Salesforce is the go-to company for enterprise data management. They offer various solutions to meet your business needs, including CRM, customer service software, marketing automation tools, and more. 

Suppose you’re looking to increase efficiency in your organization or want to reach customers better than ever before with personalized messaging. In that case, Salesforce has something that can help you do just that! 

Salesforce solves many issues for their customers by offering them the most innovative technology on the market today. With this tech, they can provide companies worldwide with an integrated suite of applications built on one platform, so it’s easy for everyone involved in running a business, from sales reps, marketers, and executives alike.

Adopting Salesforce Sales Cloud to solve sales manager challenges

The job in sales is one of the most stressful out there. ꟷ True. 

There is nothing to be done about it. ꟷ False. In this article, we’ll look into the challenges a sales manager faces daily and reveal how implementing Salesforce can relieve the burden on them. 

Identifying and admitting the challenges hindering the efforts of sales leaders is only half the battle a sales manager needs to win. Once the problematic issues have been detected, it is crucial to adopt an appropriate solution to tackle them and streamline the sales process effectively.

Poor hiring and retaining the right sales reps

If you strive to achieve better sales performance in your company, you need to hire the right people. 

Recruiting top professionals can be hard, and retaining them can be harder since talented employees are demanding. 

They may quickly leave for another company unless you provide them with the efficient tools they need to have valuable information at their fingertips. 

Your smart sellers deserve something better than conventional methods of data collection and storage.

Automation of routine tasks

The Salesforce functionality allows creating a 360-degree customer profile to gain deep knowledge about your customers and boost sales, reducing sales reps’ overload at the same time. 

The Salesforce platform provides an insight into the customers’ purchasing habits, previous interactions, and more.

Additionally, sales reps will value automation of routine tasks: alerts, templates, notifications based on public info.

For example, Salesforce CPQ allows creating, managing, and sending quotes. 

Quote templates allow customizing the way your sales reps quote your company’s products and services. 

Sales reps can add products to their quotes, adjust their quantities, configuration, and pricing, select standard or customized quote templates from their quote records, generate quote PDFs, and email them to their customers. 

Task notifications in Lightning Experience enable sales reps to remember the things on their to-do lists. 

Sales reps can benefit from email alerts that are automatically generated and sent to designated recipients. 

Email alerts available in Lightning Experience and Salesforce Classic can be associated with workflow rules, approval processes, or entitlement processes.

Ineffective assessment of sales reps and coaching

Keeping your employees in the dark regarding their performance and ignoring the importance of employee training won’t contribute to building trust with you, nor to increasing sales volume. 

Therefore, assessing and coaching your sales reps is a must. They don’t know that you may be struggling to find the necessary information in spreadsheets or that you might have lost the data stored in silos.

The analytics and forecasting capabilities built into the Salesforce platform facilitate assessment – they enable you to efficiently gather the information about your sales reps’ performance, monitor and analyze their outcomes, as well as identify underperforming employees.

The procedure for assessing and coaching with Salesforce becomes more effective. 

Looking at the account profile and communication history enables sales managers to identify inefficient patterns in sales rep’s work, e.g., delays in communication, a weak product presentation, or insufficient needs analysis. 

Then, the sales manager gives feedback to a sales rep and coaches what to do (outside of Salesforce). And the final step is to monitor the sales rep’s work to see if wrong patterns are replaced with new ones.

Low motivation

Lack of sales reps’ motivation is one of the biggest challenges for sales managers. 

It primarily results in low performance and, if not tackled, can prompt your employees to look for work elsewhere. 

In this regard, making sure your sales staff stays motivated is instrumental and worth the manager’s efforts.

Boosting your sales reps’ motivation with Work.com

Work.com is a corporate performance management platform available as an add-on license for Professional Edition, Enterprise Edition, Unlimited Edition, or Developer Edition and is included in Performance Edition. 

Using Work.com, sales managers can celebrate small wins of their employees and top performers, share the leaderboard and give rewards in a gamified manner. 

