877.703.4488 info@cloudmybiz.com
Tips for Using Salesforce with a Small Team

Tips for Using Salesforce with a Small Team

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

  1. 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.

  1. 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

  1. 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.

  1. 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.  

  1. 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.

  1. 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.

  1. 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

Tips for Better Lead Scoring in Salesforce and Pardot

Tips for Better Lead Scoring in Salesforce and Pardot

 

Getting a large funnel of leads is a big part of the job for any marketer. However, once you have a good volume of leads, you need to do something with them. Specifically, you need to have good qualifying parameters set up so your sales team doesn’t spend a ton of time with leads who are either uninterested or just not ready. To find out who is really interested in your product, you need to set up your lead scoring properly.

When it comes to Pardot, your lead scoring is based upon specific actions taken by your prospects, such as email opens, link clicks, downloads, etc. The idea here is to establish how much the prospect is interested in you. The more engaged the prospect is with your website and your content, the more confident you can be that they are interested in you and your product/service.

Alternatively, how interested you are in the prospect is a separate scoring system in Pardot known as prospect grading. In this article we won’t be discussing grading, other than to say that it is through the grading system that you can determine your ideal lead based on industry, geography, title, etc. This grade gets attached to the prospect so that when a prospect seems interested in you, via lead scoring, you should have sufficient data to determine how much you want to engage with that prospect.

So without further ado, here are our quick tips to help you get the best results from your Pardot lead scoring.

Assign different scores for different pages and different actions.

As one of the foundations of any good lead scoring plan, you need to be sure that you have some variety in your scores. You most likely have a few pages on your site that are “more important” such as a pricing page or product detail page. These pages should have higher point values than say, “about us” or your blog page.

Similarly, not all actions are equal. While it is great that someone has clicked on a number of your emails, and maybe even downloaded a paper, it certainly isn’t as much of a positive flag as someone who has submitted a form on a contact page.

Negative scores and degradation

Negative scoring can be just as important as varying your scores for “more and less important” actions and pages. Over time, prospect scores can easily become inflated, as clicks and pageviews slowly add up. Negative scores can help keep this in check, such as assigning negative scores for views of your “Jobs” page, as you don’t want to be focusing your time on job seekers, or automatically be deducting points for a prospect who has been inactive for a certain period of time.

Keep an eye out for Spam

Unfortunately, there are a lot of spammers out there, and for whatever reason, they may be filling out forms, and being entered as prospects into your system. A couple things to look for that may indicate a spam prospect: a form that is filled out without the expected capitalizations in the name or company fields, or inputted field data that is basically gibberish words.

One other thing to keep in mind is that leads using an email address from either Gmail or Yahoo may indicate less reliable prospects. Whenever possible, try to focus on prospects with business email addresses. In any of these cases, keep an eye out for prospects whose data doesn’t seem to be in line with what you normally see. If something seems off, they might not be a good prospect.

Setup a lead scoring threshold

Once a prospect gets to a certain point threshold, you can set up notifications for your Sales team. This ensures that Sales only get notified after a prospect has gone through a certain level of qualification. A simple automation rule should do this trick nicely. Pardot recommends initially setting this threshold at 100 points, if you are going by their built-in scoring rules. Take some time to think and plan for what your ideal scoring threshold is, based on your frequency of marketing content, and how you are scoring each action. And don’t be afraid to tweak your threshold over time if you aren’t getting the results you need right off the bat.


Think twice when you assign points for email opens

Learning this one the hard way can really throw off your scores. Don’t get us wrong, email opens are essential for marketing, but they aren’t the best indicator of interest or engagement. After all, some people open all of their emails just to have a clean inbox! An email opened does not necessarily equal email read. 

If you are sending out a lot of emails, you should really consider not assigning a score for individual email opens, as it can give you an inflated score, that really doesn’t reflect how interested the prospect is. Better metrics to consider for emails will be click-through and content downloads.

Discuss your scoring model with the Sales Team

From the get-go,  marketing and sales should get aligned on this process. Sales can help you determine which metrics have been the best indicators of a quality prospect in the past and they can help you decide at what scoring threshold they want to get notified about individual prospects.

With all of these tips on board, you should be well on your way to having a better-qualified group of leads.

 

-Ryan and the CloudMyBiz team

How to Get The Most From Your Salesforce Implementation

How to Get The Most From Your Salesforce Implementation

 

Are you considering a new Salesforce implementation? Or maybe you just implemented Salesforce. Great! But before you continue with business as usual, there are a few things you should consider. Salesforce, like most major investments, takes a little bit of love, practice and know how to get the most out of. From a high-performance car to planting your own garden, how much you put into your investments dramatically influences what you get out of them. Whether your Salesforce Org is brand new, or a couple of years old, it’s never too late to adopt better practices and improve your business.

So in that vein, we have put together a short but powerful list of tips, based on research, discussion with Salesforce, and our own personal experience, on how to get the most out of your Salesforce implementation. The tips fall under two categories: things to do before your implementation, and things to do following a Salesforce implementation.

