The Inevitable Salesforce Implementation
A Typical Experience with Salesforce
Salesforce is the most widely used CRM across almost every industry. This is especially true for large tech companies that put an emphasis on sales. My personal experience with Salesforce as a sales rep has been less than ideal, and, unfortunately, this sentiment seems to be shared among most sales reps. To reps, Salesforce means more administrative work due to logging activity and constant nagging from management.
To the company, Salesforce is costly. Salesforce provides next to no support for setup, meaning companies often seek help from third party implementation partners — all on top of the hefty fee Salesforce charges per license.
Despite all of this, why is it that Salesforce is the CRM market share leader? How did they create a need for their software, charge a high monthly subscription while not providing support to set it up?
Maintaining Agile Sales while Scaling
For companies that value scale; Salesforce is critical. This is especially true for companies that hope to maintain Agile Sales, for three main reasons:
- Level of Customization
Businesses differ in who they sell to and how they support their current clients. If you also take into consideration industry specific factors, every organization has their own needs which will influence how they will use software to support them. Salesforce is fully configurable. As a result, you can mould your instance to match the specific processes and protocols of your business.
2. Single Source of Truth
Salesforce integrates with virtually every software platform related to helping businesses become more efficient. This allows teams to integrate not only their current systems into Salesforce, but also all software they may purchase in the future. Salesforce positions itself as the junction for all data, which allows all systems to act interoperably.
3. Salesforce as a Management Tool
Although the essence of Salesforce is a CRM, it is also a robust management tool. After you have your customized and integrated system, this allows management to have a pulse on everything that is going on within the business. This includes sales rep activity, usage stats on your platform and financial analysis, such as forecasts.
Designing Salesforce for your Sales Team
It’s great that Salesforce is customizable, open to integrations and a great reporting tool for management but none of that solves the problem of logging activity in a CRM is not an enjoyable experience for sales and support reps.
The good news is that teams can help mitigate this problem by designing their Salesforce instance carefully. Setting up Salesforce and its integrated systems can actually help reps by automating tasks and providing contextual information to help point them in the right direction. For example, if a rep needs to procure a signed contract to confirm a closed deal, why not set up an integration with a platform like SignNow, and automate the process within Salesforce.
The most important aspect to this whole process is ensuring that you understand every single detail of your current sales process. The depth of your understanding has to be detailed enough to easily pinpoint all inefficiencies within it. Connor Jeffers breaks down how to evaluate your current process and then how to rearchitect it for the better.
From there, it is also important to evaluate all your current systems and decide whether you need to purchase alternative or supplemental software. For example, if your sales staff are using email automation software but want something more all-encompassing and customizable, it would make sense to take the plunge into Outreach.
Lastly, it would be shortsighted to think that you’ll have a perfect system immediately after implementation. For that reason, it’s imperative that either you or a member of your team become the designated Salesforce admin for the organization. Ensure that you learn how to make iterative changes to your system that will inevitably come up as the company evolves.
