Introduction
In todays highly competitive world, businesses are constantly looking for ways to get and stay ahead of the competition. How can businesses identify prospective clients and convert them to loyal customers in a never ending process. Businesses therefore require a CRM solution that responds to the needs of the business and offers the business the flexibility, to respond adequately and adapt to changes in the market, customer behaviour, etc. and the ability to scale as the business grows and matures. I think the Sales Cloud CRM solution from Salesforce.com is a solution that gives businesses this cutting-edge advantage over their competitors, and not only that, it helps the business grow enormously.
Salesforce.com offers a series of products geared at building powerful CRM (Customer Relationship Management) applications. The Salesforce.com CRM has been compared to other top players in the industry and is ranked number 1 as of 2014. Check out the results here and see what makes Salesforce.com CRM better than all others.
With the Salesforce.com CRM solution you can increase your ROI (Return On Investment) by up to 70% and your turnover by 38%. Moreover the Salesforce.com Sales Cloud can help you achieve the following:
- boost sales productivity by 36 %
- improve win rates by 26%
- increase pipeline by 25%
- attain a forcast accuracy of plus 45%
Let's begin by looking at what the Sales Cloud exactly is.
What is the Salesforce.com Sales Cloud?
I bet someone could imagine the Sales Cloud as a piece of software that he could buy and plug into his organisation to help him achieve his sales goals. Well that someone would be very wrong. First because the Sales Cloud is not software and secondly because it is not a single product that will solve all your clients problems. So what is the Sales Cloud?
I will define the Sales Cloud as follows;
It is a collection of different products, tools and methodologies that helps businesses attain their objectives of growing their businesses by effectively managing leads and prospects and increasing revenue by increasing sales productivity, building and maintaining a more robust pipeline and increasing accuracy of forecast and doing this in such a way that sales, marketing and management are aligned and working together as a cohesive team to guarantee short and long term success.
This is what I call the Sales Cloud. The products, tools and methodologies mentioned in the definition above will be briefly introduced in this section. Always remember that your client's Sales Cloud implementation will always be unique and will require a proper end-to-end thought process to be successful. It will require that you understand your clients and his business better he does. Also mentioned in the definition is the fact that your Sales Cloud implementation should be aimed at achieving lasting results.
The components that make up the Sales Cloud are;
1. Accounts & Contacts
Provides a 360 degree view of customer accounts by using one central place to manage all customer information and interactions. Account teams can be created and used to foster collaboration across cross-functional teams on an account by account bases by letting end users grant access to their accounts and related records to other users.
2. Marketing & Leads
Provides the ability to manage leads in a systematic and structured manner leading to an increase in the number of leads generated and consequently converted. Provides valuable information about potential customers and the lead qualification process by tracking qualified and unqualified leads as well as dead leads and leads that end being paying customers.
3. Campaign management
Used to track and manage different types of campaigns from lead capture to deal closure across all channels. Campaign influence is used to track the impact of multiple marketing campaigns on a single opportunity. Campaign hierarchy also provides information about which campaigns are related to specific marketing programs.
4. Channel Management
Provides public and private online spaces where employees, customers and partners can collaborate. A suitable tool to achieve this is a Salesforce Community. This is a branded space that offers a subset of a Salesforce organization's features and data and allows selected customers and partners to engage in business processes. Another Salesforce.com product that could be used for channel management is Salesforce to Salesforce which enables colaboration with partners who are also Salesforce.com customers. Salesforce to Salesforce allows you to see partner updates on shared records and enables you to report on shared records managed by partners.
5. Partner Management
In addition to channel collaboration via Salesforce to Salesforce, you could use other Salesforce features such as partner recruiting, management, collaboration, sales, marketing and community to engage your partners more.
6. Opportunities
Tracks all opportunity-related data including milestones, decision makers, customer communications, real-time quotes etc. This data can be used to accurately forecast revenue and product demand. Opportunity features you should consider when planning a Sales Cloud implementation for your client include;
- Opportunity teams: can be used to foster collaboration between cross-functional teams which will lead to an increase productivity in sales.
