3 ways Salesforce Admins can help your company be more organised in 2016
We are all going to be asking each other about our goals and resolutions for 2016. They will more than likely include more gym 💪 and less booze 🍻. Have you thought about a resolution for your business or your team?
In December I spoke to a flurry of organisations looking to find ways they could better organise themselves on Salesforce. It seems that a new year is not just a new you, but a new us.
This post is going to look at 3 popular ways in which teams are starting to better organise themselves using Salesforce and Taskfeed. For a deeper look into why these work so well take a peep into a previous post “Why you should consider managing projects in Salesforce.”
3. Tracking business requests
Many organisations have some form of process for managers or individuals to submit business requests. These tend to be day-to-day requests for access to systems, or more significant system changes to support a new way of working or even beyond that to more substantial requests for resource to work on a strategic project.
The way these requests are managed tend to start of as an email inbox along with some spreadsheets. If this sounds like you then perhaps 2016 can be when you get on top of this. Having implemented this process a couple of times, both at a fairly large business setting priorities like High/Medium/Low doesn’t really work as it’s all relative. Being able to prioritise on request directly against an other makes the decision faster and clearer.
It is quite common to implement a process like this within Salesforce using custom objects and configuration. This is far superior that tackling these requests within Email however it will quickly become cumbersome. With Taskfeed each request can be prioritised visually against one another, with simple drag-and-drop. Strategic projects can be promoted into their own Taskfeed Board and linked back to the original business request. The important process of triaging each request becomes easier as it can be a matter of dragging requests into different columns based upon what is strategic, tactical or what’s just not worth doing right away.
2. Improve pipeline forecasts
If you see opportunities dropping from one month to another then you have a problem. This is a common symptom for a sales organisation is missing a clearly defined and articulated close plan. A close plan helps articulate the steps involved to move a deal forward. This may be a proposal, presentation, customer demo, or getting a more senior level introduction — whatever this is it should be thought about for the specific deal in mind.
Salesforce should help you manage this with the Opportunity Stage, Close Date and the Forecasting module. What often tends to be missing is the objectives and actions to progress the deal. By thinking objectively you can identify what should happen next, and then start to identify when that can happen and so on leading to a more accurate Close Date and therefore a more accurate overall pipeline.
Taskfeed will help you define your close plan as a series of actions. Action tasks can be defined by the Opportunity Owner or defined as templates and added to the Opportunity Task Board automatically. With Taskfeed embedded in each opportunity the close plan is clear, visible and individuals are accountable. As a business you’ll have a clearer view of your pipeline as the close plan helps to provide a more realistic Close Date.
1. Manage your customer post-sale
Once the sale is made the work has only just begun. You now have to deliver your product and service to the customer. For many that means some form of process to set-up the customer, onboard/activate the customer or deliver your service to the customer in one way or another. Salesforce gives us everything from Marketing-to-Sales but then you're on your own.
Taskfeed helps customers move from Sales into Delivery/Ops. For example, as soon as an Opportunity is Closed-Won in Salesforce a Project Board can be created, and populated with all the required tasks as they have been pre-defined in templates. These templates can be applied to the project automatically based upon the Opportunity type, or mapped to specific products within the Opportunity. The templates act as a project plan, or simply a checklist of activities to ensure your provide the customer what you promised. You now have a schedule and critical action list mapped out visible to your entire organisation.
These are 3 popular ways to get organised on Salesforce. If you are looking to get organised in 2016 then request a demo of Taskfeed today and we can discuss exactly what it is 2016 will bring you.
