Top Sales Challenges Addressed by Salesforce Sales Cloud

There’s no denying the fact that a sales job is full of challenges. Sales managers are constantly on the lookout for ways to optimize their sales processes so that their teams, which include sales representatives and executives, can sell more and offer a better customer experience at a lower cost. These professionals want better streamlining of processes, more accountability, as well as better visibility into sales.

Here, we will try to understand the top sales challenges a sales manager faces on a regular basis and depict how implementing the right technology solution can help resolve those challenges. Salesforce Sales Cloud is one of the examples of such solutions we’ve considered here since it is widely used by growth-oriented companies. Once the challenges are identified, it is important to adopt a reliable solution that can help tackle those challenges and streamline the sales process.

Identifying and Resolving Sales Manager Challenges with Salesforce Sales Cloud

Challenge -1

Ineffective Coaching and Assessment of Sales Representatives

To build trust and increase sales volume, it is important to assess and train your sales reps. This becomes challenging when you struggle to get access to the relevant information available in the spreadsheet or if you lose the data stored in silos.

Solution

The Salesforce platform has built-in analytics and forecasting capabilities that help facilitate assessment. This allows you to gather information on the performance of your sales reps, analyze their outcomes, and identify underperforming employees. It is easy to assess and coach with Salesforce. By looking at the communication history and account profile of your sales reps, you can identify the inefficient patterns in their work such as weak product presentation, insufficient needs analysis, or delays in communication. This helps you offer feedback to your reps and coach them. Eventually, you can monitor their work and see if they have shown any improvements from before. A Salesforce Certified Sales Cloud consultant helps you leverage the true capabilities of Sales Cloud to improve efficiency and overall sales performance by optimizing the cloud to meet your business needs.

Challenge – 2

Long Sales or Deal Cycles

The long sales cycle is one of the biggest challenges in sales encountered by sales staff. When the customer decision time frame is long, there is uncertainty on the probability of winning the deal and delayed ROI.

Solution

To speed up sales cycles to close more deals, it is important to replace traditional methods of communication with advanced and automated solutions.

Salesforce Sales Cloud solutions allow sales or business development representatives to set up efficient communication with their prospects and achieve shorter sales cycles. By providing access to social network profiles linked with Salesforce accounts, leads, and contacts, Sales Cloud helps sales reps to serve prospects and customers more efficiently. By leveraging social media tools, sales reps can send targeted emails and offer short-term deals/discounts to convince customers to buy.

Sales Cloud also provides ‘Guided Selling’ for improving the productivity of sales by automatically recommending applicable content to sales reps as and when they need it. The professionals receive recommendations based on data like the title and stage of the prospect in the sales process and the industry where the prospect works. This helps close deals faster and you are able to uncover the hidden value of Sales Cloud implementation that goes beyond the basic measurements of income and revenue.

Challenge – 3

Incorrect Hiring and Retention of Sales Representatives

Hiring the right people is important for improving the sales performance of your company. It is tough to recruit top professionals and retain them. Unless you equip these professionals with the right tools and manage their workload and performance efficiently they need to have important information at their fingertips, they may quickly leave your organization for another company. Expert sellers need more than just conventional methods of data storage and collection.

Solution

Salesforce helps with the automation of routine tasks by building a 360-degree customer profile. This helps gain in-depth knowledge about your customers and increase sales while reducing overload on the sales representatives. Salesforce Sales Cloud implementation offers insight into the purchasing habits of customers, past interactions with your brand, and a lot more. In the healthcare sector, Sales Cloud helps with patient acquisition and retention. Routine tasks are automated with the help of features like templates, notifications, and alerts based on public information, thereby helping the sales reps immensely.

Challenge – 4

Lack of Motivation in Sales Team

Lack of motivation of sales reps is one the most common challenges of sales managers. This lack of motivation leads to low performance and when not tackled in a timely manner, results in employees looking for job opportunities elsewhere. Hence, it is important to keep your sales staff motivated.

