by Mike Walsh | Apr 26, 2019 | Blog, Salesforce Tips
Automation is the name of the game when it comes to getting the most out of Salesforce. Capturing lead information with the handy web-to-lead functionality is one of the core elements for enabling Sales teams. Not only is the information the lead entered from the web form stored directly onto a lead page in Salesforce, but you can set up the system to auto assign a Sales rep, and have that user notified regarding the new inquiry.
But what if your Sales team isn’t going to be able to follow up right away? You don’t want to lose that momentum. Or maybe you just want to buy your team a bit of time to ensure they can do their research before reaching out? You guessed it, automation is the answer.
The best option here is the web-to-lead autoresponse emails. Once the template and sending filters are setup, an email will be automatically sent out to the new lead, as soon as their info registers in the system. As this feature comes standard on the CRM, we have a few tips below for setting up and optimizing your Salesforce autoresponse emails.
Setup your template (letterhead)
To make life easy on yourself, start by setting up a template, also known in Salesforce as a letterhead. This way, every successive, similar email you want to build will already have the same basic components, such as a header logo, and ensure they all look the same. Click here for steps on creating a letterhead
(This can also be done in Pardot if you want nicer looking emails. By default, Salesforce offers limited formatting options for your emails)
Create the different variations dependant upon the use case
For this, you need to define the when and the why of each email you are going to be using. Did you capture the lead from a demo video, whitepaper download, or simply someone clicking a “contact us” button?
Best practice for both Sales and Marketing is to send different emails in each of these use cases. But now that you have your letterhead, the basic formatting is already taken care of. From there, create your first email, and you can always use the clone option when making more to quickly build variants that feature small tweaks.
Content is king
Of course, you need to make sure that the content of the email is relevant and specific to the use case. Don’t get off to a bad start by thanking someone for watching a video if they haven’t seen any video. A few other tips for these autoresponse emails.
- Use merge tags – marketing researchers have proven time and again that adding in a merge tag and personalizing, like the lead’s first name, can have a big impact on improving how an email is received.
- Give added value – another handy marketing trick is to follow up with added value to further engage. Whether it be a blog post, success story or any other content you have created, just be sure that it can add some real value for your lead.
Define your web to lead autoresponse rules
Once you have all of your emails built, it’s time to make sure they send to the right lead. For this, Salesforce allows you to build your sending rules on a large number of fields in either the lead, campaign or current user.
For example, a common use here is the “Lead Source” default field. Simply that you will send a different email to each lead, based on where they came into the system. Whichever fields you choose, do make sure to pick reliable fields that won’t be changing frequently, or can have data error problems. Click here for steps on setting up the autoresponse rules.
-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
CEO of CloudMyBiz Salesforce CRM consulting services with a deep knowledge in the lending industry. Taking keen interest in the project management side of operations, playing a vital role in the 31% YOY company growth. Strategic leader, mastering the ability to problem solve at every level of the business, providing effective solutions for clients.
by Mike Walsh | Apr 4, 2019 | Blog, Salesforce Tips
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
CEO of CloudMyBiz Salesforce CRM consulting services with a deep knowledge in the lending industry. Taking keen interest in the project management side of operations, playing a vital role in the 31% YOY company growth. Strategic leader, mastering the ability to problem solve at every level of the business, providing effective solutions for clients.
by Mike Walsh | Mar 28, 2019 | Blog, Salesforce Tips
Salesforce isn’t just an enterprise-level CRM, companies of all shapes and sizes can use and benefit from the powerful features and tools. Of course, to get the most from your CRM, strong internal Salesforce support can make a huge difference in the platform’s success!
When you start looking out for a CRM software for a small team, likely you are wanting most of these qualities:
- Quick to setup with an easy to use interface
- Automation, faster process and less screens and clicks to deal with.
- Essential data and details are easy to access
- Needs to be effective to get the Sales team to use it
Salesforce can do all of these things for you. In addition, and most powerfully, Salesforce is something that your company can grow with. Infinitely scalable, (as we said, extremely large, enterprise companies use it) you never have to worry about growing too big for the CRM. In addition, Salesforce is known for its reporting capabilities, which are extremely robust, and give you just about any detail or metric you would need to improve and grow your company.
So with all of that being said, here are a few tips for using Salesforce with a small team, and leading you to better business practices.
