5 Strategic Steps for Ensuring Success with Salesforce

Businesses today are challenged to keep pace with the change in customer behavior. The rise of digital, social, search engines, and mobile technologies has resulted in the emergence of a well-informed consumer. With rising customer acquisition costs, businesses need to modify their business model and capabilities in retaining their clients. Fortunately, there are cloud-based technology products like Salesforce CRM (Customer relationship management) dedicated to helping companies manage those critical customer relationships.

Salesforce CRM software(s) have created a lot of buzz in the business world. A CRM is an all-encompassing management tool that manages varied business processes; from marketing, sales, customer support to feedback, vendors, and various data and information. It takes care of the overall business horizon, simplifies things and saves efforts and time of the company.

If you are wondering how to derive more value from an existing investment or looking for the right CRM technology for your business, Salesforce CRM implementation is what you need. This blog will provide insights on the five Salesforce implementation steps (Salesforce CRM best practices) for the proper use of Salesforce and see how following these can lead your business to solid, lasting and profitable customer relationships.

1. Developing a Sales Methodology

Developing a sales methodology is a planned strategic move that provides guidance and action-items that can eventually be used in any sales process. Every organization must develop a unique sales methodology based on its market, vertical, products, and industry position, as there are no one size fits all standard sales methodology.

A good example of sales methodology is SPIN Sales methodology, in which salespeople asks a series of questions to their clients based on: Situation, Problem, Implication, and Need-Payoff. These questions then get integrated into the sales steps. Another common type of sales methodology is Strategic Selling – where the roles assigned to the different players (economic buyer, influencer), and the red flags, get integrated into the process.

2. Sales Process Automation

Even after developing a robust sales methodology, the process can still run into significant trouble and expense due to a number of reasons—inefficient process, inadequate qualification, uncoordinated team etc. However, there are solutions and steps that can iron out the inadequacies. Automating the sales methodology within a CRM software application can be a good first step to begin with. In today’s customer centric organization, CRMs are becoming a standard business practice and the advantages of Sales Process Automation in a CRM is numerous.

3. On-Demand CRM Solution

The on-demand CRM systems provide deeper and more essential CRM capabilities such as –industry-specific functionality, scalability, customization, easy-to-use features and more! It allows businesses to work effectively with partners throughout the sales lifecycle and enables sales representatives to better position opportunity pricing and accurate sales forecasting. Hiring an established partner can help businesses follow necessary steps of Salesforce implementation process, keeping CRM updated and optimized.

4. Solution Selling

Thanks to digitization, today’s buyer is more knowledgeable and well-researched than ever before. As a result, the businesses had to shift the focus on to the customer requirements rather than stressing product benefits and feature, and this has paved the way for Solution Selling.

If Solution Selling is your business motto, then an automated CRM system with a Project Management Tools would enhance your efforts greatly. Moving ahead with Solution Selling and Automated Sales Processes within your organization will have consequences, for instance, uptake issues from inefficient and complicated tools and interfaces. Businesses need to assess the flexibility PM tools offers, and assess the interface for usability within your sales team. The key element behind the PM tools is workflow, and workflow is the platform behind the interface that maps your business process and sales methodologies, into the CRM System. The moment you set up your business process (BP), you integrate all aspects of the sales process for automation.

The idea is to build a framework according to your rules, experience, and best practices which your entire sales team can follow.

5. CRM Metrics

If today’s business mantras are performance, improvement, and accountability, metrics are the means to achieving them. Irrespective of company size or product, measuring customer satisfaction and loyalty, sales performance, including increasing sales revenues and sales effectiveness, and market share are crucial. Salesforce CRM puts many key metrics at your fingertips: Sales Metrics, Marketing Metrics, Service Metrics, etc.

With over a decade of Salesforce experience and a strong pool of Salesforce certified resources, Damco helps organizations increase their agility through increased social interaction with customers, collaborative relationships with partners, and flexible and user-friendly enterprise applications.

Getting started with Salesforce is easy, but keeping up with it requires consistent optimization. This article will help you optimize Salesforce implementations, read here: https://www.damcogroup.com/blogs/3-tactics-to-optimize-your-salesforce-implementations