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Do You Have Sales Performance and Task Dashboards?

Do You Have Sales Performance and Task Dashboards?

What does your sales team see when they login to Salesforce? A generic homepage? Apps, widgets and screens that aren’t relevant to their job and are only there taking up space?

If the answer to any of these is yes, you are missing out! Not only is this an easy opportunity to empower your team and give them a leg up each day, but they are actually losing time and effectiveness by not having Salesforce Dashboards on their home page.

A well-built home page may include but is not limited to:

  • Calls Logged
  • Tasks (pending and completed)
  • Calendars & Events
  • Leads Breakdown
  • Opportunity Pipeline
  • Recent Opportunities & Records

Some of these items come pre-built in the Salesforce Lightning Builder, such as “Today’s Tasks”, “Recent Records” and “Recent Items”. The others are simply added as “Report Charts”.

Sure, you do need to go ahead and create some of your own reports, but this is also where you can get creative and make reports that are custom-tailored to your business and sales needs. For example, to create a report showing the Opportunity Pipeline for a particular Sales Rep, create a report with the following filters:

  • All opportunities
  • Close Date = All Time
  • Opportunity Status = Open
  • Probability = All
  • Stage = not equal to Prospecting
  • Opportunity Owner = (name of rep)

When you add this report to the home page you can also specify that the particular Home Page should be shown to only a particular App and Profile, thus making it possible to customize for each user in your company. 

Click here for more details on building your home page

 

-Ryan and the CloudMyBiz Team

 


Want to get started with Salesforce? 

Need some custom consulting or development to enhance the Salesforce you already have?

Contact us

 

Enhancing Business Partnerships with a Community

Enhancing Business Partnerships with a Community

Quality business partnerships between yourself and another company aren’t always easy to come by. However, when you get one that is thriving, you certainly want to keep that ball rolling.

Communication, sharing and transparency are some of the essential ingredients. So how do you enable all of these when you and your partner are looking to roll out a new product, or even a set of products? What do you do when you are diving into a new market or a new vertical, and need to lean on each other to make the venture fly? How do you manage your leads, sales, onboarding, and customer service, when these roles and responsibilities are shared?

Well if you are using Salesforce, the answer to all of this is simple…

Salesforce Partner Communities!

The Salesforce Partner Communities are the best way to handle all of the above concerns and do so in a fully branded and streamlined online environment.

For those of you who have been with Salesforce for a while now, you may have been familiar with Partner portals. These portals (discontinued in new orgs as of 2013) were essentially a stripped down version of the Partner Community, where one partner would essentially be the “host” and the other business would get login credentials to the portal.

Once there, they would have access to a curated version of the host’s Salesforce org. Including, leads, contacts, accounts, etc. The host would be able to choose exactly what the other partner would have access to – to ensure compliance and security. However, all of this is still a little lacking, so Salesforce went a step further and introduced the Partner Community.

The Partner Community is a fully shared environment – which is one of the things that makes it so great. Any number of partners can connect, and specify which of their data sets are connected. Thus, all partners get a total sharing and collaborative experience. This enables powerful lead gen and sales opportunities.

The increased transparency also ensures that no deals or opportunities fall through the cracks because of miscommunication on assignment and ownership.

The next level of partnership

Aside from the partner community being a great place to drive sales, it can also be your number one resource for knowledge and help, both internal and external.

When any partner logs in – the can access curated notifications on the home page, keeping them up to date on and new developments. If you have the time and patience to build a knowledge base, you can upload everything, so that all of your team, from marketing to sales to customer enablement can have the information they need, right at their fingertips.

The same goes for customers and customer support. If you want to have a customer facing knowledge base – boom – there you go. This can also take a real burden off of your support staff. Finally, the portal can be used as a direct way for customers to connect with your support team, ensuring a smooth and centralized process for all aspects of the partnership.  

 

-Ryan and the CloudMyBiz Team

 


Want to get started with Salesforce?

Need some custom consulting or development to enhance the Salesforce you already have?

Contact us

The When and Why of Salesforce Communities Cloud

The When and Why of Salesforce Communities Cloud

Here’s the situation: your business has a number of great products/services. You are doing a robust business. And you have a whole bunch of customers contacting your support team every day asking for help. Of course, you are happy to support your customers in any way you can, but the sheer volume of calls and messages is beginning to overwhelm your support team and causing other operational slowdowns. So what do you do? Salesforce Communities Cloud!

people togeher. Communities Cloud

What is a Community Cloud?

Community Cloud is a Salesforce platform that gives companies the tools to create a branded online community to connect with customers, external partners and employees.

Customer communities can be used for many different needs, including:

  • Support and feedback
  • Qualifying leads
  • Tracking revenue
  • Discussion and collaboration
  • Providing product information and training
  • HR and IT information resources

The Salesforce Communities Cloud is a great addition to the Salesforce Service Cloud that can significantly streamline all of your service needs. Communities can function as many things: a portal, a help site, a support forum, and whatever your preferred iteration, Communities allows you to better engage and support your customer community. How so? Communities creates an interactive and secure online site where customers can log on to self-service any questions or issues they may have, access account information, or connect and collaborate with one another.

