Are you getting the most out of your Salesforce investment?

By utilizing our Path to Success assessment, we are able to evaluate a number of existing Salesforce implementations. Customers typically request a Salesforce assessment because they feel they are simply not getting enough from their Salesforce investment.

Some of the common problems we come across are:

Dirty Data

Imagine you have 10 sales reps, and every day each person makes two calls to the wrong number. Not only do they waste time with those faulty contacts, but it is likely they will spend even more time tracking down the correct number to call. The wasted time quickly begins to pile up. In fact, it’s not uncommon for salespeople to spend about 30% of their time searching for the data needed to do their jobs.

Broken Sales Process

It’s hard to grow sales if your sales process is broken. Often times, customers do not even realize they have sales reps who are underperforming. This could be a result of an inconsistent sales process, or lack of ability to sell as a team. Sometimes the process is clunky and slow with limited automation capabilities. We have seen this increase their typical sales cycle by up to 72%.

Low adoption

Each day your CRM sits unused, it is losing value. We often install Adoption Reports to see who is using what, how often they login and how many sales activities are logged. Another approach is to create adoption strategies (Sticks – Wall of Shame, Carrots – Leader Board) or even introduce a form of gamification to drive the right behavior.

Poor lead generation

We see some companies that have a hard time building enough pipeline. Often it’s because they don’t have effective lead routing or their lead quality is poor. For example: How often do your sales reps run into dead ends because of wrong phone numbers, bounced emails, or wrong-sized businesses? Or perhaps they’re lacking insights from the Social Web—from sites like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. According to third party research, 79% of a company’s marketing leads are left unpursued.

Sales reps spend more time on admin tasks than selling

When we speak with companies, they want to give more selling time back to their sales reps in the field. Unfortunately, many of their Salesforce pages and mobile layouts have not been optimized for the users. According to leading research, 68% of a sales rep’s time is spent…not selling. Rather, it’s spent on things like status reporting, information mining, and acquiring approvals on deals.  This is a tremendous drain on the productivity of your sales organization.

Underperforming sales reps

One of the most universal challenges we see almost every organization deal with is that they don’t have enough insight into who they are selling to. This includes data about the account – such as employee size, industry, corporate hierarchies, what they’re selling – and the value of what they’re selling. Many of their deals are not forecast correctly. At the end of the day, any one of these challenges can prevent a company from meeting its sales targets.

Why are so many Salesforce users struggling with these issues?

What we have found is that many companies are not taking advantage of Salesforce capabilities and AppExchange Apps. Additionally, they do not have a formal process of evaluating new apps and Salesforce features that are delivered in three releases each year. We do see other problems where their solution are overly customized with both code and custom objects and fields that make the solution rigid and cumbersome.

What can you do to quickly spruce up your Salesforce?

Fortunately, Salesforce is an extremely versatile platform which allows you reverse useless customization and add apps from the AppExchange. There are tools out there to help you improve your data quality and reduce clicks.

• Field Trip This utility lets you analyze the fields of any object, including what percentage of the records (or a subset of your records) have that field populated.
• DemandTools DemandTools is an enterprise capable suite of data quality modules to control, standardize, verify, deduplicate, import & generally manipulate Salesforce and/or Force.com data.
• MyFavorites ONE CLICK access to Important Records, Reports, & Dashboards! Yes, this app allows you to create your own unlimited bookmarks, custom links or shortcuts for any internal/external site within Salesforce & SF1 app in just One Click
• Data.com Clean Is the a comprehensive data cleansing solution natively integrated with Sales Cloud. Plug in Data.com Clean to automatically cleanse and enrich all account, contact and lead records so you have better control of your data.
• ConsumerInsight lets you clean, complete and select consumer contacts, leads and person accounts using demographic, lifestyle and behavioral insights from Acxiom’s best-in-class, privacy-compliant.

What about improvements that might take a little longer?

It all starts with having a clear CRM vision. You need to know what you want from your Salesforce org, and what success looks like. Typically this involves an in depth assessment of your current usage to understand your baseline. Then, you must determine what your success metrics are. Most successful users of Salesforce develop a multi-year roadmap to constantly enhance their Salesforce solution. They also create an effective governance structure to ensure that all changes are planned and tested before being moved to production. This reduces unintended consequences of change. Finally, they create a Salesforce Center of Excellence (CoE) to constantly monitor new releases and the AppExchange for opportunities to get even more from their investment.