Automating The Sales Process
Posted on 02. Jun, 2010 by AscendWorks Consulting in Execution, Uncategorized
Executing a sales process in Salesforce.com helps to facilitate increased productivity, especially for teams. Assigning tasks and staying coordinated on past activities and communications with buyers and customers makes Salesforce.com valuable to any organization seeking to manage a pipeline.
Typically, after an initial implementation of Salesforce.com, the following activities should be seen consistently by your team:
- Logging incoming and outgoing calls
- Email communications with customers
- Executing all daily open tasks
- Management of process via dashboards
- Filling out of Lead, Contact, Account and Opportunity data fields
- Current updates of Opportunity record stages and pipeline information
The process of adoption is often an arduous leadership endeavor. Getting your salespeople to execute and record activities requires a vigilant sales management role. Many times, this is highly elusive and sometimes, teams abandon their initial enthusiastic embrace of Salesforce.com.
One of the most powerful aspects of Salesforce.com is its platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offering. Salesforce.com can integrate with other technologies to further extend the functionality and automation of its CRM function. After organizing and aligning your organization, a natural next step is to automate the sales process.
Automation
Automation within Salesforce.com should be done after the sales process has been defined. This includes triggers, workflows, lead scoring, and notifications among various aspects of driving automation. With a solid process, your system can be less error prone from people-dependency and more consistent from automation.
Typically, your sales process needs to be augmented with a buying process. The buying process is a demand generation process focused on nurturing and delivering a timely conversation with your sales team. You can learn more about marketing automation by clicking here.
From a customer perspective, they will have timely communications and actions from your organization because of an automated Salesforce.com implementation. Personal, relevant and timely emails based on the prospects’ position in the sales cycle will help your sales team not only be leaner with less expense, but also smarter in talking with the right people at the right time.
Automation alleviates the need for more manpower and helps your business run consistently. This should be considered and implemented with a clear understanding of your strategy and process as you adopt Salesforce.com. The timeframe for this is typically 30-90 days after your initial implementation.
Imagine a customer experience where the salesperson does not fumble the ball from poor follow-up. Having a system which follows-up creates a predictable and accountable result for your organization that scales. Without it, growing the business becomes difficult. Learn more about driving automation into your Salesforce.com system via a consultation.