- Opportunity splits: can be used to split credit across multiple team members. This keeps sales reps and other members motivated.
- Similar Opportunites: allows users to search for opportunities that share common fields with the current opportunity
- Big Deal Alerts: sends an automated email that includes a snapshot of an opportunity record that has reached a certain threshold. This threshold will normally depend on the opportunity amount and probability.
- Opportunity Update Reminders: sends out an automated email with information about opportunities such as total amount closed and the total forecast amount. You can schedule the frequency of opportunity update reminders.
7. Forecasting
Allows users to view their forecast and the forecast of their subordinates for each forecast category. Forecast category is defined together with the probability when creating the opportunity stage picklist values. Forecasting can be used to forecast sales from multiple perspectives by using forecast types such as Opportunity Revenue, Opportunity Quantity etc. Collaborative forecast can also be used by sales managers to adjust the forecast of their subordinates leading to more accurate forecasting.
8. Product, Price Books and Quotes
Quotes can be used to implement multiple pricing scenarios for each opportunity. In order to use quotes, products and price books must be implemented. Products are the individual items sold by your client's organization. Prices for these products are defined in a standard or custom price book price list. Products can then be added to an opportunity as product line items. Eventually quotes can then be generated from the opportunity and its products and sent out to customers. The quote shows the total price for all products and services for an opportunity.
9. Chatter
Chatter belongs to Sales Cloud tools that you should implement to increase sales productivity, collaboration and alignment of cross-functional teams. Chatter has the following capabilities which make it accomplish these task splendidly;
- Chatter feed: used to track objects and enable collaboration on a record by record basis. It also allows you to post comments, files and links when collaborating with other users in your organization. You can also set up polls to perform surveys and gather opinions using chatter feeds.
- Chatter Files: used to upload and store files privately or to upload and share files with other coworkers and groups. Users can find and follow files using chatter files.
- Chatter Groups: used to create public or private groups to ease collaboration with specific people including customers who do not belong to an organization.
- Chatter Topics: topics can be used to add tags or topics to chatter post and records to make them easy to find. This feature allows users to be identified and endorsed as topic experts.
- Chattter publisher: publisher actions feature is used to create actions and add them to the Chatter publisher on the home page, on the Chatter tab, in Chatter groups, and on record detail pages. These actions can let users do a number of things from create and update records to open up Visualforce pages which can be built to do virtually anything.
- Chatter Messenger: gives Chatter users real-time presence and instant-messaging capabilities. This means that users will be able see when coworkers are online and engage in private, one-to-one and multi-person instant messaging sessions. Chatter Messenger is built right into Chatter, i.e. it does not need an external client
- Chatter Messages: used for secure private conversations with other Chatter users. Messages are also used to notify people when a file has been shared with them. Messages don't appear in in a user's feed, profile, global search results, or any other part of Chatter that's publicly visible
- Chatter Desktop: desktop application that allows users to collaborate in chatter without opening a browser.
10. Email & Calendering
Enables users to work seamlessly with their favourite calendering and email app. This minimizes the amount of work that is duplicated in different systems significantly. An example of Salesforce.com tool that can be used for email and calendering is Salesforce for Outlook. In is used to sync events, task and contacts from Salesforce to Outlook or vice versa or both. With Salesforce for outlook, a Salesforce side panel can be added to outlook. This side panel is used to add emails and events to Salesforce records and even create new records without ever leaving Outlook.
Finally email templates can be used to achieve efficient and consistent communication with customers.
11. Mobile & Salesforce 1
Salesforce 1 creates a virtual office anywhere on mobile devices! It is used to log calls, respond to leads, review reports and collaborate using Chatter. Salesforce 1 is THE app that lets you access and update your Salesforce data from iOS and Android devices. With Salesforce 1 you also have access to all your apps and chatter. This means that almost any task that can be accomplished on a desktop is brought to your mobile device via Salesforce 1.
