Increase Sales and Save Money with these Salesforce Tips
If there’s one tool we’d recommend companies leverage while they are in quarantine, it’s Salesforce. Salesforce is 100% in the cloud, extremely reliable, and was built for increasing the productivity of employees. Here are some Salesforce tips you can use to increase productivity, better manage your team virtually, increase sales, and save money.
Increase collaboration and communication with Chatter
Managing tasks, productivity, and workflows in the office is one thing, but how do you do that with a workforce that is entirely remote? Our first Salesforce tip is to use Salesforce Chatter to improve communication and increase collaboration. Chatter is a cross subject feed that lets you quickly reference customers, activities, and each other. Employees can collaborate or simply ask a question by tagging each other, they can comment on projects, and share knowledge, files, and data. Chatter works similar to a Facebook or Twitter feed in that tagging an employee or manager in a comment takes that person directly to what you’re working on so that they can respond with context. You can also use the tool globally as a messaging board.
Is your Sales Team not using Salesforce? Here are some reasons why they might not be adopting the platform.
Adjust your workflows
Speaking of workflows, have you adjusted your team’s workflows to account for working from home? If you had a sales team that would normally spend time on the road, their workflow is going to look a lot different now that they aren’t meeting with clients face to face. Take medical sales reps for example. They have a schedule of hospitals to visit on a regular basis for sales calls. Now that your team is home based, they need a new workflow that optimizes sales for the current situation. Rather than hitting the same big customers face to face and then waiting for the smaller ones to call them, they can take this time to keep in touch with more customers.
One workflow adjustment you might consider making would be to enable automatic prompts to reach out to customers that haven’t been contacted recently. For example, you could set-up a workflow tool that serves up a list of customers who haven’t been talked to in a while, whose subscription may be expiring, or who ordered months ago and probably need to reorder. These types of sales tasks would normally take hours of research to uncover but with Salesforce are automatically served up.
One upgrade you might consider to really leverage the power of Salesforce is Einstein, an AI analytics tool. Einstein can scan your customer list to serve up sales opportunities for people who are likely to buy right now based on past activity rather than relying on sales people to go through their list alphabetically. Einstein scores your customer list automatically for you so that you can easily scan through it for sales opportunities.
Create guides using Path
Path is a Salesforce feature that is baked into Salesforce functionality but that few users really know about or use. It’s easy to set-up, and can be a huge opportunity for your sales team – especially newbies. Path offers a set of guides at the top of the screen that prompt users through the process you set-up – like from fresh lead to a closed deal.
It’s obviously not needed for seasoned professionals who have been on your sales team and are embedded into Salesforce, but if you have changing workflows or have new salespeople on your team, it can be extremely helpful. Think about those salespeople who used to be on the road and had back office support but now need to be in Salesforce. This underrated feature could make a huge difference in the workflows of your people who may not know what to do and could use some guidance.
Audit and consolidate to cut down on costs
Our last Salesforce tip: Now is a great time to audit your Salesforce licenses and features. Salesforce charges you by the user each month. That means, going through to deactivate accounts for employees who have been furloughed will save you some money. You should also contact your Salesforce rep to see about suspending some of your licenses to cut down on costs.
Are there features and add ons you’re not using? This is something we see a lot of as we’re consulting with clients. They bought add on features like Pardot that no one is using but are still paying for. Going through your Salesforce package to cut features that not being used could save you a ton of money.
Additionally, there are applications and services you can cut back on – or cut out completely that may not be necessary. For example, Microsoft 360, data storage outside of Salesforce, and connectivity software like VPNs and phone lines. There are Salesforce features that already cover these needs, like Salesforce dialer can completely replace a phone line.
Leveraging this powerful sales tool can help you manage your team, increase sales, and create better workflows for the changing environment. We hope these Salesforce tips have helped get you started in the right direction. If you feel as though you’re not getting the most out of your Salesforce Org, we can help! We offer a full suite of Salesforce consulting services like Salesforce implementation, Salesforce tune-up, Salesforce app development, and Salesforce customization.