If your organization has been using Salesforce for a year or more, there is a significant chance it is not optimized for your organization as best it could be. With three releases a year, most companies simply don't have the internal resources to stay on top of new features and functionality, much less build and follow a roadmap to extend Salesforce functionality in sales and marketing as well as to post-sales service and delivery. The truth is, most companies are only using a fraction of the capabilities of the platform and have not integrated Salesforce with the other applications used to run their company including accounting, ERP and marketing platforms.
Here are some questions to ask your organization about Salesforce
Is there a Salesforce roadmap in place? It is important to be aware of business needs that could be addressed in Salesforce, new functionality that would be advantageous to the organization, other applications that would benefit from integration with Salesforce and have a plan to implement these enhancements.
Is Salesforce integrated with the other applications and services we use to run the business? Salesforce CRM can and often should be the hub of your operation, with spokes going to marketing email marketing platforms, event sites, surveys, customer and partner portals, accounting and ERP systems and just about any other program or website used by your company. This saves time from double-entering data, reduces errors, makes reporting and dashboarding easier and improves employee morale and productivity by allowing them to focus on their professional talents.
Is Salesforce being used for post-sales service and delivery? Salesforce can be set up for case/ticket management to ensure sales and service have a complete view of the customer. Post-sales onboarding and delivery can be managed in Salesforce. Assets (sold products) and service contracts should be created and managed through Salesforce.
Is everyone in the organization using Lightning? Lightning is the future of Salesforce - all new features are being added to Lightning only. If your organization has not moved yet, it is time. Many users that may have tried it and switched back have likely not seen it recently, properly optimized. It is much more intuitive and easy to use than it was when it came out.
Is all the information you want to see for an Account on the Account page? Lifetime sales, open opportunity totals, date of last sale, graphs of a breakdown of sales by opportunity type and much more should be information you shouldn't have to look for.
Is it quick and easy to create Opportunities, Accounts and Quotes with fields defaulting to most popular options and pre-populating from parent records? Using a properly tuned Salesforce feels effortless and intuitive.
Are Account statuses and other fields up to date? Users should not have to go back to an Account record and update a status from a prospect to a customer...this should be automated along with any similar updates that happen when a deal is created, closed, lost or any other record updates.
Are you using Products and Quotes? Are you building and generating sales documents from within Salesforce? Is DocuSign or another e-sig product integrated to allow for one-click proposals, emailed to the client with e-sig enabled? If the answer is no to any of these, your sales team may be working to hard on operations and not on selling.
Do your team members have a dashboard that tell them at a glance about their performance today, this week, this month? Can your managers easily see how their team is performing? Does your executive team get a dashboard emailed to them daily with KPI's showing the overall health of the company?
When is the last time you had a Salesforce training session? There is a lot of productivity-enhancing functionality your team may not be aware of. Annual or biannual 15 to 30 minute training sessions will help new team members get up to speed and more seasoned members learn new tricks.
If you would like to learn more about any of these topics, feel free to drop me a line.