The organization that is seeking to increase revenue, increase customer loyalty or generate demand typically is seeking strategy in addition to technical competence.  The strategy drives the system and the system must work cohesively balancing the trade-offs in productivity, management and collaboration.

Here are some of the differences between the advisor and the technician:

• The advisor is helping you lead. The technician is merely following your orders.
• The advisor architects your overall business strategy. The technician is highly tactical and engages the system without concern for overall context.
• The advisor considers trade-offs in adoption and productivity, often championing simplicity.  The technician focuses on the technology, often overlooking how people use a system.
• The advisor collaborates with the client and educates on options in the client’s best interest.  The technician takes orders from the customer and leaves the client to own their own interests.

Salesforce.com is a mission-critical application which will either increase revenue or become a cumbersome IT experience.  Consider the talent you hire as a critical pivot point towards success or frustration.  Strategy and leadership are the ingredients which are less tangible, yet should be evident in a well-designed system and business process in Salesforce.com.

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.

• Update their account records
• See their account information
• Log support cases
• See the status of support cases
• Send and manage referrals

There are numerous applications which can be scoped for increasing customer loyalty and ultimately revenue.  Building a customer portal requires thinking through the best presentation of data and how the data syncs with your Salesforce.com interface.  The process includes data mapping and developing the rules for managing the data flow between Salesforce.com and your custom portal.  The portal itself can be developed using web services to a secure site or using Force.com sites as the venue for your customers to login to.  Each has benefits which would need to be evaluated based on requirements and a business case.

Management of your users via login credentials would be a layer of implementation that is inherent with a portal implementation.  Their information and how it flows with your Salesforce.com system are part of the requirements to explore.

Imagine your customers having a much higher value perception of your brand because of transparency and convenience being offered to them.  Your team manages data on the back end using Salesforce.com.   Your customer has access to what is relevant as well as inputs what is changing.  It is more value to bring to customers that want to have an increased relationship with you.  It is a differentiator in an economy where your competitors are vying for your customers’ attention.

How you service your customer should be tracked in Salesforce.com beyond the sale.  This leads to cross-selling and referrals.  Salesforce.com is a customizable system which can both be a framework for execution or even more so, automate repeatable processes for predictable and high-quality output by your team.

Depending on your service process, your organization should be set up with managing a data object which tracks projects relative to your customer’s account.  The requirements of the project data object include:

• Contacts involved with their roles
• Data fields for seeing the project to completion
• Billing inputs and reporting if applicable
• Task management and delegation
• Milestones for setting expectations
• Communications to create rich touchpoints
• Accountability with your team

Your ultimate customer experience has both predictability with nuance most likely.  With the right leadership and process, you can increase your customer loyalty and ultimately revenue with leveraging Salesforce.com to drive your internal processes which translate to external rewards.  This in turn creates velocity in your organization from efficiency and control.

1. Action. This is how the concrete task is to be completed.  It is in the form of calling, emailing, document creation, and the actions related to moving the sale to the next step.
2. Communication. Much of the value of doing business with you and your organization comes from the connection the buyer feels.  Communication is critical.  Automating and personalizing communication with relevant and timely pieces is critical to a healthy sales process.

Many sales organizations shy away from driving process for fear of being rigid or impersonal.  The reality is that many of the tasks and communications executed fall within a general and repeatable framework.  Capturing this framework with flexibility is both possible and essential to drive efficiency in the sales process.

With the ability to iterate quickly and customize to your organization’s changing needs, Salesforce.com becomes a strategic tool to enable the process behind your organization’s sales.  It takes leadership and clarity to capture and deliver the process and execution in Salesforce.com effectively.  The rewards are driving more opportunity through your sales experience and having a predictable system for increasing revenue.