12. Salesforce CRM Content
Used to organize, share, search and manage content using fully searchable repositories called libraries. Library members can be added and given rights to author and manage the content. Multiple versions of content can be added to the library and how frequently Content is viewed or downloaded can also be tracked. Content can be packaged and delivered to external recipients, setting a date on the which the content will expire and recipients can be required to use a password to view the content.
13. Real-time Analytics
Can be used to easily create reports and dashboards to help analyze real-time performance of the business and share and apply insights across teams. Used to track pipeline, deals, revenue and activities. Also used to track and measure the success of the Sales Cloud implementation by measuring factors like user adoption, data cleanliness, number or converted leads etc.
14. AppExchange
An online marketplace for applications and services designed for compatibility with the Sales Cloud to enhance and foster sales success. Use the AppExchange to search for, download and install applications developed by Salesforce.com and it's partner ranging from applications for mass mail, intergration, social CRM etc. AppExchange can be used to find applications that customizes and extends your Sales Cloud implementation to work the way your business works. There is no need in reinventing the wheel, so always check the AppExchange before wasting your client's dollars and you time in building a solution that has been developed and resides on the AppExchange just waiting for you to use it.
15. Data.com
This can help to shorten the sales cycle by giving real-time access to clean contact and lead information. This makes it possible to quickly identify contact roles, decision makers and influencers for an organization's accounts and opportunities.
16. Other
Multi-currency: allows organizations to use multiple currencies in opportunities, forecast, reports, quotes, and other currency fields. This is very relevant when rolling out a global Sales Cloud implementation. A corporate current can be set and active currencies which can be used within the organization and their conversion rates are also set up. Advanced currency management can also be enabled on and allows the management of dated exchange rates within opportunities. The opportunity close date will determine which conversion rate to use. When implementing the multiple currency feature put a lot of thought in how this feature will affect reports and dashboards.
Territory management: typically used in a private sharing model to grant users access to accounts based on territories. A territory is simply a grouping of accounts based on a set of common characteristics such as region, product line, etc. Bear in mind that an account can belong to multiple territories, but an opportunity can belong to only a single territory. This means that users will have a separate forecast for each territory they belong to. Customizable forecasting must be enabled to use territory management.
Translation Workbench: used to specify languages to be translate, assign translators to these languages, create translations for customizations that have been made to a Salesforce organization, and override labels and translations from managed packages. Everything from custom picklist values to custom fields can be translated. The translation workbench is very important for global Sales Cloud implementations. I have seen this mentioned any where as part of the Sales Cloud but I think it's importance should not be underestimated.
Benefits of Using the Sales Cloud
- Strong lead generation process leading to a high lead quality rate and subsequent high lead conversion ratio
- better understanding of customers.
- better understanding pipeline and the derivatives that drive business
- standardized quoting and pricing
- better management of the sales process
- better alignment of sales and marketing
- high data quality
- 360 degree view of customers with easy access to contact and opportunity information
- streamline business processes using, automation, workflow and approval processes.
When to use the Sales Cloud
During the analysis phase of your implementation, you will have to gather requirements from your client's main stakeholders. This often happens in breakout discovery workshops where you will talk to stakeholders to learn how they currently operate (As Is-Process), what their pain points are and what they hope will be achieved with the Sales Cloud implementation (To Be Process). It is only after you conduct this discovery meetings, that you will be able to draft the requirements document on which you will based your solution design in the design phase. In this section we will look at a few problems that most prospective clients looking to implement the Sales Cloud CRM solution will have.
Most often the problems that your client will face that might make them consider implementing a CRM solution will revolve around
- Lead generation process
- Revenue
- Sales productivity
Lead generation process
Your client may face the following issues during around the lead generation process;
- poor lead data quality
- difficulty in reporting on leads
- ineffectiveness of campaigns leading to poor ROI
- poor alignment of marking and sales
Poor lead data quality might occur because during the lead generation process, important data is not collected from the prospect or lead. How about using custom fields on the lead page layout and validation rules to enforce that critical information be stored for a lead? How about using a status picklist to make sure that the lead process supports different statuses? New leads can then always be created with a status such as open, when a lead is converted, its status could automatically be set to qualified using a Workflow Field Update. This will definitely make the lead process more transparent and reporting to analyze leads will also become easy.
