SERVICE OVERVIEW

INSTANTIATING YOUR SALES STRATEGY IN A POWERFUL SOFTWARE TOOL

What Is This Service?

Our Salesforce Optimization service empowers mid-size professional service firms to maximize their investment in the Salesforce cloud application. We help them realize a true ROI and instantiate their Sales Strategy, their policies and practices, into the everyday routines of their sales team. When the tool and the strategy align, amazing things happen for service firms. What sorts of things?

First, their sales function focuses on those behaviors that are most likely to produce revenue outcomes: calling on the right people, managing sales campaigns effectively at each stage and logging Opportunities with revenue projections and likelihoods of a close.

Second, the firm becomes a learning organization where pipeline, close rates and deal size become predictable and foreseeable, allowing finance staff to make accurate growth projections. Third, the organization can scale as new sales hires are trained in and monitored by best practices.

Salesforce Challenges

Most professional service organizations know that they need an enterprise-wide CRM and Salesforce is often the number one choice. However, Salesforce is deceptively simple with functionality for Leads, Contacts, Accounts, Opportunities and Reports. Also, the user interface is pretty intuitive and Salesforce has done a good job of making their application mobile-friendly.

So it would seem that you can simply buy licenses, give your people a bit of training and then realize value from the tool. Right? That has not been our experience. At all.

Most service-based organizations do not have core expertise in Salesforce or use the tool to its greatest benefit to achieve their goals. When we ask service firms what they want Salesforce to accomplish for them, we often hear 4 primary goals:

• Create a bridge between marketing and sales so inbound leads are properly captured and made available to the sales function with little to no data-entry on their part.
• Instantiate a process for navigating sales campaigns from first point-of-contact to closed deal and all phases in between. Make this process repeatable and visible to sales management so they can continue to train consultants in best practices.
• Maintain a core repository of all Leads, Contacts and Accounts so you can find people when you need to and understand their relationship to your firm team members. This answers the question: who owns Leads, Accounts and Contacts?
• Build predictive models for revenue generation and deal flow so you can develop a financial strategy that is based on accurate information.

When we look at how most service organizations are actually using Salesforce, we consistently see that they can only achieve one of these four goals: transferring leads from marketing (or your website via web-to-lead) to sales functions. Why is this the case?

Salesforce is much more complicated than it appears on the surface. The tool is highly configurable and flexible to allow for nearly any type of sales and marketing functionality that you can imagine. Many service organizations choose Salesforce administrators who are from IT, Finance or HR who have little understanding of the tool itself and almost no understanding of how sales campaigns actually work.

What’s more, most consultants have only a nominal understanding of how to use the tool and are expected to learn by doing. This means that they often do not adopt the tool or use it in a way that you want. The result is garbage in equals garbage out. In other words, if your core users are not maintaining accurate data, your reports and projections will be completely unreliable.

Another challenge concerns remote sales team members. Many service organizations employ sales people or consultants who are not in the corporate office on a routine basis. They are given wide latitude to develop their own schedule and produce the outcomes the firm requires. In some instances, sales management and other executives have no visibility into the day-to-day activities of these people. This is especially problematic for new sales team members or those who are underperforming. Firm leaders sometimes ask – what do they do all day?

Our Salesforce integration service addresses all of these issues by bringing together a core competency in sales and marketing processes and a deep knowledge of Salesforce configuration. We deploy Salesforce for your firm in a way that you need. We also train your people to use the tool to its greatest benefit.

Who Needs This Service?

Professional service firms who:

• Have invested in Salesforce but have not yet realized the returns they were hoping for.
• Know they need an enterprise-wide CRM, have not selected or configured one yet and want to get it right from the start.
• Want to build repeatable sales management policies that everyone adopts.
• Desire consistency in how their team members use the tool.
• Need to build predictable financial models based on accurate data being generated from Salesforce.

To learn more about how we deliver this service, please click on Our Approach above.

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