Solution

Salesforce helps boost the motivation levels of employees with Work.com- a corporate performance management platform for sales reps. The platform can be availed as an add-on license with the Developer, Unlimited, Enterprise, and Professional Edition of Salesforce and is already included in the Performance Edition. Work.com allows sales managers to celebrate the small wins of their employees, share the leaderboard, and offer rewards. It offers a range of features like real rewards and recognition to motivate sales teams. As a sales manager, you can measure performance and motivation within Salesforce.

Challenge – 5

Ineffective Proposals

Your sales representatives’ efforts of creating the right proposals can amount to nothing if there are critical issues in the proposals. Here are some common issues encountered while creating a proposal:

• Lack of collaboration between departments
• Losing the interest of a prospect by spending too much time on proposal drafting
• Messed up formatting owing to hurry

Solution

Salesforce serves as an effective tool for cross-collaboration for sales representatives, financial managers, pre-sales engineers, and marketing and other departments. This makes way for effective cooperation and helps prepare a convincing proposal.

Preparing a proposal with an automated template makes it easy and less time-consuming. Salesforce functionality allows your ‘Opportunity Teams’ to come up with sales proposals within minutes with just a mere click of a button. Also, creating saved templates allows their reuse in the future, saving the time and effort of the sales representatives.

Salesforce sales cloud implementation ensures that your sales staff does not have to worry about the layout, design, and formatting and can completely focus on delivering the right proposal. The functionality of the platform also allows you to include an electronic signature that facilitates document management.

Challenge – 6

Low Productivity of Sales Team

One of the common sales manager challenges is sales teams suffering from low productivity with their sales activities, generating no response or their time being wasted on unqualified prospects. Being a sales manager, there’s more pressure on you from higher authorities to make excellent sales and hence, it is vital for your sales team to be productive.

Solution

Salesforce Timesheet in Mission Control helps sales managers in managing their time and keeping track of day-to-day activities. You can manage both big and small tasks with process consistency. The important features of Mission Control that can help boost productivity include the following:

Resource Scheduler: It presents a calendar-style view of work records to the structure of organizing the tasks of employees.

Worker Hours Profiles: This allows you to view timesheets at a glance for all worker profiles per week.

Kanban Whiteboard: With the help of this feature, you can display all your project tasks with their working status.

User Management Permissions: It allows you to manage permission sets and profiles.

Summary: Summary provides a report for a quick overview of tasks.

Salesforce Mobile App: The app offers your instant access to Salesforce through your mobile.

Challenge – 7

Miscommunication Between the Sales and Marketing Departments

Lack of communication between the marketing and sales departments results in poor performance of the organization. Proper collaboration between colleagues that share a common goal and tackle related issues is important for success.

Solution

Salesforce allows for integration between Sales and Marketing Clouds making way for closed-loop reporting, and an environment where sales and marketing departments can have a complete view of customer interactions. The solution makes the lead alerts and the history of each lead’s activity available to sales, helping sales reps in planning their follow-up strategies and discovering ways to start the conversation. Marketers are able to keep up with the information on call attempts, lead status updates, and revenue numbers of the sales reps. They can also identify the marketing channels that are working so that they can concentrate more on them and boost their conversion rates.

Conclusion

Salesforce Sales Cloud solutions aim to bring the best-in-class solutions to sales managers and reps and has the biggest market share of any Sales CRM out there. Its automated software offers employees the required tools for increasing their efficiency and ultimately boosting business ROI. Salesforce Sales Cloud implementation helps you sell more effectively by eliminating the common sales team challenges encountered while selling. Automation ensures that sales processes become clear, and deals get closed faster.

Case in Focus

Japanese Manufacturer Achieved Shorter Sales Cycle and Maximized Deal Size Through Implementation of Salesforce Sales Cloud and CPQ

The client is one of the largest manufacturers of meteorological technology and precision measuring instruments. They needed to create a unified sales platform for a quick quote-to-cash process for 2000+ products. Damco implemented the Salesforce Sales Cloud and configured a price quote (CPQ) solution to provide accurate pricing faster with any given product configuration scenario.

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