How Salesforce Training Supports Effective Sales Leaders

There are tremendous pressures on the modern sales organization to adapt to the emerging trend that is business in the cloud. Implementing Salesforce Training as a part of an organization’s overall growth strategy is quickly becoming more of a ‘must do’ and less of a ‘nice to do’. As customers are becoming more powerful, more discerning and more demanding, and growth is an enduring theme in all vendor organizations big and small, adapting Salesforce Training is becoming a key component of adaptation.

 

Here are three things that top sales leaders are doing now to help push their sales teams ahead, and how implementing cloud based tools like Salesforce and implementing proper Salesforce Training programs is tantamount to their success.

 

One: Effective sales leaders use Salesforce Training to make sales productivity a top priority.

 

For high growth sales teams, the days of administrative chores are past. Many organizations are engaged in ‘project pushdown’ when all but the most essential jobs which are directly related to customer relationships and needs are given to support staff in administration, marketing, training and development and service departments. This means automating the sales process and ensuring that tools like Salesforce are properly deployed throughout the organization. Implementing Salesforce training to ensure that an optimal business process is designed and deployed, and that CRM is a tool that supports sales reps, and isn’t simply a large contact data base, is key.

Top companies ensure that both hard and soft measures are put in place for personal productivity. IBM measures sales time and customer facing time and establishes benchmarks. Lexmark concentrates heavily on support processes and tools that enable sellers to be immediately productive in the new product launch arena. Cisco works very closely with selected channel partners to leverage jointly held value propositions to penetrating new geographies, verticals and segments by pre developed joint business planning processes. Many organizations now treat sales time and sales productivity as a valuable and easily misplaced asset. They surround the sales people with people and processes to ensure they maximize efficiency and effectiveness. With the right Salesforce training, even small organizations can learn how to leverage this tool to track and measure productivity outcomes.

 

Two: Today’s effective sales leaders use Salesforce Training to get closer and closer to Marketing.

 

Simply put, sales organizations do not have sufficient resources to effectively research customers, do customer targeting, research the competition, develop go-to market, develop sales messaging, design and develop sales collateral, or successfully complete all other ‘tactical marketing’ tasks. The most successful sales organizations are either partnering or have integrated with marketing. With the right Salesforce Training program in place, sales and marketing and work side-by-side on a congruent plan to ensure that the marketing and sales messaging is consistent, timely and structured.

 

The Lucent prescribed seven step model that consistently links marketing programs with sales efforts is being rolled out worldwide in their new parent company. AT&T maps the sales process against specific marketing programs and makes marketing executives responsible for supporting all elements of the sales process. UPS enable marketing and sales to work hand in hand to enable sellers to deliver ‘synchronized commerce’ messaging to high level decision makers in pre nominated verticals.

 

Three: Sales leadership uses Salesforce Training to move from charismatic to active and supportive.

 

Sales leaders are now team players as well as team leaders in the true sense of the word. They can be very supportive, ensuring the ‘team back home’ is delivering an exemplary customer relationship based service to customers in support of the needs of sales people. Leaders are also focused on goals, will defend sales activities within the administration of an organization, and are very knowledgeable, communicative and consistent. Leaders tend to be great coaches and mentors. Leaders make sure that everyone in the organization keeps completed focused on the prize of attaining the numbers and the goals.  Tracking and monitoring performance using an established Salesforce training platform is critical to this endeavor.

 

Oracle sales leaders make a point to ‘be in touch by staying in touch’, spending lots of time in the field, working alongside the sales force to call on customers. Some own their own strategic accounts. UPS attribute their success to ‘committed leadership’ who are constantly setting change agendas based on their knowledge and awareness of a changing customer need understood as a result of their high levels of in the field presence.

 

SalesForce Training & Consulting is a professional coaching and training firm that specializes in helping companies navigate their way in a Salesforce.com environment. SalesForce Training is based in Toronto, with trainers in Boston and Chicago, providing sales coaching, sales management consulting, Salesforce.com training and Salesforce.com Admin support, sales training and sales personnel assessments.

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