Implementing Salesforce Successfully

Things to Think about before Implementing Salesforce

  • Ben Doran, Revenue Operations Consultant

Effective Salesforce rollouts require a well-crafted plan and careful execution. Implementations are intricate and demand a thorough knowledge of how the system works. As with everything, experience is vital to a smooth integration. This post is not meant to scare you but to equip your team for the journey ahead. Read on to learn more about what you should consider before implementing Salesforce. 

Salesforce is a powerful system that provides users with unparalleled capability. The tool is a must-have for any company looking to grow and stay connected. It’s so much more than your parents’ CRM – it’s a customer service tool, a help center, a marketing platform, etc. But as the saying goes, “with great power comes a great implementation.”

What Does Integration Look Like?

Like the kid in school who is friends with everyone, Salesforce plays well with external applications. From Dialpad to Adobe, you can easily access hundreds of apps through the Salesforce system.

Before you start the implementation, we recommend mapping out a complete list of integration needs. Make sure you know what you want and how the systems will communicate with each other. 

Pro Tip: Actual integrations take time and require technical expertise. While the DIY spirit is admirable, it usually doesn’t end well here.

How To Train the Team

Salesforce is not an autonomous vehicle; it requires someone to drive it. The driver here is your team, and as it takes time to learn how to be a good driver, Salesforce also has a bit of a learning curve. Therefore, helping users with best practices and terminology is crucial. The two questions you want to answer are:

  1. How are we going to train everyone? 
  2. Where can users go if they have questions?

It’s just as important to have an internal team trained and motivated to use Salesforce as it is to have the tool. Depending on your capacity, training can consist of anything from a series of teamwide meetings focusing on how the platform works to mandatory completion of Trailhead units. This Trailhead curriculum is a free resource created by Salesforce to educate users. It’s a great tool to introduce newcomers to the Salesforce ecosystem. In addition, training allows your team to get up and running on the platform quickly.

Your team should create a working vocabulary and an outline of best practices. It doesn’t have to be pretty, but an internal resource will help answer questions and reinforce standard operating procedures. It may sound like tedious work, but you’ll thank us later.

professional businesspeople

Internal Salesforce Resource

Who is going to be your Salesforce “person?” Who will be responsible when questions, problems, or recommendations arise? While Salesforce is an independent and self-sufficient application, you still need someone internally to oversee the day-to-day operations.

There are a few determining factors when assigning this responsibility. For example, an admin may be a good idea if you’re looking at running a large-scale operation with 50+ users. Admins usually come with a series of certificates and a wealth of knowledge about how the system should run. At the bare minimum, though, you will need someone internally who is comfortable setting up new users, editing fields, and ideally working with Flows. In addition, you’ll find an internal resource who can quickly troubleshoot and answer questions to be very efficient and productive.  

Choosing the Best Salesforce Implementation Partner 

Similar to the dating landscape, there are many options for finding a consultant to lead your implementation. On Google alone, you’ll find the names of 100+ businesses that say they are the best. This process can be confusing and frustrating unless you know what to look for in a partner. Arguably, experience and communication are the top qualities of a capable partner.

Has the company implemented Salesforce before? This is probably a good question when evaluating any business but so crucial here. A lot goes into implementation, and you really need to trust that the company knows what they’re doing. Before making a decision: 

  • Reach out to their references
  • Check their Salesforce Certifications
  • Read their case studies, if available

Communication is often overlooked, but it’s the key to any healthy business relationship. Because of the technical requirements and the level of customization of each Salesforce system, you must be comfortable with how the consultants communicate with you. For example, making sure the system works the way you planned and getting all your questions answered promptly are communication considerations. 

The Salesforce platform can transform your organization. But, before that can happen, the tool must be implemented appropriately. Getting to that place can be an uphill battle if you’re unprepared. Therefore, a comprehensive plan that outlines what happens before, during, and after the implementation is critical. In addition, working with the right consultant will make the transition as smooth and easy as possible. 

Our Revenue Ops, LLC team is committed to providing the best experience possible. We have a tried and true system for Salesforce implementations that starts with a complimentary discovery meeting to discuss your needs. Then we map out a plan with specific tasks and timelines to strategically incorporate Salesforce into your operations and tech stack. We take the time to review project progress and address any questions throughout the process.

If you want to discuss how we can help you to implement Salesforce successfully, don’t hesitate to contact us!

