As the year ends, it is a natural time to review how your mission-critical business systems are working to enable your processes.Salesforce.com typically runs crucial business processes for you and as your team is focused on end of year metrics such as closing business, driving leads or increasing customer loyalty, you can review your system and further refine it for management effectiveness. Here are a few things you might want to consider to help align your team for increased success:
- Dashboards and reports. Looking over the past year, eliminate reports and dashboards that are no longer relevant. Ask yourself what metrics have come to matter and customize your system to produce these metrics in real-time. Set your dashboards to capture what you have found to matter. What gets measured gets done, so measure correctly with your increased experience and knowledge.
- User performance. Recognize the users that have used your Salesforce.com system the way you envisioned. Completed tasks, closed Opportunities and Lead nurturing are examples of ideal behaviors in Salesforce.com. Present an award and communicate the reasons for your recognition. Your team will come to understand what you value and why. Get concrete to help reinforce what you have been looking for.
- Pipeline management. Review the current Opportunities in your pipeline as well as how the data and relationships are captured. Assign tasks to each Opportunity owner to clean up the records or leave comments in Salesforce Chatter to recognize great behavior. Get your pipeline in order to start the next sales cycle with accurate projections and create a review process to ensure your pipeline continues to be true.
- Marketing Automation. Focus on building a complete lead record with their digital activities captured in your Lead records in addition to your sales team’s tactical engagement. This will transition your organization to understand how buying is done via the buyer’s process in addition to your sales process. Marketing automation adds far more activity history and open tasks which drives automation in the selling process. It pushes your organization into a modern process for engaging buyers.
The beauty of Salesforce.com is that it is a continual journey of refinement. There is not perfect data. There is continual improvement upon process, culture and data capture. Use the natural business cycles available to you to ensure your system continues to get more robust, drive user adoption and is relevant for management of your business.
These are Salesforce strategies I work with organizations on.
How can these points help you increase Salesforce success?