made through to pipeline progress and conversions.
Less time spent in physical meetings – by entering data as they work, there is less need for your salesforce to give verbal and interim updates. Everything is trackable in the system.
Ultimately, the ability to see which of your salespeople are performing – and which aren’t. Most sales directors and managers simply don’t have the ability to assess in an objective way whether their sales people are performing in the role until several quarters have gone – at which point, the damage is done.
With real-time activity reporting, issues can be flagged up quickly. Where meetings aren’t happening, deals aren’t progressing and conversions aren’t happening, you have the opportunity to step in and assess what needs to happen – whether that’s specific coaching, individual training or, possibly, the need for a different individual altogether.
How to help your salespeople
Of course, good management is a two-way street, so to help your sales people to adopt the Salesforce technology, you need to incentivise them. Use the carrot and stick approach where necessary to set the expectation that all sales data is to be entered directly into Salesforce and not into individual and local spreadsheets or databases. Make sure your team have quality smartphones and tablets so that they can update records on the go. Keep data expectations simple and tight – most CEOs only track 5-10 metrics across an entire company. Work with your sales people to identify where reports and dashboards could be better customised for collective needs, and continue to communicate and engage with your team regularly – celebrating successes and wins as well as identifying areas for development.
Ultimately, Salesforce gives you the tools that you need to be the best performance and people manager that you can be – adding value to the business and positioning yourself ever more credibly as an informed, decisive leader.
About Silver Softworks Limited
Silver Softworks is one of the fastest growing Salesforce partners in the UK. We are known for our deep experience in delivering transformative solutions built on the Salesforce platform all while supporting innovators and change agents within our customer base.
Our deliberate choice to focus our operations and efforts on the Emerging Small Business (ESB) and Small/Medium Business (SMB) sectors continues to drive our passion for innovating across the Salesforce platform and finding solutions for companies much like our own. Our team have many years’ business and Salesforce experience working for some of the UK’s most recognisable brand names, see what they say here. We have delivered some of the UK’s most complex solutions on the Salesforce platform to date. See how we can help in your industry today.