Tips for Small Companies Using Salesforce
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Create a Salesforce Roadmap… and use it!
A Salesforce Roadmap should be a big picture dive into all your business software systems, not just CRM, and not just Salesforce. This will help you identify all needs and goals, as well as potential roadblocks and pitfalls. By laying it out with a list of major initiatives with milestones and deployment dates, you will have a solid foundation to build on.
This way, when any new issue or potential development comes along, you can compare it against the roadmap to work off, and assess your team’s bandwidth and priorities.
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Use the Salesforce AppExchange
It’s no secret that there are a lot of powerful tools on the AppExchange and for good reason! Many of the apps provide essential features and automation that can dramatically improve your business. When you are in a small company, you need to be efficient – so take a peek, and find the apps that will unlock your team’s max effectiveness.
To get weekly app recommendations – Sign up for our weekly newsletter
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Try the Salesforce Optimizer
Salesforce Optimizer is a free tool for Professional and Enterprise level accounts. It provides optimization tips and ideas, through a custom report that you request online. Built and maintained by Salesforce, this one is pretty much a no-brainer, as it will tell you what already included features of Salesforce you could use more of, or use better.
Click here to learn more.
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Utilize Salesforce Knowledge Resources
You can learn just about anything that is Salesforce Related on the knowledge base. From help articles to detailed walkthroughs to questions and answers from other users, it’s all there. The answers section is particularly helpful to get feedback from other users on real-world situations, with reasonable response times.
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Leverage “Cases” as an Internal Help Desk
Of course, if you need answers or assistance with the big stuff, there are always Cases. Cases are a standard object in Salesforce which you can leverage as an internal support system, and ask for guidance, or admin help on just about anything in the CRM. You can either contact cases through the Email to Case feature, or from your Partner Portal.
Just remember that Salesforce has thousands of cases being submitted each day, so if your issue isn’t urgent (affecting essential functionality) it might take days or even a couple weeks to get the issue resolved.
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Train Your Internal Users
Internal user training can be a real lifesaver, especially because in a small company, most people wear many hats. So, by giving all of your users a decent level of Salesforce expertise and knowledge, they should be able to begin solving their own issues and feel empowered to take care of business. This will avoid admin bottlenecks, and helps the team to be their own solution.
Trailhead can also serve as a training resource. Salesforce product experts provide instructional content for multiple user roles and experience levels. Users can customize their trails to learn the content that meets their needs, and learn at their own pace.
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Get Outside Help if Needed
At any point in a project, it can quickly become more cost effective to pay an expert, rather than taking the time (and opportunity cost) to figure it out yourself. If you ever get into this situation, you should consider either Premier Support; or enlist a consulting company to build a support package that meets your needs and budget.
-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
CEO of CloudMyBiz Salesforce CRM consulting services with a deep knowledge in the lending industry. Taking keen interest in the project management side of operations, playing a vital role in the 31% YOY company growth. Strategic leader, mastering the ability to problem solve at every level of the business, providing effective solutions for clients.
by Mike Walsh | Mar 8, 2019 | Blog, Salesforce Tips
Setting a new Salesforce Org can be a very exciting time! So many possibilities and opportunities at your fingertips. Maybe its the start of a new venture, or just a way to improve your business organization. Either way, you want to get started on the right foot.
So, we put together a quick but effective list of to-dos and steps that will help you get your new Salesforce Org off the ground and set up for success.
- Define Your Naming –
- How you do this will depend on what type of org you are creating. Getting your naming standards down early will help a ton and avoid much confusion later.
- Best practice is to define your user and company names to indicate the Name (or purpose) of the Org, along with the full name being used and a version if applicable.
- Add Your Company Logo
- A great way to do this is with a custom app. Upload the logo to the App, and then simply set the App to appear in any location you want the logo to appear.
- Enter Your Company Info
- Primarily speaking, you need to get the company’s default time zone, fiscal year, and primary contact information.
- Set Security Policies
- Setting up security is always essential. Passwords, network and session settings are a great place to start. Users and account permissions are next! Try the Health Check feature of Salesforce for a guide on best practices.
- Enable Chatter
- The internal communication community for Salesforce. A great way to make sure that everyone stays connected.
- Add Power of One & Case Safe ID Fields
- These two fields can be very helpful when it comes to reporting. Set them up in Sandbox.
