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Leading competitive sales teams is a highly challenging and competitive task. However, the reassuring fact is for the users of Salesforce is that it has many functionalities which make the administration of sales-related activities much easier and optimal. This article will discuss some key tips for the sales team leads and managers to optimize Salesforce usage and team output. This is not a comprehensive list, but it gives some actionable insights to the sales leaders to plan and practice.
Tips for optimum Salesforce use
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Assign ownership metrics
There are many benefits of implanting Salesforce; however, the top features of Salesforce are related to tracking the performance metrics and readjusting the practices. Unfortunately, the sales team leaders do not fully leverage the power of data to drive future strategies and repeat sales.
However, the sales team leader can ensure that their team is optimizing their sales data by using the Salesforce dashboards for running the meetings. When sales teams use the basic spreadsheets to explore the metrics to manage the team, they may end up managing with subjective or compromised data. The most successful sales teams effectively leverage the Salesforce reporting for building custom reporting through insightful dashboards populated with data that each salesperson enters into it.
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Building a proper culture
Fine-tuning the culture of sales teams will help improve the performance of the team drastically. Salesforce can set the right ground to create a proper culture based on metrics and bring in accountability. This approach will surely aim at and achieve more. Looking at the current structure, we can see it is very astounding that many of the sales teams are still not held accountable for anything they do.
When accountability is lacking, the team may be lacing in culture too, and the desire to perform in line with a sales plan will be void. This will end up in failure to tap whatever opportunities are coming in their way. However, suppose there is an accountability-centric culture with a sales plan which frequently gets reviewed on Salesforce. In that case, it can show a dramatic improvement in the performance of the salespeople as they use Salesforce for their jobs and perform against the sales plans. Consultants like Flosum will also help to plan it in a better way to reap more results.
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Nurturing and developing the teams more easily
It may take a certain amount of time and effort for every salesperson to start generating real revenue. By utilizing the Salesforce tools for training development, team leaders can effectively expedite the ramp-up time for the new team members. This will increase their speed and conversion time to profitability. Along with this, it will also help empower the sales managers to track the progress of each team member. The management team also can track the progress of individual sales pipelines using Salesforce and effectively plan the coaching efforts for team members. Salesforce also acts as a platform to share important information with the team members, which makes it easier for each participant to jumpstart their activity in their new role.
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Integration of Marketing and Sales
Salesforce also helps organizations integrate marketing and sales and put the power of marketing into the hands of the sales team. This can be made possible by integrating Salesforce Engage to Salesforce. It will let the salespeople easily create marketing emails and run the campaigns right from Salesforce. With this, salespeople can easily improve nurturing and engagement of the customers and prospects. This program also unveils the customer journey across all sales and marketing efforts by providing a complete and comprehensive overview of the journey. With this, the sales team can easily push their leads through the funnel and easily close the deals. It will also give actionable insights to the salespeople by relating it to their prospects to make them visit the websites, open emails, respond to your marketing campaign call to action, etc.
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Tracking the activity and results of sales efforts to drive more performance
Understanding the path to a sale and the return on investment of various related sales activities is crucial for optimizing the sales team’s performance. Here, Salesforce can let the users pull their activity reports on the Salesforce dashboard to know what types of activities are necessary to reach the conversions. For example, knowing the number of phone calls needed to get a prospect sign up for a demo will help the team leaders to set the benchmarks and identify the top performers. So, by learning from their process itself, one can understand who may be struggling to convert the prospects and who is working on it well as desired, which will help fine-tune the overall sales process. In addition, Salesforce comes with many innovative tools for activity and result tracking, which most users tend to miss out on or overlook to use. By leveraging the capabilities of these tools and procedures, you can instantly enhance the performance of your team.
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Ensuring continuity in the sales process
Even it may not be ideal; the team members may get inevitably sick of tending to transition into different other jobs from time to time. With the use of Salesforce, this transfer process of transfer is seamless. Salesforce will let the teams track each and every process in light of the client interactions, with which one team member will be able to easily pick up exactly from where the former salesperson left off. Ensuring continuity is very important in the sales process as otherwise, you will be losing a sale even after putting 80% or 90% of the effort into it.
The managers and team leaders who want to effectively lead their team can explore these tips and make use of those along with leveraging the advanced Salesforce functionalities to better manage the salespeople. Along with these, there are many third-party integration tools also which will help expedite and enhance the sales processes. Using these effectively will help the sales leaders to focus more on their most important activities, quantify the efforts with objective values, gain actionable insights, and set the best course to success.