This has a couple of effects. First, it drastically reduces the number of cases your team has to handle. It gives your community an easy way to find solutions without sitting on hold for hours. Finally, it allows a better way to engage the community, increase support and build trust among your client base.

Getting Started

So now you might be thinking, yes, it sounds nice to have a vibrant and comprehensive online portal and community, but we don’t have the time or budget to create something like that! Good news, Salesforce Communities Cloud is designed to be easy to set up. In fact, many communities are up and running in as little as 30 days!

Communities come with a number of different, scalable templates to make development a breeze. No coding is necessary, custom components can easily be integrated and everything can be customized, on brand, and totally mobile-ready.

Finally, Communities comes built to seamlessly integrate with Salesforce CRM data, such as leads, accounts, activities, and opportunities. No time-consuming processes, or wonky integrations here.

Benefits of Communities Cloud

Business group with thumbs up in an office

So now we come to the fun part. We have told you that the community cloud solves for a number of common service issues, but the community cloud is about more than just making things easier for your support and service teams. Below we have listed a few of the other benefits you can see from using Communities Cloud:

Improved Customer Relationships

You can populate your online hub with just about anything that will help your customers, such as tutorials, FAQ’s, databases of questions and answer and even allow them connect with each other and your company. The more resources and content-rich you get, the better your customers can have a self-guided experience that lets them find all the info they need! Not only does it deepen your relationship with the customer, but it builds trust, dependability, accessibility and improves customer loyalty in the long run.

Better Feedback

A hidden gem of Communities Cloud is that it allows you to research your products, and get all sorts of feedback and use cases directly from your customers!

By observing your community’s natural behavior, you can easily find out the biggest sources of satisfaction and dissatisfaction, what new features your base is hoping to see, and what issues or questions are the most common (pointing the way to items that should be fixed)

Save Money

Which part of management doesn’t like saving money?

In the end, providing quality customer service and support takes time and resources. So, by having a quality portal that lets customers self-solve their issues, you will free up many of these resources to be used elsewhere. This results in a significant reduction of expenses. For example, in England, it’s estimated that a popular online community for diabetes patients has saved the National Health Service over a million dollars each year in hypoglycemia cases alone.

Additionally, because a quality community hub better establishes your reputation, builds customer loyalty and increases engagement, companies often see an increase in sales and long-term customer retention as a direct result of activity within their community!

Who Should Use Communities Cloud?

An online community isn’t just for B2C companies. Just about anyone who is already using Salesforce Service Cloud will benefit from Communities. No matter your business, you can make your service and support much more pro-active and timely with Communities.

-Ryan and the CloudMyBiz Team

 


If a highly customizable community solution sounds like something that would help your business, drop us a line. CloudMyBiz works with you to develop and implement the best possible community, custom tailored to your business’ unique needs.

Contact Us

 

Tip of the Week – Opportunity Splits for Credit and Revenue Sharing in Salesforce

Tip of the Week – Opportunity Splits for Credit and Revenue Sharing in Salesforce

 

Opportunity splits are an easy and effective way to share credit among your sales teams. Not every deal is the work of a single person, or even one single sales team. The Opportunity Splits allow everyone involved to get credit for their work, and show it on their revenue reports. Opportunity Splits have been around for quite a while in Salesforce Classic, but just came out for the Lightning Experience with the Spring ‘18 Release

To set up Opportunity splits, an administrator will need to enable them in your system. Once enabled, sharing credit is easy. Simply navigate to the Opportunity Splits section on an Opportunity and fill out the fields. You can credit team members who are directly responsible for opportunity revenue with revenue splits, which always total 100% of the opportunity amount or you can credit supporting team members with overlay splits, which can total any percentage of the opportunity amount, including percentages over 100%.

Considerations for Creating Opportunity Splits

 

-Ryan and the CloudMyBiz Team

Tip of the Week – Coming soon: Custom Navigation Bar for Salesforce Lightning!

Tip of the Week – Coming soon: Custom Navigation Bar for Salesforce Lightning!

If you are a Salesforce user, you probably have a lot of pages to navigate every day. And if you are like most users of Salesforce Classic, you have probably customized your navigation bar to give you easy access to your most commonly used apps and screens. Unfortunately for anyone whose company already has, or will soon make the switch from Classic to Lightning, that custom navigation bar you spent so much time on will not carry over to Lightning … Until Spring that is!

Coming as part of the Spring ‘18 release, Lightning users will gain the long awaited ability to customize their navigation. Stay tuned to the CloudMyBiz blog over the next few months for a more details on making these time saving adjustments. In the meantime, Salesforce admins have provided a simple but effective workaround. The Favorites tool! Simply add the pages you want to save to your Favorites list, and access them later from the drop down menu at the top of your screen.

Click here to see Favorites in action!

-Ryan and the CMB Team