Preparing for a Salesforce Implementation

Think of it as moving into a new house or apartment. You don’t just pick a random place, sign a mortgage and drive straight over. A lot of planning and preparation is needed to make the big move, just the same as it is for a Salesforce Implementation.

Business Process Review

This is your chance for a better system and process.  A well designed Salesforce platform should mirror, support, and augment your business process, reflect your internal roles, hierarchies, security, and enable your organization to be more efficient. Take a little time, think about what you have that works, what doesn’t and what you could do to improve. This is your foundation…make a commitment, invest in it, and you’re well on your way to a positive, organization-changing implementation.

Get Advice from Certified Salesforce Expert

Just about any businesses can benefit from receiving expert advice. A certified Salesforce expert can help you develop a deeper understanding of your business goals and advise on best practices or potential solutions. Certified Salesforce experts can help you in just about any area of your business, from figuring out a better system architecture to the strategic guidance of creating a better business roadmap that aligns with your implementation. 

Review Your Data

Do you know where all of your data currently is?  Are you planning/preparing to move from silos to one system of record? Once you’ve taken the time to review your data the best thing you can do it simplify!  Not everyone on your team or inside of Salesforce needs to see every bit of minutiae, so be smart about your permissions, security and how everything is divided. If you do it right, not only will you avoid your team from feeling overloaded with data, which will negatively affect adoptions, but you will also set the foundation for a more secure and streamlined database.

Designate an IT project manager

As you prepare for a new implementation, you absolutely need to designate an individual who can work across functions, quickly gain consensus, make decisions and remove obstacles, and serve as the overall project champion. Having an IT project manager significantly improves both the quality of the implementation and the speed at which the implementation progresses. In addition, having continuity and leadership throughout the duration of the implementation will help immensely to ensure all goes smoothly and ensure that all your expectations are met. If you are working with a certified Salesforce developer and Consultant, this will be one of your primary contact points with the Salesforce expert.

Be Ready to Get Involved

Even if you are working with a developer or consultant to install Salesforce, you need to be ready to get your hands dirty. The more you participate with the implementation team, the better everyone can remain in sync, and generate the best results. Too little participation often leads to project delays and misaligned expectations.

Be Ready for Change. Expect Change

And set aside some extra funds for just in case you want to make additional changes. No project goes perfectly smooth from start to finish. Understanding this from the beginning will help ease any tensions or stress later on.

Post- Implementation Tips

Following your successful implementation, you need to remember that everything isn’t done yet. You still have plenty to do to make sure your system is optimized and stays that way.

Train, Train, Train

Training is one of the most critical points in ensuring user adoption and the long-term success of your Salesforce implementation.  It’s crucial that users not only learn how to use the system, but that they know how to make the most of it. If you can make the commitment to effective, ongoing training, you’ll end up with a confident and effective user base. And remember to keep on training as time goes on. The more you invest in your team’s knowledge, the more they will be able to do!

Plan for Support

Having a plan to support your user base is important to the continued growth of your platform. If you have a consultant or developer working with you, discuss with them a support plan that meets your needs to ensure any unexpected issues are covered. Make sure you have a plan ready to go for how you are going to support your user base.

User Feedback

Make sure your users have a way to submit support requests, make suggestions for improvements, and request additional training. Engagement with your team is critical to make sure your users know you’ve got their back and that they’re going to be heard. This will significantly improve user adoption, and of course, the better your user take to the new system, the better they can perform their jobs.

Automate All the Things

While some automation may be better left to the Salesforce partner who did your implementation, there are plenty of smaller tasks that you automate yourself. Things such as auto scheduling emails, workflows, and task notifications, can all significantly streamline your day and give you more time to focus on your most critical tasks.

Download Apps from the Appexchange

Why build when there is a marketplace of over 3000 pre-built apps. Need an email marketing client? Check. Want a better call center. Also check. Need to put fun quotes and emojis into your org? Yep, got that too. Need advice on the best app to use for a particular pain point? Our Salesforce consultants are happy to help.

Use Analytics

Reports & Dashboards should be relevant for the business. Take the time to learn how to utilize and build proper reports and dashboards. If they are showing irrelevant information, or the information they show isn’t easy to understand, you aren’t doing yourself any favors.

Salesforce1 Mobile

Finally, think about adopting Salesforce1. With Salesforce’s mobile integration, you can carry all your vital information with you anywhere you go, and access it from any device. Essential for any business that goes on the road regularly!

Whew. How’s that for a short list? No matter what stage of the Salesforce journey you are on, hopefully these tips have given you a little something extra to improve your experience.

If you are still hungry for more, stay tuned for our comprehensive guide to getting the most from a Salesforce Implementation, coming out in the next few weeks.

 

-Ryan and the CloudMyBiz Team

 


 

Ready to upgrade to the world’s #1 CRM? Already have Salesforce but need some improvements?

Whatever your needs, we have you covered. Contact one of our Salesforce experts and we will find you a better business solution.

Contact Us