The platform offers various features to help your sales teams, including recognition tied to real rewards. In addition, now managers can guide motivation and performance directly from within Salesforce. 

Sales reps can see their colleagues’ goals, feedback, and recognition inside Chatter or recognize great work within a Sales Cloud opportunity record.

Lengthy customer decision time frames

Facing long sales cycles can be a nightmare for all sales staff, meaning delayed return on investment and uncertainty about the possibility of actually winning the deal. 

Therefore, energizing long sales cycles to close more deals within a shorter time frame is an understandable and laudable desire of sales managers. However, reliance on traditional communication management methods does not work in this case, and the stake should be placed on more advanced automated solutions.

Effective communication with prospects using social networks

Salesforce Sales Cloud enables sales reps to establish effective communication with their prospects to achieve shorter sales cycles. 

With access to social network profiles associated with Salesforce accounts, contacts, and leads, sales reps can serve customers and prospects more efficiently. 

For example, in Salesforce Classic, sales reps can access Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube to get valuable insights about their prospects and understand their needs better.

Leveraging these social media tools enables sales reps to send targeted emails, offer short-term discounts or deals to push the customers into buying.

Smart automatic recommendations with Guided Selling

Guided Selling available in Salesforce Sales Cloud helps boost sales productivity by automatically recommending relevant content to sales reps when they need it. 

Recommendations based on the data like the prospect’s title, stage in the sales process, and industry where they work assist sales reps throughout the process. 

For example, during the conversation with a prospect, Guided Selling provides a sales rep with internal sales aids and outward-facing collateral that help forward the sales conversation at a certain sales stage.

Inefficient proposals

All your sales reps’ efforts to create the right proposal can be brought to nothing due to certain critical issues. 

So let’s look into the most common ones and see what solutions can be proposed to get rid of them.

Coming up with a proposal can be hindered by a lack of collaboration between departments.

The solution: Salesforce can serve as an efficient cross-collaboration tool for sales reps, presales engineers, financial managers, marketing, and other departments enabling efficient cooperation to prepare an effective proposal.

Sales reps risk losing their prospect’s interest by spending too much time on drafting a proposal.

The solution: Generating a proposal with an automated template is a lot easier ꟷ the Salesforce functionality enables your opportunity teams to come up with sales proposals not in hours but minutes, at the click of a button. In addition, saving the created templates enables their reuse in the future, which saves your sales reps’ time and effort.

Messing up formatting is so easy, especially when in a hurry.

The solution: Using Salesforce, your sales staff doesn’t need to bother with the layout, formatting, and design and can fully concentrate on delivering the right proposal. 

The platform functionality also allows including an electronic signature, thus facilitating your document management.

Disjointed sales processes

Disjointed sales processes result from the fact that every sales team member applies different methods to handle sales processes in the absence of unified software for streamlining sales management. Sooner or later, such an ill-organized approach may cause a complete mishmash in the company. Salesforce features intended to bring consistency to the sales process include Progress Bar, Opportunities, Quotes, Products, and Price Books.

Designing the sales process with a Progress Bar

Referring to the famous quote of Dr. W. Edwards Deming, a quality management thinker: If you can’t describe what you’re doing as a process, you don’t know what you’re doing. In this regard, without a clear map of the sales process, it can be difficult for a sales manager to organize it and make their sales reps act according to it. 

The Progress Bar available in Salesforce Sales Cloud enables a sales manager to design the process consistently and effectively communicate it to the people involved. As a result, every sales rep gets an understanding and a full picture of the sales process. 

For a sales rep, the Progress Bar serves as a permanent reminder about what process is taking place and when approximately it will be finished. 

Seeing the whole process in front of their eyes motivates sales reps to nudge customers to a further stage.

Bringing transparency to the sales process with Salesforce Opportunity records

Managing details about deals, the accounts they’re for, and the number of potential sales stored in silos can be quite a challenge for sales managers. 

Opportunity records in Salesforce allow tracking such information making the entire sales process more transparent for a sales manager. 

