5 STEPS TO SALESFORCE SUCCESS

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1 5 STEPS TO SALESFORCE SUCCESS

2 Introduction So you ve implemented Salesforce and have begun your Salesforce journey! Congratulations Salesforce is the number one CRM system and you can now manage your current and future customer relationships more effectively. So now what? Based on what we have learnt from hundreds of customer experiences, we have put together a best practice guide for the steps to success after your Salesforce implementation. And even better they come at no extra cost!

3 Simplify Before you get defensive, no - one is accusing you or your businesses project team of over complicating things when you implemented Salesforce. And the partner or person that set up Salesforce was acting as instructed so you can t blame them (well maybe you can). But when we are brought into administrate Salesforce for a business that has had the system set up in the last months this is always the first thing we hear people say. Whether the users are in sales, marketing, projects or administration; page layouts are often too long and cluttered, and users see far too much irrelevant information. Assuming you have Enterprise, you will have access to Profiles and the advanced security settings that come with this edition. Running around asking management and day to day users which fields they do and don t use is as an effective use of your time as getting involved in a Facebook debate on religion. So instead install Qandor s Field Trip app (free on the Appexchange): Field Trip allows you to run usage reports on all standard and custom fields, so you can see exactly which fields are adding value and which aren t. Now you can ask users which fields they no longer want to see, and actually verify whether or not it s a good idea to remove them.

4 The next step is to make sure that your profiles are correctly assigned and that page layouts are changing based on the logged in user. This will make sure that people only see the information relevant to them on any given page, saving a whole lot of confusion and page scrolling in their day to day routine. Below is the current page layout for an opportunity page. The fields and buttons are relevant to the project manager and his team but not all are relevant for the sales user. Project Manager View - Project management specific fields and buttons Editing the page layout for a sales user allows them to display only the information they want and need to see. Sales Manager View No more clutter! The above example has removed 6 buttons and 8 fields from the sales users view on the first section alone. Assuming you have 10 sections on the page then we are looking at some serious page real estate that you ve freed up for your users. You can start adding in fields again as the processes and requirements change, but be sure to revisit this process at least every 3-6 months.

5 Data, Data, Data You thought you were going to get through a systems administration guide without having to read more about the most boring topic on earth? Wrong! Data quality is a huge part of your CRM success story and is easier than most people think to stay on top of! Where to start? The old data wasn t great, the new data is already out of sync, and your users feel like they can t save a record without having to enter your customers, uncles, step sisters birthday in case marketing ever send that distant step sister campaign they talk about once every year. 1. Set your rules up (in Dupecatcher) and strike a balance between ease of use and data quality. Go too strong either way and you ll upset this delicate space/time continuum, and the world will end. A no brainer is to download a duplicate catching app for the front end of Salesforce; We recommend DupeCatcher, and best of all it s free! DupeCatcher allows you to set rules up for catching data duplication on the front end (as users or systems add records into Salesforce). You can set up warnings and merge options based on users so they are aware when they are entering duplicate data.

6 2. Go easy on the mandatory fields. Just two paragraphs ago we spoke about the balance between user adoption and data quality. Here is where that battle is won and lost. Talk to marketing and management about the 5 most important pieces of information you need from your prospects and customers. Make sure these are mandatory and that sales are told the importance of gathering this information. 3. Work smart not hard. If you are going to require that users capture Country as a required field then stop building that 196 dropdown menu immediately. Don t give people a text field either so you re running report filters on USA, U.S.A AND urited snates of amerkia. Download ProvenWorks app Country Complete. Country Complete gives users a full list of countries to choose from. No mistakes. Ever. The bottom line is that bad data is bad for your business, and maintaining high quality data requires good processes and attentiveness. If you re struggling to keep customer contact data up to date then try Data.com to keep records recent and fresh (This does have a cost associated).

7 Automate Wherever possible use Salesforce to automate tasks and communication for both customers and employees. Talk to the different departments and figure out what processes are long and manual. Then use workflow rules to automate these steps. Marketing are trying hard to produce as many leads as possible for sales to convert. Sales like to devote their time to the customers and accounts who spend big bucks on your products and services. The result can be that many of your smaller value leads get ignored and hiring more sales employees for those small deals might not be cost effective. Create workflow rules for all leads with order values of less than xxx Create a drip campaign of 5 templates relevant to that group of leads that work on time triggers and send automatically over a 3 month period, unless the lead gets converted during that time. The idea here is that a salesperson is only going to speak to these leads if they call or directly, or if they are still engaged in the s by the end of the period. This cuts the sales cycle and increases the conversion percentage as you would expect with inbound leads. It could look something like this:

8 Explore Salesforce is huge. It s a full time job staying on top of features from new releases, Apps on the AppExchange and the product eco system that revolves around your Salesforce.com system. Should you be using Pardot or data.com? What are the new communities capable of for your partners and customers? Who else in your industry uses functionality you re not aware of? Could a few simple APEX triggers solve a massive business issue? These are things we stay on top of every day for our customers. Well you have a couple of choices here. If your business is able to allocate a dedicated Salesforce administrator then he/she should be attending webinars and events, learning new skills and attending training and certification sessions as often as possible. An in house expert is great but if they have no exposure to other instances of Salesforce then they have a horse blinkered view of what s available and possible. The AppExchange is a great hunting ground for solutions and a good place to start. If you don t have either budget or need to hire a Salesforce resource internally, then you need to talk to us and about our SFDC champion s administration service. We look after 100+ businesses instances of Salesforce and see the good, the bad and the ugly. Having the experience of what is possible with standard functionality and then expertise to develop what is not is vital for our customers, and in most cases our service is a third of the cost of an internal hire. Get in touch with us today to find out more.

9 Monitor We love this part. Reporting is at the very heart of Salesforce and CRM as a whole. What good is all this information if you can t then accurately use it to make good business decisions? This is your typical scenario: Reports are made by management, users and system admins, and therefore stored all over the place. There are 5 different reports built in 5 different ways displaying the same information and the sales guys are fighting over who generated more new business last year. Marketing, sales and management all disagree on the metrics and filters for reporting. Start from the top down! Get the most senior member of staff possible to give you their reporting requirements (you often find that the higher up you go the less complicated the report becomes). Build the reports and make sure you create a dashboard for each person visualising the data and accessible from their phone or ipad. (Senior management love to dashboard watch on tablets and phones). If you have built the high level reports first (total revenue, profit, forecast for the whole business, customer satisfaction etc.) then you should be able to clone these dashboards and add filters specific to teams / individuals within the chain.

10 Summary We doubt that any of the steps we have covered come as a massive shock to those of you who took the time to read it. In fact these are simple steps for success when maintaining any worthy CRM system and not just Salesforce. Through our years of experience we have learnt that Simple = Success Clicks not code (when possible) Constant maintenance and administration are vital If you have any questions or need help regarding Salesforce please do not hesitate to contact the consultants at CloudSocius who will be happy to assist you. Contact Us

11 CloudSocius are a leading Salesforce partner who offer Salesforce services to all companies who have adopted Salesforce, or are looking to begin their journey. The talented team at CloudSocius manage, maintain, administrate and develop companies instances of Salesforce, giving them the perfect CRM system for their business.