The point of having Salesforce.com run your business operations is to make decisions and drive actions in real-time. A login from anywhere in the cloud enables your team to be plugged into the workflow and intelligence of your systems and processes, the backbone of a company. Bring in any new person and they can execute your offense within Salesforce.com if your processes are controlled and align your team.
To know what is happening, your ability to be plugged into your team’s pipelines, service, or operations a click or login away. Here is how to ensure you are operating in real-time with your team in Salesforce.com that I have learned in my Salesforce consulting work:
1. Manage By Dashboard Metrics
What you measure gets done. If your team understands that you are monitoring data in real-time from specific metrics in your reports and dashboards then this reinforces their behaviors towards the actions you want them to focus on. Be sure to have well-defined metrics that matter on a real-time basis. This can be anything leads/day/person to completed tasks by person per day. Ensure your reports and metrics account for your revenue, loyalty and marketing goals. The right behaviors will follow.
2. Integrate Website Metrics
If your Salesforce.com API is enabled, then your website metrics need to feed Lead and Contact records to monitor behaviors. This helps to set up your sales response appropriately. This requires custom software development to drive the right data with the right scheduling.
3. Measure Activities
Every task needs to be assigned and every activity needs to be recorded to drive the fidelity of Salesforce.com as a reliable data source. Each person who has a conversation or performs an action with an Account, Lead, Contact or Opportunity needs to log this. By so doing, others on the team can count on the temperature of your relationships and act accordingly.
4. Capture Integration Activities
Any custom or standard software that integrates with your Salesforce.com system likely logs activities. These are powerful indicators of what is happening as your Leads and Contacts interact with marketing, proposals, signed documents, or the array of other third-party AppExchange software integration options. Ensure that your integrations are creating the real-time picture of what your customers, prospects and partners are doing with your interactions.
Better Judgment And Actions
We live in a real-time world. If your organization is using Salesforce.com and your applications are tightly integrated, then your team should know when to act and what to decide. This helps create an interactive experience with your customers and prospects. Salesforce success depends on setting up your people for timeliness of information to act as well as providing a way to act in real-time.
How is your organization doing in real-time? Feel free to comment.