Schedule a free discovery session

Salesloft Solutions Partner Program

What the Salesloft Partner Program Means to Us

Salesloft recently announced a Solution Partner Program for companies that recommend and implement Salesloft tools to maximize revenue for their clients. We are thrilled that Revenue Ops LLC has achieved Select tier status within this partner program.  

We are excited about formally partnering with Salesloft. We’re very comfortable with the platform. It is our sales engagement software of choice when we’re working on improving our clients’ workflows.

This partnership uniquely positions us to have access to Salesloft resources. We are particularly excited about experiencing cutting-edge product feature releases. Salesloft is committed to providing enhancements that reflect current sales process trends. And, we’ve found them to be really good about responding to customer feature requests since they’re based on real-world use cases. 

We’re looking forward to being privy to future integration and implementation opportunities. We appreciate that improving an operational process does not necessarily mean installing completely new programs. Sometimes existing programs just need a little boost to make them more useful. Integrations enhance our strategic approach when developing the technology and workflows for our clients because it saves time when we implement existing applications to complement new software. It also streamlines the training and onboarding process. 

Ultimately the most significant benefit of this partnership is transferring all of these perks to our clients. So when you work with us, you can be confident that you’re receiving the highest level of service. 

Best Features of Salesloft

We think the biggest and best benefit of Salesloft is that it allows small but mighty teams like us to operate like a large, Fortune 500 company. There might be strength in numbers, but sometimes less is more. 

Thanks to the robust and intuitive nature of Salesloft, we can communicate at scale with our prospects and customers. These days, resources are scarce just about everywhere, and there isn’t enough time in the workday to accomplish everything we need to do. But, if we invest a little time in building relationships with our contacts by defining audience segments, configuring some preset messages, and establishing a reasonable distribution frequency, we can maintain top-of-mind exposure effectively and efficiently.

Salesloft provides the tools we need to automate our communications along with a high degree of personalization and customization. As a result, we can interact with our contacts strategically and regularly. In addition, Salesloft offers one-to-one SMS messaging capabilities and custom videos so that we can engage in direct but less invasive ways.

Salesloft also makes it easy to connect and scale our operations through integrations. Therefore, we don’t have to reinvent the wheel when implementing new technology. Salesloft integrates seamlessly with a number of sales and marketing applications, including Salesforce.

As a Salesforce partner, we combine data from our CRM and sales engagement activities to paint a clear picture of our interactions. And we use the data to evaluate our tactics and optimize them accordingly. 

Salesloft Select Partnership

Salesloft Improves Our Operations

Salesloft is designed to help sales representatives be productive and focus on their regular sales tasks. They don’t have to be bogged down by mundane administrative tasks because Salesloft automates and synchronizes tasks like recording conversations, scheduling meetings, and designing and distributing reports. 

Sales representatives feel more organized and aware of their responsibilities. Salesloft makes it easy for them to understand where their contacts are within the sales process. And they can easily plan the next steps and follow-ups so that nothing falls through the cracks. 

From a customer experience perspective, Salesloft enables customer service representatives to stay on top of renewals to maximize revenue. Avoiding missed opportunities goes a long way to ensuring recurring earnings and maintaining customer satisfaction. In addition, positive experiences with customer service help to extend the customer lifecycle.

Why Salesloft

When considering a sales engagement platform, it’s impossible to ignore Salesloft. It’s a market leader, and for a good reason. Salesloft focuses solely on optimizing business development opportunities and streamlining the sales cycle.

We at Revenue Ops LLC are intentional about aligning with market leaders. Salesloft is recognized by G2, Forrester, and TrustRadius. We help our clients maximize their revenue and scale their business by working with best-in-class products.

We are an experienced team of sales, marketing, and customer success professionals committed to helping clients improve their performance. We apply our deep knowledge of CRM systems like Salesforce and sales enablement tools like Salesloft to optimize sales potential by stimulating and tracking customer interactions. Learn how we can help you implement a strategy to improve revenue operations and maximize your growth.

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Sales Enablement vs. Sales Operations

The Difference Between Sales Enablement and Sales Operations

Sales enablement, sales operations…sounds pretty similar, right? It’s actually pretty easy to confuse the two. Here are the most significant differences between sales enablement and sales operations. 

The key difference between sales operations and sales enablement is that sales operations focuses on the operational efficiency of the everyday business processes involved in selling (i.e., order management, forecasting). In contrast, sales enablement experts work directly with other teams to increase adoption within the organization by providing content, training, and support for their customers. 

Note: operational or technical account managers are a part of sales operations, whereas account executives or senior account managers can be considered as part of sales enablement even though they may not have direct reports under them. This distinction becomes more evident when they have a dedicated individual responsible for overseeing the training, onboarding, and support of their accounts.