This tool makes it possible to look into each stage, such as needs analysis, proposal creation, deals closed won/lost, in detail providing information on entrance and exit criteria and what specialists are involved at that stage. Meanwhile, tailoring opportunity stages to the specifics of the company’s sales process can contribute to its pipeline transparency.

Using opportunities, sales reps can share or move them through the sales process and manage the products associated with the opportunities. 

Furthermore, sales managers can create opportunity teams in Salesforce to allow sales reps and technical people to work together on a deal and assign specific roles and tasks to each of them. This contributes to effective collaboration, which is one of the hardest things to achieve.

Bringing visibility to products and their prices

Having an organized price book bringing visibility to products with different prices depending on the market or a particular customer segment (for example, based on a geographical factor) is one of the major concerns for a sales manager; money is a sensitive issue. 

In Salesforce, sales managers can appreciate having the capability to effectively and conveniently track the products and services the company sells, using Products and Price Books. 

After a sales manager has created a product, sales reps can add it to their quotes, opportunities, and orders. 

Setting up Products and Price Books gives sales managers an insight into what customers purchase what types of products, which allows using this info for targeted marketing. 

In addition, spotting what sales reps sell what product the best allows sales managers to ensure that their sales reps are assigned to the most suitable prospects.

Organizing quotes creation

It is often the case that sales reps have to send their prospects numerous quotes and refer back to those quotes at some point in the sales process. In this regard, the inability of sales reps to record and track various product and price combinations given to their prospects disarranges the sales process. 

Salesforce Quotes allow sales reps to create a quote from an opportunity and its products. In contrast, every opportunity can have multiple associated quotes, which can be synced with the opportunity. Syncing a quote and an opportunity ensures that the information remains relevant and up-to-date and avoids double-counting opportunities, streamlining the sales process.

The communication gap between sales and marketing

Marketing and sales being two different worlds existing in parallel with each other is the status quo. The lack of communication between these two important departments ultimately leads to poor performance since the effective collaboration between colleagues united by the common goal and tackling related issues is vital for success.

In this situation, the integration between Sales and Marketing Clouds can be the right solution as it allows for closed-loop reporting. In this environment, both marketing and sales departments have a full view of each customer interaction. 

This solution makes the history of each lead’s activity on the website and leads alerts available to sales, which helps sales reps plan their follow-up strategies and find hooks to start the first conversation. 

In turn, marketers can keep up with the information on sales reps’ call attempts, updates on lead status, revenue numbers, and identify winning marketing channels to focus on the channels that generate the best conversion metrics.

Business Challenges Solved With Salesforce Consulting Services

Handling client’s or customer’s information

The biggest strength of a company or business is customer and client knowledge and insights. However, transferring the complete data to a new system can also be challenging while coping with such sensitive and confidential information. 

So, that’s where the initial obstacle came into play when upgrading to Salesforce. Even so, this will ultimately turn into your most significant benefit once you move to a new model. 

With only a few keystrokes, all the essential customer/client information could be found with Salesforce consulting services. 

You will see all right there and some, beginning from contact details to a chance bound to that lead. This way, the most significant drawback turned out to be the main strength.

Personalization

There are specific priorities, goals, and tactics for each organization or business. A salesforce consulting service recognizes this business dimension and provides personalized assistance to satisfy the organization’s criteria for creating different Salesforce apps. 

The company’s standards. To generate a high ground over rivals in the customer service area, it is essential to customize the Salesforce framework according to business needs. A trained Salesforce consultant will help you accomplish the same!

Gaining valuable insights on time

You have the customers’ 360-degree data with a robust Salesforce app – the consumer quest history, preferred unique selling proposition, etc. 

Through the integrated information available on your Salesforce system, salesforce consulting services will make you understand consumer preferences across multiple channels and platforms. 

It is convenient for businesses to offer unparalleled cross-channel customer service through sales, marketing, distribution, and other platforms by using Salesforce consulting services.