- Power of One is a simple formula that enables you to summarize data quickly in reports.
- Case Safe ID is a formula that enables you to manipulate record IDs in other reporting tools that do not recognize case-sensitivity.
So there you go. You are a few steps closer to having a well oiled Org up and running.
-Ryan and the CloudMyBiz Team
CEO of CloudMyBiz Salesforce CRM consulting services with a deep knowledge in the lending industry. Taking keen interest in the project management side of operations, playing a vital role in the 31% YOY company growth. Strategic leader, mastering the ability to problem solve at every level of the business, providing effective solutions for clients.
by Mike Walsh | Jan 2, 2019 | Blog, Salesforce Tips
Happy New Year to everyone! 2018 is in the books and 2019 is officially here. It’s been a big year for Salesforce, and of course, for us Salesforce experts and consultants. As always, the platform is growing to service a bigger audience but also working to provide better solutions and functionality for those already using it.
Last year saw tremendous advances in the areas of AI, Security (GDPR), automation, big data and the Internet of Things. So what can we expect in the world of CRM in the coming year? Well if, its anything like last year, quite a lot!
The growing trends in just about every area of business and sales revolve around the ever-increasing amounts of information and data out there, and how they are used, analyzed and processed. People want to make sure their data isn’t being manipulated, but they also want better and more relevant interactions from brands. Companies are challenged to not only collect as much data while maintaining trust but then needing to figure out how to understand that data to grow.
According to Salesforce’s fifth annual “State of Marketing” report, released in December 2018, 84% of those polled said that being treated like a person rather than a number is essential to winning their business. With all of this in mind, it should come as no surprise that Salesforce is likely going to focus on Customer Experience (CX) in the following year.
What is the idea behind CX?
In a nutshell, you can think of it as a new piece of the value proposition. Customers are finding how they are treated to be increasingly more important, and purchase decisions are not just on the quality of product or service alone.
So how will Salesforce likely move in this direction? There are 3 main areas that come to mind:
- Customer Data and Personalization
- Connecting with customers and making them feel valued. Giving them a curated experience and not just a one-size-fits-all response. This is what people are looking for. It’s all about personalization, and the more personal you can make the customer’s experience, the better.
- Collecting customer data is how companies are able to customize each customer’s experience. Not just the obvious things like their name and address, but minute data points that begin to tell the bigger picture of their needs, wants and habits. Look to Salesforce to roll out many different tools and add-ons that make that customer experience ever more personable
- AI
- In 2018, Salesforce pushed pretty hard to get their AI software, Einstein, into the minds of customers. Watch for it to really begin to take root in 2019. Relying on computer analytics to give quality recommendations naturally takes time to adjust to, but sooner or later, it will take hold. Or at least, this is the bet that Salesforce has gone all in on.
- AI can allow companies to get ahead of the game and be proactive with regards to their customers’ needs. Some new areas you may begin to see AI in are voice-to-text functionalities, spam filters, sales forecasting, smart searches, and sentimental analysis.
- Marketing Automation
- Automation is not a new buzzword. But it sure is important in just about every area. Who wouldn’t want to take a 10-hour manual process and reduce it down to a couple of simple keystrokes?
- Increased marketing automation means companies can interact with their customers not only more, but at the right time! So when you really need a new bottle of shampoo and an add comes up reminding you, well that’s pretty good customer experience.
- Salesforce has been working diligently with both Pardot (B2B) and Marketing Cloud (B2C) in the last few years to continue adding features and streamlining their marketing automation options. 2019 should continue this trend.
Read more here about the shift toward Customer Experience
As an added bonus, (and to back up the point that Salesforce is very much thinking about Customer Experience), we found a great article on their own blog, with some of their 2019 predictions, in regards to retail.
Some of their predictions include:
- Integration of customer data across systems will become imperative
- Subscription commerce will get a big boost
- And purpose-driven brands will thrive!
Read the full article here
-Ryan and the CloudMyBiz Team
CEO of CloudMyBiz Salesforce CRM consulting services with a deep knowledge in the lending industry. Taking keen interest in the project management side of operations, playing a vital role in the 31% YOY company growth. Strategic leader, mastering the ability to problem solve at every level of the business, providing effective solutions for clients.