Sales Enablement Roles and Responsibilities

  • Create, manage and distribute content
  • Train internal stakeholders on their products or services
  • Partner with marketing for campaign support
  • Develop supporting collateral to help internal teams sell better

Sales Operations Roles and Responsibilities

  • Order management
  • Forecasting
  • Technical account management
  • Classifying and adding new accounts
  • Workflows and approvals (pipeline development)

How are these roles similar? Both are responsible for creating, training, managing, and distributing the company’s product awareness. Plus, a good sales operations team should have a solid understanding of how sales enablement efforts directly relate to actual sales. And vice versa: sales enablement directly impacts operational efficiency when done correctly. For example, sales engineers can identify issues in your software and escalate them before customers contact the sales team.

Focus on What’s Best for Your Business

This distinction between sales enablement and sales operations matters because it helps each team focus on what’s best for their business.

Sales enablement focuses on delivering an engaging customer journey. Therefore the team works closely with marketing to provide content through email drip campaigns, interactive guides, and personalized user experiences.

On the other hand, sales operations will work closely with other teams like finance to identify opportunities for process improvement, including automating order management or improving forecasting accuracy.

Drive New Business Growth

Both roles are vital for driving new business growth – yet both still require additional tools to help them become even more efficient at their jobs (or turn you into a unicorn).

Sales Enablement: If you’re working on sales enablement, then the first thing you need is CRM. CRM gives your team one place to manage all of their customer interactions and information, including marketing campaigns, email drip programs, account plans, product launch schedules, and more.

Sales Operations: If you work in sales operations, then the next thing you’ll want after CRM is analytics. Salesforce Analytics Cloud lets you track company-wide trends so you can benchmark how much business your reps are driving overall vs. other companies in the industry. In addition, it comes with pre-built reports that help you visualize data to improve quotas or forecast accuracy.

Operations + Enablement = Sales Growth

These two roles work together to drive new business growth. But the right tools can take them from good to great.

The best part about having both solutions? You can use them together to measure shared metrics across the company. Here’s a quick example: Sales operations wants to track the number of demo requests made by reps, and sales enablement wants to track the number of demos completed. But instead of each team creating their own copy of these KPIs, they can simply create a custom report in Analytics Cloud that uses both sets of data – which means less time spent tracking down information and more time for analysis and action.

So if you’re trying to figure out how best to spend your budget this year, remember that there are two distinct yet equally important roles when it comes to driving business growth. Sales enablement focuses on customer engagement while sales operations helps teams become more efficient at their jobs – so make sure your tools reflect those priorities!

Best Tools to Consider

1. Salesforce Sales Cloud: The sales management platform that helps salespeople and sales operations teams become more efficient at selling.

2. Salesforce Analytics Cloud: The analytics platform that lets you measure and benchmark your company against other businesses in your industry and identify opportunities for improvement.

3. SalesLoft: Fully-automated outbound prospecting software that uses AI to generate personalized email campaigns, manage prospects from cold outreach all the way through to close.

4. InsideView: Helps sales and marketing teams quickly discover new prospects, prioritize them based on fit, and generate targeted lists for outreach.

5. HubSpot Sales: A platform that lets you manage all your contacts with automated workflows that easily move prospects through the funnel. It also makes it simple to create custom reports that help teams understand their data in context with overall company performance.

6. HubSpot Marketing: The marketing automation platform allows marketers to personalize each customer’s journey by integrating email, social media, paid advertising, and more.

7. Zapier: A web tool that makes it easy to build your own automated workflows between all of our apps without having to write any code.

8. FullContact: Helps sales reps quickly connect with new leads by automatically updating their contact profiles based on social media activity.

9. RingLead: Lets companies link contact data from third-party databases into Salesforce so they can get a complete view of not just who their existing customers are but also who they’ve had conversations with in the past (and might be interested in reaching out to again).

10. Rapportive: Allows you to see LinkedIn profiles within your inbox so you can make connections based on shared contacts.

The best software solutions for your business will depend on the size of your team and how you work together within each role (sales enablement vs. sales operations). However, most companies can benefit by having access to both types of tools because they focus on different aspects of growing revenue. With this distinction in mind, you can be sure to develop a complete and well-rounded sales stack that will help you increase your ROI and become a unicorn.

We at Revenue Ops LLC are happy to help you navigate sales operations and sales enablement software options and choose the right tool for your business. Let’s discuss your goals, obstacles, and vision to get started. 

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