Things you should be doing with Salesforce

Things you should be doing with Salesforce

Postcode Anywhere has teamed up with Salesforce experts, Westbrook, to put together top tips on how you can use Salesforce to its full potential. Introduction Westbrook has been implementing and consulting on Salesforce since 2005 in many regions and varied commercial sectors. It has a vast array of hard-edged experience and knowledge that it can draw on for the benefit of its clients - big and small. Salesforce straight out the box is a cutting edge CRM system, and is more than capable of managing large customer databases. But what transforms it into a real strategic advantage is how you use it! In this quick guide, we take you through some of the fundamental changes fully utilising Salesforce can make to your organisation.

Creating a 360 view of the customer Creating a customer centric business model has never been easier than with Salesforce. The platform provides quick and easy access to critical data; accounts, key contacts, communication history, documentation, and more. This ensures that every detail of your customers needs, requirements, and preferences can be accessed within seconds, potentially showing past, present and predictive data. Delivering on the Salesforce platform not only provides you with a unified database of all activity, but customising dashboards enables you to pull together the pieces of information that are relevant for specific contacts and specific interactions, creating an intuitive workspace. With so much data readily available, the key to implementing this effectively is to always keep the end-user in mind. Deliver only the most relevant information to the user at the most relevant point in the interaction inside a single dashboard. Suites of dashboards can be created so a user can view wider information, switching between them based on individual business processes. With these tools in place, tailored to the role and function of the end user, an organisation can much more efficiently utilise its customer database.

Organisation wide reporting Reports and dashboards are vital to driving success. Reports provide you with an overview of your past and present performance enabling you to remain proactive and reactive to trends. To make the most of Salesforce CRM s reporting capabilities, it s important to plan carefully. Follow these tips when making reports; Note that you will only see data that you have access to Don t include too many fields in your report it will slow the report down and you won t be able to review it comfortably on your screen If your report contains more than 2,000 records only the first 2,000 will be displayed on the screen Always cross check the results to make sure your Report really captures what you want it to capture For dashboards Build your reports first if these are not right, your dashboard will not be able to display relevant information Store your reports in a folder specifically for your dashboard Ensure the correct Dashboard Folder permissions i.e. restrict to only the relevant users, and recommended to be Read Only (so only System Administrators can make changes) Ensure you select the correct Running User Optimise your dashboards over time, by making changes. At first it might seem like trial and error, but as you become more experienced you will find it leads to extremely satisfying results!

Connecting sales & marketing (Salesforce core, + marketing cloud) The age-old division between sales and marketing is being broken down through the Salesforce platform. Whether through utilising the Marketing cloud, or some of the many of the sales support applications, marketing can provide Sales more qualified leads, while sales information can be passed to marketing for analysis and planning. One of the most valuable innovations for this connection is lead scoring. By ranking incoming leads according to preferences, channel, interests and role, marketing can ensure salespeople are engaging with the right opportunities, at the right time. In return, salespeople can directly report on the successes rates for future campaigns, and manage these relationships more effectively. Customising your Salesforce to include this, or integrating a pre-built application, not only grows the return on investment in CRM, but improves a wide range of functions such as setting sales targets, campaign planning and growing user adoption.

Access to applications Salesforce is more than just a CRM platform it s an eco-system. With new applications appearing regularly on the AppExchange, it s important to check out how some might enhance your CRM significantly. Ranging in size from quick fixes to internal processes, to large scale applications which replace whole business functions, the AppExchange is a key area to explore. Some of our top picks are listed below: Create, build and manage documents directly through Salesforce, ensuring your team can perform as many activities as possible on the Salesforce platform. This is great for invoicing and contracts, saving users time and ensuring all crucial data never omitted. While speed and accuracy are normally tradeoffs, this tool is an effective way of entering and validating contact addresses, bank accounts and email addresses all within the Salesforce CRM. Start typing an address into an account or contact field, and the application will start filling out the rest, verifying the data against national records. This one Deploy surveys both internally and externally, with integration to map the information directly into your CRM. Useful for external marketing campaigns, this tool s template functionality is perfect for internal processes too, such as customer feedback and employee surveys. solution covers over 240 countries around the world making it the complete package. When it comes to managing geographic information, such as Sales territories or country coverage this tool is a must-have. Salesforce1 ready, teams can utilise proximity based searching while in field to optimize travel routes.