Security of client’s or customer’s data

You could move all your vital information into Salesforce without any hiccups with the aid of professional salesforce developers. 

Loaded with several state-of-the-art safety features, Salesforce will ensure that information security would be the last aspect you ought to think about. 

That being said, there are many substantial gains; companies and businesses that have switched to Salesforce consulting services have reported a 94 percent increase in their data protection, as per one of the researchers. Such statistics suggest something, all of it. Isn’t it?

Finding suitable options

Small and medium-sized firms, companies, and businesses are also concerned about the spectrum of choices or variants of salesforce services. 

In a scenario, it is strongly recommended for businesses to use salesforce consulting services. 

About why? The answer is clear. 

Salesforce consulting services assess the company’s business priorities, requirements, or goals efficiently and recommend ideal salesforce solutions to operate your business effectively and successfully.

Planning

A deeply comprehensive planning process takes a fair bit of time to be planned. However, you shouldn’t need to worry if you have professional managers who can handle CRM deployments. 

But if not, you would need guidance from Salesforce experts who can immediately come up with a great action plan. These plans can indeed be tailored further as per the requirements of each particular customer.

Effective team cooperation and collaboration

Without even a good structure in place, the team and partnership management is still tedious. With salesforce advisory services furthermore, team coordination has become as simple as a whirlwind. You could connect in real-time with everyone and anyone in the company, disseminate ideas, get feedback and do whatever is required to collaborate seamlessly. 

With salesforce app development, what was once an initial obstacle for you could probably turn out to be something that you could use? 

A group that operates smoothly and is sure to bring excellent, productive outcomes to the room. This could also carry company development along as well.

Moving on, here are a few explanations why, finally, one can employ Salesforce consulting services for effective salesforce implementation and improved ROI.

• Quick Setup – Establishing up and maintaining Salesforce becomes simple if achieved with the aid of a consultant. Specialists understand precisely where to make adjustments, how and when to amend the configurations, and how to customize safety settings to make the CRM genuinely safe and efficient.
• Increases customer experience – Leading salesforce development allows businesses to improve their total customer experience by rapidly offering appropriate automation resources to solve customer’s issues. It is indeed easier to deliver customized services to clients as businesses take advantage of Salesforce consulting services.
• Effective risk reduction during Salesforce implementation – A professional Salesforce consulting company has the expertise, market experience, and technological expertise to assist firms and businesses in seamless salesforce implementation and manage any uncertainty associated with data transition from conventional IT models to Cloud-based Salesforce software.
• Faster and easier adoption – A Salesforce consulting company guarantees a hassle-free switch from a conventional platform to a Salesforce CRM tool. When businesses want to implement the Salesforce CRM framework into their business environment, it is best for salesforce consultants to establish a unique consumer adoption plan. A strategy involves immersive user training, appropriate salesforce admin services to the user, and skilled employees’ incentives to instantly accelerate salesforce acceptance within the business.

Unorganized Database

The first and foremost way to help your business is by keeping all your data organized on a single platform, avoiding silos. Get a 360-degree view of how to leverage your CRM for Sales, Marketing, and Support.

Address Book Update

A CRM will automatically store and retrieve all your contacts whenever you need them.

Event Scheduling

Got an event pending for long? Simply schedule it from within your CRM. Then, let your clients and employees know about it by triggering automatic follow-ups.

Client Communication

One vital thing in this age of fierce competition is cultivating relationships with clients, and it has to be achieved through effective client communication. Retaining an existing client is 6-7 times less expensive than securing a new one. With an effective CRM, you can call, message, or email a client without having to switch between windows.

For example, Salesforce has been making waves with its highly robust solution for customer service as companies can leverage the Salesforce Customer Portal features to up their customer service.

To-Do Task List

You are no more missing important tasks! Unfortunately, your email’s inbox is not an efficient place for you to keep track of your tasks. A CRM will show you a list and a detailed view of all the tasks that you need to undertake and will even keep on reminding you to meet your deadlines.