Ineffective campaigns can be caused by the fact that marketing is not able to track which opportunities directly result from the campaigns they run and therefore do not know where to invest their dollars. The result is often a poor ROI. How about using campaign influence feature and contact roles on opportunities to make tracking which campaigns impact an opportunity seamless? When contacts belonging to the contact role on the opportunity are added as campaign members, the campaign will automatically be added to the campaign influence related list on the opportunity.You can also use campaign hierarchies to automatically track which campaigns belong to which programs run by marketing.
How about aligning marketing and sales by giving sales reps visibility into lead data? This can be achieved by simply setting the Org Wide Defaults (OWD) for leads to public read-only. This will however mean that everyone in the organization can see lead data. If you want to share this data only with sales operation, then use role hierarchy and sharing rules to accomplish this by setting OWD for Leads to private and then using a sharing rule to share leads with the sales manager and his subordinates. Equally you can expose sales data or opportunities to marketing by using a private sharing model on opportunities and using role hierarchy and sharing rules to give marketing read-only access to opportunities.
But more important give marketing the possibility to track and report on dead leads, so that they can be able to improve on lead quality.
Increasing Revenue
- poor sales processes and methodology
- poor data quality
- inefficient sales reps
- inaccurate forecast
The stage pick list which determines the business process should be linked to the probability and forecast category fields. This means that at each stage the probability field gives the probability of that deal closing and this causes the opportunity to be assigned to a forecast category. For example, a close won detail will usually have a probability of 100% and belong to forecast category commit, while a deal in the Proposal/Price Quote stage might have a probability of 80% and belong to the forecast category Best Case.
After analyzing your client's sales process and methodologies, invest a lot of time into designing the business process stages and the corresponding probabilities and forecast category. This is because the forecast categories will be used to improve the forecast for your client's organisation. You should also enable and configure collaborative forecasting which will enable manages to edit the forecast of their subordinates leading to an increase in forecast accuracy.
Inefficiency of sales reps might result from a couple of factors; is sales getting bad lead data from the lead generation process? are sales rep forgetting to perform follow-up task on deals at the right time? is there a lot of manual work going on that prevents the sales reps from selling effectively etc. It is your job as a Sales Cloud Consultant to ask your client the right discovery questions and find out exactly what the cause of the problem is. In the next sub-section we will look at automation and collaboration which can immensely increase the effectiveness and productivity of your client's sales reps.
Improving Sales Productivity
- too many manual task
- data quality issues
- poor collaboration across cross functional teams
How about using Workflow to set up follow up task for your sales reps at specific times in the future or when a certain criteria is met? and how about sending email reminder emails if the users do not perform follow up task?. For example, automatically setting a task for the sales rep to call the decision maker two days after an opportunity enters the "Quote" stage can be accomplished in this way. If the sales rep does not log a call for that opportunity two and a half days, automatically send an email reminder.
Also automate approval processes to kick in and be routed to the right approver when a certain criteria is met. You could also enable approvals through chatter feeds or even directly from emails making the approval process much faster and more efficient.
The problem of collaboration can occur for a good number of reasons; lack of the know-how to efficiently coordinate cross functional teams, destructive competition between cross-functional teams; power play, internal company politics, old bad habits etc. After understanding the root cause of this dis-alignment between cross functional teams, take appropriate measures to resolve it. Remind your client that each Salesforce.com Implementation is a golden opportunity to do things differently.
The Sales Cloud offers amazing collaboration possibilities. The best of which is Chatter in my opinion. How about enabling feed tracking for the opportunity object and any objects which are vital to your client's sales process? this will enable real time record updates, communication, decision making, surveys, approval processes and other actions that can be defined using the Chatter Publisher. Chatter is indeed awesome and anyone who has used it in a real time production environment will agree with me.
