Could you be doing more with your investment in Salesforce? Some organizations use only a small portion of the overall functionality available in Sales Cloud. Whether it’s storing basic contact information, recording sales activities, or creating sales Opportunities, Salesforce has a great model for basic CRM. But, Salesforce can be leveraged for so much more and experience tells us the deeper the adoption, the deeper the ROI. That’s why the team of certified Salesforce experts at Concentrix Catalyst has compiled this list of four ways to get more value from Salesforce.
In this piece, we’ll cover four underutilized features in Sales Cloud and how they can make your sales team more effective.
Organize a Solid Pipeline Process with Leads and Opportunities
Many sales teams lack a clearly defined process for engaging with leads. As a result, it’s difficult to manage to follow up and to ensure no one slips through the cracks.
The first step in establishing a sales process is identifying each stage in the customer journey from the first interaction with your business to making a purchase. The steps in this path will be replicated in Salesforce through Lead Statuses and Opportunity Stages.
This allows your team to group Leads and Opportunities by stage or status. Through a Kanban view, they can view all their assigned Opportunities within each stage and drag records from one column to the next.
Each of these stages should have a clearly defined path that outlines the milestones your reps will progress through to advance a possible sale. You can do this easily with the Guidance to Success Path functionality in both Leads and Opportunities in Salesforce Lightning Experience.
Forecasting Opportunity Revenue
Using Opportunity Stages also impacts revenue forecasting. When setting up your stages, you can add a probability (e.g. 30%, 60%) that indicates the likelihood of a deal closing.
By combining the probability with the value and close date on the Opportunity, you can forecast potential revenue over a specific time period.
Forecasting allows your team to be more proactive. They’re able to more clearly see where they stand regarding individual goals. They can also be more informed when setting priorities. Keep in mind that you’ll also want to consider how Salesforce Territories or the Products object may impact and extend your forecasting capabilities.
Tracking Lines of Business
Tracking lines of business allows you to tie sales to products and services. With this data, you can report on the sales performance of individual product lines. You can also forecast the demand for your individual products.
Opportunities can be tied to your lines of business through a simple picklist, by creating Opportunity Record Types, or through the Products object.
Implementing Quoting
Quotes, Products, and Price Books are standard features in Sales Cloud. By using these objects, you can create quotes that can be downloaded and shared with your customers. Quotes can be easily tracked by your team. They are related to Opportunities and can be displayed in a related list.
All of your sales items can be stored in Products. The pricing information for each product is housed in Price Books. The Quotes object combines your products and pricing using quote templates that can be created to suit your business.
More complex functionality, like line-item discounting, bundling and custom pricing by account is available by licensing Salesforce CPQ. When deciding whether to upgrade to CPQ, you should consider the complexity of your products, pricing, and quoting requirements.
Implementing Quotes in Salesforce will also help keep your reps in Salesforce rather than working in multiple systems. This will enable stronger adoption and ROI with your Salesforce investment.
By taking advantage of the four areas of functionality covered in this blog, you can accomplish more in Salesforce. Your sales team will be able to closely monitor each stage of the sales pipeline. They can get a better sense of where they stand regarding individual and company goals through forecasting. They can also generate quotes faster with standard quoting or Salesforce CPQ.
Better defining your sales process, creating forecasting reports, tracking opportunities by the line of business, and implementing quoting can be made easier with help from an outside partner. Contact us to get started with a free consultation.
