OUR APPROACH

REALIZING PREDICTABILITY AND REPEATABILITY FROM THE SOFTWARE

How We Deliver This Service

Our approach to delivering this service includes these key phases:

• Review of your Sales Strategy.
• Identification of your firm-wide goals for Salesforce.
• Identification of key stakeholders and their goals for Salesforce.
• Definition of sales policies and practices.
• Configuration of the Salesforce environment to instantiate your policies, practices and reporting.
• Salesforce training of your staff.
• Definition of metrics and reports that monitor adoption of your policies and practices.

Review Of Your Sales Strategy

In this phase, we review the set of decisions you made using our Sales Strategy service. If you have not used this service to define your core sales strategy, we often recommend this as a starting point. Why? Because the Salesforce environment is highly configurable, it can be designed to accomplish many different goals. You need to have clarity on these core questions:

• What are the stages of our sales funnel? What steps do prospects need to pass through to become our client?
• How do we navigate these stages to maintain momentum and who is responsible to manage client contact at each stage?
• Do we structure our sales people according to inside sales, outside sales, named accounts, territories, channels or practice areas? What is the best application of our people to serve clients and produce revenues?
• How do we deliver a great experience on the inbound journey so prospects convert and become clients and then refer us to others?
• How do we quickly and accurately build proposals that prospects cannot resist?

The result of this phase is that you will have alignment amongst your core stakeholders about the sales strategy that you want to instantiate in Salesforce.

Identification Of Your Firm-Wide Goals For Salesforce

In this phase, we brainstorm with your core executive team about the overarching goals you want to achieve from a Salesforce integration. We do this by asking everyone on the team to put forward their goals, producing a larger list. We then help you prioritize that list to the “must haves” that the initiative must achieve if it is to be deemed a success. The result of this phase is that you will achieve alignment on your executive team about what a Salesforce integration should accomplish and develop a set of criteria that can be used to compare against outcomes.

Identification Of Key Stakeholders And Their Goals For Salesforce

In this phase, we help you identify who the key stakeholders are and what they must realize from a Salesforce integration. In our experience, a few key people need to realize a few key outcomes from an initiative like this. Managing Partners usually want accurate financial forecasts and pipeline reports so they can anticipate what’s coming. CFOs usually want these forecasts, yet they also like up-to-the-minute dashboards that show them real-time data. Sales managers often want activity reports that show where their individual team members are with the daily grind of activity. They want to know who is active and who they need to be prodding. Marketing leaders want to see the outcomes of leads they’ve generated and the behavior scores of inbound prospects. The result of this phase is that we build a plan to deliver as much information as possible, in the most effective manner possible, to key stakeholders.

Definition Of Sales Policies And Practices

In this phase, we help you define the specific sales policies and practices that you want instantiated in Salesforce. Usually these policies are focused on a few key areas such as:

• Lead flow. How do leads enter the database and who is responsible for doing this?
• Data hygiene. What are your policies for fields that must be filled out and what are the range of options for doing so: pick lists, open fields, etc. How do you enforce these policies?
• Sales campaigns. What are the various stages that prospects pass through and how can you keep Opportunities updated to reflect where prospects are on their inbound journey so reporting is accurate?
• Opportunity documentation. Will every new deal require an Opportunity and if so, what fields must be filled out to register the Opportunity?
• Leads versus Contacts. What is your definition of the difference between a Lead and a Contact and when are Leads converted to Contacts and who is responsible for doing so? How do you keep your Contacts associated with Accounts so you have accurate Account-level data from which to build reports?
• Administrators. Who are your administrators and what rights do they possess versus users?

There are many more potential policies that can be defined. This is a short list. The result of this phase is that you will have clearly defined policies and practices that can be instantiated in Salesforce and can be used to train your sales staff.

Configuration Of The Salesforce Environment To Instantiate Your Policies, Practices And Reporting

In this phase, we configure the Salesforce environment to your specifications. We prefer to use Sandbox environments whenever possible. The result of this phase is that your Salesforce instances will be configured to match your sales policies and practices.

Salesforce Training Of Your Staff

In this phase, we train your staff in everything we’ve developed with you up to this point. We show your staff the policies and practices that you’ve defined. We introduce them to the Salesforce environment and walk them through the core functionality for Leads, Contacts, Accounts and Opportunities. We show them how to develop reports, should they choose to learn this. We also show them how to use the tool in a way that matches your requirements. The result of this phase is that your team will be ready to use the Salesforce environment in a way that you need them to. This eliminates the garbage-in equals garbage-out problem and gives you accurate and reliable data.

Definition Of Metrics And Reports That Monitor Adoption Of Your Policies And Practices

In this phase, we identify the metrics that indicate that your users are actually adopting the Salesforce tool and using it the way you want them to. We translate these metrics into a set of reports and sometimes dashboards that stakeholders can use to monitor activity in real time. The result of this phase is that you will have reporting tools that give you visibility into how Salesforce is being used. This allows you to address issues long before they become acute.

See What Can You Expect for details about the outcomes of this service.

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