You could also enable team selling on opportunities. Users can create teams and add them to opportunities. These teams could comprise of anyone in the organization thereby fostering collaboration. Team roles are used to identify each team members role within the team and what they are allowed to do. After enabling team selling, you could also enable opportunity splits. Sales reps will likely be more productive and motivated if they see that they are getting recognition for the business they are bringing in. This could be in form of commissions or whatever way your client has chosen to reward his sales reps. Opportunity splits will help determine each team members contribution when working a deal.
Finally you could also enable account teams on accounts. Account teams let users open up their accounts and related records such as contacts and opportunities to a few chosen individuals. Just like with opportunity teams, they can create roles and assign them to team members. These roles will determine what team members can see and what they can do.
In this section we looked at common problems that can be solved using the Sales Cloud and looked at what components of the Sales Cloud can be used to solve some of these problems. As usual your client's problems will be unique to his business and you will have to understand your client better than he does and then design a solution tailored perfectly to his business. Always remember that each Sales Cloud implementation is an opportunity to do things differently. Let you client know this every chance you get, because the likelihood that some clients will cling to outdated and mundane processes is very high. Their excuse will always be, "but we have always done it this way" and what should your answer be? Yes right, every Sales Cloud implementation is an opportunity to change things, make them better.
I will like to finish this introduction to the Sales Cloud by talking about the different stages involved in a typically Sales Cloud implementation and the best practices you should adhere to.
Implementing the Sales Cloud
Plan
The document which results from this phase is the Statement of Work (SOW) which will document, purpose and scope, deliverables, milestones & timeline, resources, risk etc.
Analyze
The next phase is the analysis phase. The first step in this phase is to identify product champions. These will most like be high performers in sales and marketing within your client's organization. It is important to communicate with these small group of individuals at this stage to gain buy-in for the project. Let them understand the purpose and scope of the Sales Cloud implementation and give them the chance to be heard. Gaining buy-in with product champions is absolutely necessary for later adoption and thus a successful implementation. Secondly using the SOW as the starting point, hold discovery workshops with all stakeholders to gather and prioritize requirements. The requirements document should be the main product of this stage. Have your client start communication with the end users in order to build buzz.
Design
In the design phase the requirements document from the analysis phase is used to design a solution for the Sales Cloud implementation. The solution will be divided into a solution and a technical solution design. The solution design is a functional design revolving around all the customization that will have to be done on the platform and you as the Sales Cloud consultant will be responsible for designing this solution. Normally you will have a technical solution architect do the design of the technical solution for you. In my experience, most senior developers are also well equipped to do the technical design. The technical design revolves around the Apex code and Visualforce pages that will have to be created to compliment the functional design. Always look into alternative solutions together with your client before venturing into Apex code. Code always introduces a level of complexity which at times is just not necessary, so do not use Apex code just because you have a developer to spare. The design documents that result from this process should be concise, to the point and easy to follow because they will be needed later for maintenance task probably long after you are gone. Have you client communicate to the end users to build buzz.
Build
The alpha review of the product then takes place. This is when the client will see his brand new Sales Cloud implementation for the first time. The purpose of this review is to gather initial feedback and implement it before the beta review which takes place later in this phase as well. Other important task also take place parallel in this phase. Depending on your Sales Cloud implementation these task could include cleansing and preparing data for migration, running data test migrations, developing test scripts, developing training material etc. Also have you client communicate to the end users to build buzz.
Validate
Deploy
Very important is that at the end of each stage make sure you obtain sign-off from the client before moving to the next stage. This will keep everyone aligned, manage expectations and enable transparency at all phases of the project.
Conclusion
Interesting topics to look at is how the Sales Cloud ties together with the so called Internet of Things (IoT) and Internet of Customers (IoC) and what part Salesforce 1 mobile app has to play in this. These are the buzz words these days. I will explore these questions in a future blog. As usual feel free to challenge my views and leave a comment. Thanks for reading
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