Activity Documentation

No one wants to undertake manual documentation anymore. Not only is it lazy and monotonous, but also highly counterproductive. 

Your workforce could be spending the same time selling or servicing clients. A CRM will set your priorities straight.

Data Management

A CRM will back your data constantly and most often on the cloud so that you may access it anytime. 

Previously, your business would have taken a great hit if your hard drives or desktop-based software got corrupted. All your data could have vanished, and with that, to some extent, your business too.

Marketing

Using a CRM, you can personalize customer experiences by providing a consistent message across all marketing touchpoints. How is this done? Using a CRM with Marketing Automation, you can create a single view of each customer with information from all customer touchpoints.

You can leverage CRM integration with different marketing automation software to keep track of critical consumer metrics and run personalized marketing campaigns. One of the best options is utilizing CRM and Marketo integration to stay ahead of your competitors.

Content Sharing

Content Marketing is the only form of marketing that is left, says Seth Godin. When using a third-party platform to publish your content, you can keep track of what content helped close the deal and at what time. Later, you can also use that information to refine your content marketing substantially.

Email Campaign Marketing

Email Marketing still has the highest ROI as a marketing tool for B2B efforts. It returns around $40 for each dollar spent, as stated by Smallbiztrends.

Marketing and Sales on the Same Page

No rivalry is as evident in the business world as the one between the Marketing and Sales departments. Whenever a business faces decline, the teams are at each other’s throats, and the blame game starts. This continues to happen, but only in companies that are not using a CRM. When the whole Sales funnel is in front of you and all the client interactions recorded, it’s the slackers that get caught.

Sales on the Go

With the advent of Cloud CRM, salespeople can deal with clients using their mobile phones and tablets. If they’re going to a meeting, they have all the up-to-date information on their devices and can see in real-time what actions they need to take to close potential opportunities.

Forecasting Sales

Using the data gathered from all the marketing touchpoints, a CRM consolidates it and shows you the sales trends of the previous months, and can also predict what your company’s future holds w.r.t. sales.

Reporting

Using a CRM, you can be sure that you get real-time reports from your data. Now, you would have easy access to answers to questions like: What did your sales reps do last week? What are the top sales opportunities for the month? Are we going to hit our sales target this quarter? Yes, you can show it all in the integrated analytics and custom-built reports in the CRM.

Define Workflows

You can describe to your CRM the steps you usually take to carry out a certain task. Then it becomes an intelligent manager and asks you to take those steps whenever a similar situation arises. This feature makes sure that nothing is missed.

Work from Home

Cloud-based CRMs have made everybody’s lives easier. When at home, you can easily check that last update on the deal you’ve been working so hard on. Just log into your CRM, and you’re all set. A few years back in time, you might have had to go to your office and log into your ERP system to be able to access that data.

Social Insights

The customers of every business are today present on social media. Although companies have lost the power to start conversations about their brands, they can now participate in their brand’s ongoing conversations. 

When combined with a CRM, social analytics allow businesses to analyze what the consumers are demanding and how the company can ensure a good brand presence.

Define the Customer Journey

Know the exact steps you need to take to close the deal.

Every customer goes through several stages before buying a product/service. Without a CRM, a salesperson has to analyze which stage an opportunity lies in manually. A CRM, on the other hand, will automatically define a plan of action and aid the salesperson by notifying the exact steps he can take to close the deal.

Marketing Automation

There are several reasons to integrate Marketing Automation with your CRM. 

Marketing Automation platforms like Act-on, Hubspot, Marketo, etc., let your business market on multiple channels, including social media, email, and your website.

 Also, they allow you to automate repetitive tasks and nurture leads with highly personalized content. This is Hubspot’s Marketing Automation methodology.

Lead Nurturing

An intelligent CRM can spot upcoming leads that have the potential to become customers. 

Whether your leads come from email marketing, business cards, or website, CRM lets you nurture them with targeted content and provides you with the exact steps you need to take to nurture the leads. 

For example, a CRM will let you know when to send a quote or call the lead or simply send a personalized email offering a discount on your product/service. 

