Good customer relationships are an important characteristic of almost all successful businesses. This had to be handled manually in the past. Businesses focused on meeting and dealing with customers face to face. They still do, in fact, in the brick-and-mortar business model. But now, the majority of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is done with tools like Salesforce. With a 21.7% CRM market share, Salesforce is a leader in this space and an impressive tool for optimizing a business’s sales performance and enhancing its sales numbers. A few tips that can help businesses leverage the full potential of Salesforce for sales performance are:
Strategize and Plan
It’s important to have strategy and plan for sales before you can properly leverage Salesforce. A comprehensive sales strategy with detailed plans for each individual task can serve as your roadmap. It will guide you on the best way of using Salesforce features and optimizing it for your unique use-case and sales needs. A “tool-first” approach might undermine your sales performance.
Automate As Much As Possible
One benefit of having a tool like Salesforce is that you can automate a variety of sales-related tasks. Salesforce offers multiple automation tools and transparency about the benefits and disadvantages of using each tool. You can automate individual tasks or entire pipelines and processes, depending on the level of complexity you can implement and the team can handle. Focus on the repeated and service-related tasks that might be critical but don’t necessarily require human touch. You can use the company’s official and comprehensive guide to automation.
Data Analytics
One of the things powerful CRM platforms like Salesforce are great at is managing, processing, and reporting data. A strong emphasis on data analytics can have a significant impact on your business’s sales numbers. But even more importantly, it can help you optimize and improve the sales performance. You can gain insights on the steps your sales teams/sales personnel spend most time on and how valuable that step is to a conversion. You can also identify and merge redundant steps and eliminate low-impact steps to shorten your funnels. This may give your sales teams time to bring in more leads and make up for the difference.
Proper Customer Segmentation
Salesforce allows you to segment your customers in different ways. You can group them based on how much they spend on average, purchase behaviors, seasonal preferences, demographics, and a number of other ways. For geographical segmentation, you can leverage the power of Salesforce Territories. You can even create templates for segmentation rules that can make it easier for others to segment customers, streamlining the process down the sales pipeline. This leads to optimized sales performance from two ends – higher conversion rates and fewer resources/steps and time spent on each customer. The latter is common when you treat your entire customer base as one group.
Customize
Customer segmentation and automation are just two of the ways you can optimize Salesforce development services for your specific business needs. Customization allows you to take another step and introduce new functionality to the CRM that’s relevant to your business. It may require technical expertise (in-house or outsourced), but it can also have a significant impact on your sales performance. This is especially true for unique business models with complex sales pipelines. The standard version of the CRM may not be equipped to handle this, so instead of adjusting to these limitations, leverage Salesforce’s flexibility to introduce the customizations you need.
Facilitate Collaboration
Lastly, sales performance optimization shouldn’t solely focus on the customers. It should also focus on the people making the sales, i.e., your sales teams and personnel. Make sure the CRM allows them to collaborate effectively and establish guidelines for active collaboration. They can exchange relevant information, share tactics, and even Salesforce-specific information like automated flows and customization code. This can lead to organic optimization in sales performance.
Salesforce is a powerful tool and can transform how a business connects with its customers and conducts sales. However, leveraging its full potential requires mixing time-tested sales strategies with its technical capabilities.