Managing your database in real time from anywhere Managing your database in real time enables you to gain a deeper understanding of your business, as when data has been created or updated in Salesforce it is uploaded instantly, providing an accurate view of the current state of your customer database. Analytic snapshots can record this real-time data into an object, allowing an organisation to monitor trends, view day-by-day results, and report directly on historic information. This is an extremely powerful tool for redefining business processes when combined with Salesforce1 or Salesforce mobile, and a key factor in providing outstanding field support. Once a sales person has met with a client, they can instantly record the attended meeting and outcome, while service personnel can register jobs as completed directly into the CRM. Salesforce also supports mobile applications for Chatter and Communities, simply configure the prerequisites, download the application to a handset and register your login details; even without Salesforce1!

Social media Salesforce supports an entire suite of tools, designed to provide your organisation with the cutting edge tools to engage with your customers through social media. For more information check them out here. http://www.salesforcemarketingcloud.com/ However, Salesforce itself provides users with an inbuilt tool to enables easy access to social networks such as; Facebook, Klout, LinkedIn, Twitter and YouTube. This tool Social Accounts and Contacts, provides social intelligence with enables users to serve their current and potential customers more effectively, my mapping contact email address to personal profiles. This feature can be enabled by your System Administrator in setup and accessing Social Accounts and Contacts Settings. By using these tools, you can not only build a personalised view of your existing and potential customers, but learn what is on your customers minds and remain up to date on trends and interests! Salesforce core functionality also supports social campaigns. One example is through discount codes. Offering an individual code for each campaign allows it to be mapped into the CRM through custom fields, allowing in-depth reporting directly on the ROI and engagement.

Driving collaboration The Salesforce Chatter platform provides you with the opportunity to collaborate as a business, and push data into a real-time feed accessible by everyone; consequently keeping everyone in the loop. With an appearance and functionality similar to commonly used social networks, Chatter is quick to pick up and a great tool for increasing user adoption. To create an effective Chatter then you should try some of the following; Get each user to create a Chatter profile which will be accessible across the application for colleagues and partners to access business profiles and learn more about individuals Create groups for teams to collaborate on business topics and problems, and share important information Promote the use of status to provide important real-time information across the application Utilise the Chatter app to monitor all activity in one place via the Chatter feed Share important documents, like spreadsheets, presentations, or other files via Chatter Follow users and Salesforce records to keep up to date with the latest activity

Engaging with your customers through communities Communities provide you with a space for employees, customers and partners to connect. Communities are a great way to collaborate with individuals outside of your company yet provide them with a self-service environment. If you have multiple business needs, then you can create multiple communities within your organisation to serve different purposes. The key to setting up a successful community is to; Decide on the correct subset of features and data available within the community Customise the community to show the most important data, whilst keeping it minimal Update the community look and feel with company branding Choose which members can access the community Communities are a fantastic way to connect directly to business processes and transform the way you sell, service and market.

Custom development The Salesforce Platform accelerates the development and deployment of custom applications. With Salesforce s native point-and-click functionality and drag-and-drop tools, anyone can create database schemas, workflows, custom actions, automated business processes, page layouts, and entire apps without writing a single line of code! For the advanced user or those with access to developers, Apex code and Visual Force design extends the powerful and proven success of the Force.com platform. By introducing code that can run on Salesforce servers, alongside Visual Force to adjust the graphical user interface, completely bespoke functionality can be created to support your business goals.

Evolving platform Every year Salesforce continues to help businesses become a customer company with its three releases. A mixture of technical fixes and customer suggestions, the three releases fall in spring, summer and winter. Changes in each new release are communicated to your Salesforce Administrator. Salesforce begin by upgrading the development Sandboxes, and within a couple of weeks production environments are upgraded. Once production is upgraded all Therefore, you ll want to plan ahead to make sure you know what s coming and when. The best channels for keeping up to date on releases are to use the release site (http://www.salesforce.com/ newfeatures/) and the trust Salesforce site for scheduled maintenance (https://trust.salesforce. com/). Comprehensive release notes are always published via the release site and provide full detail on all new features and how they can be enabled. Salesforce production environments are immediately impacted as the entire instance is upgraded, adding new features, enhancements and potential! Consultant Author, Emma Stevens Westbrook

Postcode Anywhere is one of the world s leading providers of international address validation. We are used by some of the largest organisations in the world, we even provide our addressing technology back to the data owners including the likes of the Royal Mail and Canada Post. Our Salesforce app, Capture+ ensures address data for over 240 countries is accurate at the point of entry. Things you should be doing with Salesforce Download from the app exchange now for a free trial. Call us: UK 0800 047 0495 U.S. 1-866-838-9075 Rest of the World +44 1905 888 550 Email: theteam@postcodeanywhere.com www.postcodeanywhere.com @pca_plus