Not just this, you can also integrate CRM with LinkedIn Sales Navigator to improve lead capturing, leverage mutual connections, and skyrocket your sales.

Customer Service

Customers today want to be responded to within a maximum of 2 hours after complaining. Therefore, responding to all requests manually becomes next to impossible. 

CRM, on the other hand, is a great tool for customer service. 

It lets customer service departments manage all the complaints within the CRM and trigger emails whenever there is an update on a customer’s complaint or service request. 

This reduces the response time, and, as a result, your business can achieve high client retention. Additionally, you can also leverage CRM integration with cloud communication platforms to remove any bottlenecks in communications.

Insights from Your Data

Following the millennium, the greatest challenge for companies has been to extract and gather vast customer data. 

Now that all data is stored in their systems, the biggest challenge has become seeing useful customer insights from that data. 

To do this, CRM vendors are now on a journey to make CRMs more and more intelligent. 

Therefore, the future of Big Data insights lies within CRMs.

Analyze Sales Pipeline

Visualize to get better!

It is very important to visualize your Sales Funnel to know how you can turn leads, opportunities, or contacts into profitable sales. 

A CRM will guide you towards the same stage where you have to put in more effort to close deals. 

For example, if many prospects are stuck at the lead stage, you can target them with nurturing content to move them further down the funnel towards closing the deal.

Analyze Business Sources

Tracking a few customers and their sources is easy, but, on a larger scale, it gets very difficult to keep track of the sources from which you get the most business. 

On a strategic level, you need to get insights into the channel which gets you the most customers. It can be email marketing, a retail distribution channel, or even social media. With CRM, these insights are visible to you, and you can take strategic decisions to invest in some channels more than others.

Defining Your Scope

When you have a 360-degree view of your clients and how they contribute to your business, you can identify the market segments, which are your cash cows. 

You can cross-sell and up-sell to them or invest in the content specifically targeted to the desired segment.

Collaboration

The alignment between different departments at your business is essential for the overall augmented performance of your organization. CRM lets everyone perform and record their tasks on a single platform: sales, marketing, or support. And this helps combine their efforts to give clients a great experience.

Saves Time

Time is money. Why not save it? Gone are the days of repetitive data entry or double work. 

Since every task within the CRM is automated to some extent, it lets you save a lot of time by performing tasks on its own. For example, imagine the time spent on meetings, reporting, and customer information entry saved. 

You and your workforce can now spend your time on much more productive tasks.

Workforce Efficiency

There are high performers, and then there are slackers in every organization. 

A CRM is a tool that motivates every individual in the business organization to work to get the task done with half the amount of effort that a person would have without a CRM. 

Tracking

Every company needs to treat its CRM as the only repository for tasks carried out by its team. If anyone has taken a step, it is revealed in the CRM and helps the higher management know what is being done. 

On the employees’ part, it is helpful because they don’t have to report each activity constantly and, on the management’s part, it becomes visible what is being done and how.

Let’s You Worry Less

Nothing is forgotten; nothing gets left out! At the very least, a CRM tailored to your exact needs and processes can let you worry less about your business and focus more on your business. There is a reason that Gartner forecasts an ever-increasing trend of investment in the CRM sphere as more and more businesses want to adopt it and give their customers an incredible experience.

That’s a Wrap!

I have covered some of the most common problems that businesses face and how CRM helps solve them. In summary, there is much more to the CRM than meets the eye. Although a CRM is, in simple terms, a mere customer database, however, it can get more done than what most people know. How many of the problems explored above does your business face? How do you use your CRM? Is your CRM capable of performing any additional functions? Let me know here!

Martin Gessner

Martin Gessner is the Founder of Focus on Force.

He has spent over 10 years working in various Salesforce roles including business analyst, project manager, consultant and solutions architect. Along the way he has earned twelve certifications, published "The Salesforce Career Playbook", and helps Salesforce professionals learn more about Salesforce, develop their career and prepare for certifications.