Boost Your Business: A Mid-Year CRM Check

Boost Your Business: A Mid-Year CRM Check

Hey there, fellow business trailblazers! Can you believe summer is almost over, and pumpkin spice lattes are just around the corner? Now it’s time to boost your business and ensure your Salesforce system is ready to tackle the rest of the year. As a revenue operations team, we developed a simple guide to help you perform a CRM check that will put your business on the path to success! 

Data: Clean and Green

Clean data needs to be the foundation of your tech stack. You have to trust what your reports are saying, and data within your systems should correlate and pass seamlessly from one system to another. Duplicate and incomplete data can find its way into your instance in many ways. Yet, no matter how it gets there, you must do something about it. A system that identifies and eliminates these pesky duplicates, like duplicate management rules in your CRM, creates reliable data for effective reporting and forecasting across systems.

Customizations: Tailor-Made Solutions

Customize your CRM to fit your unique business needs. A CRM is generally a pricy part of your tech stack, so it should be set up in a way that works best for your team’s processes. For example, picture yourself running a subscription-based service. Your mid-year analysis reveals a chance to automate the subscription renewal process with custom workflows. This time-saving enhancement ensures that nothing falls through the cracks while your team enjoys the benefit of reduced manual efforts.

User Adoption: Engage and Thrive

Encourage your team to embrace Salesforce to its full potential. Consider, for example, a growing marketing agency that uses Salesforce.com (SFDC) to streamline lead management, among other things. In a recent systems check, they found sales members hesitant to embrace the new CRM because they had lingering questions about the lead qualification process. 

Organizing interactive training and feedback sessions and showcasing the benefits of your CRM to the sales team can spark enthusiasm for how efficient the sales process can be within the CRM. A few advantages of a well-organized CRM system are automation, lead qualification, and activity capture. Incorporating the team’s ideas and input will make them feel like they’ve contributed to a meaningful part of the prospect journey. 

Metrics: Power Your Growth

The very fact that your CRM collects and organizes customer information means it’s holding robust data your business needs to take advantage of. As mentioned previously, the first step is ensuring the numbers tell an accurate story. From there, you should harness the power of data-driven insights. For example, you might use the native CRM reporting feature to focus on closed lost deals and their lead source or create custom forecasts that allow your sales managers to understand when and where they will realize revenue. The possibilities are endless, so be creative and use your data.

Security: Protect Your Fortunes

Safeguard your data as if it were treasure because it is. Security means that not all your data must be accessible to your entire company. It would be best if you established boundaries and unique permission sets. 

Consider a financial services company using Salesforce to manage client portfolios. During a recent security review, they unearthed a potential vulnerability – some users had unnecessary access to sensitive financial data and personally identifiable information (PII). By tightening access controls, improving the profile and role settings, and implementing two-factor authentication, they can shield their clients’ interests and protect their data against potential threats.

We’re Here to Help

Your CRM system holds the keys to how efficiently your team can operate. It sits at the center of your organization and demands careful planning and execution. We encourage you to go through the CRM check tactics in this guide and take the necessary steps to apply them to improve your sales operations. 

Navigating the Salesforce landscape might be overwhelming, but you can do it with some professional help. You have a trusted partner with years of experience with Revenue Ops LLC. If you have questions or want to talk, contact our consultants today.

 

Salesforce Best Practices

Salesforce Best Practices from Revenue Operations Professionals

Having worked with Salesforce for several years, our team of revenue operations specialists has compiled a list of Salesforce best practices. We hope these simple but essential nuggets of wisdom will spare you unnecessary aggravation and set you up for automation and sales success.

Test and Retest

You may think that the simple “flow” you created is only going to affect an associated record, but are you sure? Salesforce instances are complex systems that weave together elements and applications. A well-thought-out change to the way something fires cannot only cause an unintended consequence but could cause delays in business activities or even trigger errant emails to customers. To avoid confusion, be sure to test your updates in a sandbox and within the current production environment upon launch. 

Keep It Simple

Ideally, automation will take work off your plate, but if not implemented correctly, it can complicate workflows. Unfortunately, it’s more common than you’d think for teams desperately looking for efficiency to automate every step of a process and end up with a tangled web of error messages and internal questions. Instead of streamlining operations, you can end up in a messier place. Therefore, knowing the reason for the implementation and understanding how it will play out with other processes is helpful to consider before moving forward with a specific automation. By taking the time to map it out, you will be able to avoid business delays and likely have tangible insight into potential updates in the future.

Don’t Forget Data Quality

What are you doing about duplicates? How is data coming in and out of your platform? These fundamental questions need to be visited throughout the Salesforce ride. Having clean data means the reports you rely on are accurate and reliable. It lets your team pick up on trends and make accurate forecasts. So instead of blindly making decisions or depending on a feeling about your company’s health, you can be confident. That all starts with your data, so make sure everything adds up. 

Designate a Salesforce Guru

Your Salesforce instance is not expected to be a set-it-and-forget-it application. Your system will undoubtedly require updates, user activation, and minor tweaks here and there. In addition, ongoing training and support for your internal team will go a long way in ensuring user adoption and acceptance. Therefore, we strongly recommend that an individual is selected to be responsible for all things Salesforce. This person should be able to maneuver throughout your implementation comfortably. They should also be aware of the bottlenecks in your operations. Ideally, your guru is familiar with flows, a valuable tool for automating elaborate workflows. If you plan to have more than fifty users and/or expect to integrate with other applications, consider working with a certified Salesforce administrator. The manager can be an internal or external resource, like Revenue Ops LLC

Know Your Emergency Contact

Who are you going to call if your Salesforce implementation experiences functional issues? What happens when everything stops working? Not to be overly dramatic, but it’s valuable to know who to call when everything hits the fan. This contact is usually beyond the Salesforce admin. They likely have an extensive technical background and are intimately familiar with your specific instance. It may be the team that first implemented everything or a Salesforce developer you trust. Having someone available in a time of need is beneficial for your business. 

Adopting these Salesforce best practices may seem overboard, but it can mean the difference between success and failure. Salesforce is an excellent growth tool, but we must use it correctly. 

Revenue Ops LLC offers a variety of services, from full-scale Salesforce implementations to on-call support in times of trouble. Let’s schedule some time to talk if you have questions or want to learn more about what we do.