Listen, Salesforce.com is big. It’s powerful. It’s sophisticated. And it can dramatically improve the effectiveness of your sales team. But there’s one thing it certainly isn’t. The word is Intuitive. Salesforce.com has its own unique architecture. When you open up Salesforce for the first time, you are presented with an organized looking page, with a…
Salesforce.com and salespeople are in a love-hate relationship – in that Salesforce.com loves salespeople, but (many) salespeople hate Salesforce. One of the most common reasons cited by organizations for the failure of their Salesforce.com system is a lack of adoption by the sales team. Data isn’t inputted. Records aren’t kept up to date. And the…
We see it over and over. Companies, large and small, sign up for Salesforce.com, with little regard for how it’s supposed to help them, and how they’re going to roll it out to the sales/service or marketing teams. Listen, Salesforce.com can do just about anything a sales department wants it to. But that doesn’t mean…
One of the most fundamental aspects of the Salesforce.com funnel is the correct assignment of a Lead, Account, Contact and Opportunity. It is also one of the most misunderstood features for most firms setting up Salesforce.com for the first time. While every firm will have their own set of rules to determine what constitutes a…
A question was posed recently in the Salesforce.com Professional Network group in LinkedIn – “What are some best practices to push Salesforce adoption to the sales team if it doesn’t come from the top?” Some great responses, ranging from using the Salesforce assistant tool, Salesbroom, and the real time on-demand sales pipeline and forecasting app FunnelSource,…
Part of making the case for getting Salesforce.com in the first place, usually entails answering the question — “Well, how soon will we see more sales because of this?” Once the project has been approved, the Salesforce.com implementation schedule will be the single most visible aspect of managing the integration project. While Salesforce.com and other…
In a system with as much data and reporting as Salesforce.com, its easy to ask for things and get nice looking dashboards. Unfortunately, you could ask for lots of meaningless data on this dashboard, and your sales team aren’t likely to say no to your requests (demands?), right? For instance, its easy to ask for…
Want to get your salespeople making better quality sales calls? Ensure that you are monitoring their activities with Salesforce (or another reputable CRM program), start keeping statistics, and share the data with them. We’re not talking about call reports here; we’re talking about monitoring the types of calls they make and the results they get.…
Most salespeople understand the concept of the sales funnel. It works just like an ordinary funnel that you might use to transfer liquid from one container to another. We all know that if you stop pouring the liquid into the top of the funnel, fluid stops coming out the bottom. We also know that if…
Just like a car that’s stuck on ice and spinning it’s wheels while getting nowhere fast, your salespeople may be revving their engines but standing still. And they may not even be aware of it. What a waste! Staying with the car metaphor a bit longer, when you’re behind the wheel, you can use the…