4 Salesforce Solutions to Sales Leadership Challenges
According to Forbes, the stats on sales reps aren't pretty. As a sales leader, empowering your reps is the foundation for your success.
This article reveals winning Salesforce strategies that I've gathered from my work as a Salesforce consultant.
The Forbes survey of 721 reps revealed that reps spend an average of two-thirds of their time NOT selling.
As a result, 47% of them don't hit their quotas, and the average sales leader only survives 18 months in their role.
As the gold-standard in the world of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platforms, Salesforce has a responsibility to lead the way in overcoming the challenges that are underlying these dismal numbers.
Thankfully, they continue to provide cutting-edge tools and approaches to help sales leaders succeed.
When implemented correctly and combined with a dash of insider knowledge earned the hard way, they can help achieve the following results:
Challenge 1: Finding and Retaining Top Talent
High turnover is one of the greatest challenges sales leaders face.
You can’t force anyone to stay. The shortest path to success is demonstrating that there’s nowhere better to go, because your team has got it going on.
Your CRM goes a long way in this effort. It’s the tool they’ll spend most of their time on. If it’s not running like a well oiled machine, they’ll notice and wonder if a different organization has a better one.
Solution: provide your reps with the power of Artificial Intelligence
Leverage the power of Salesforce Einstein (their Artificial Intelligence solution) to help reps make decisions faster, take the right actions at the right time, connect the dots between various leads and opportunities, and more.
Solution: Have a better-designed Salesforce system than your competitors
Make your system so powerful, simple, and profit-generating that your reps can’t imagine going back to the one they had at their last job or using your competitor’s.
In addition to the best practices covered above, one way to accomplish this is to everything from the screen that doesn’t need to be there.
Your rep’s attention is a key resource. Where it goes depends on what information their computer or phone screen presents.
You can’t afford to have any of that screen real estate wasted on unnecessary tools or unneeded information. Those are just distractions waiting to happen.
Solution: Using gamification to stoke healthy competition
Everyone loves a good game. By putting a gamified twist on the old approaches to competition, you can keep reps engaged and performing at their best.
Two key best practices in this realm are a company-wide leaderboard, using Chatter (your internal Salesforce social media) to call out top-performers, and having a suite of rewards ready for your gold medalists.
Salesforce has taken this approach to the next level with their Trailhead learning platform and you can apply many of the same techniques to your own business.
Pro Tip:
Get a pre-built sales gamification solution using the Spinify Salesforce app!
Challenge 2: Reps Spending Time NOT Selling
Even the best reps waste time on false opportunities, travel, and administrative tasks. Another common theme is focusing too much on cost-cutting activities and not enough on profit-generating ones.
With all of these challenges, you don’t want your Salesforce system to eat up any more of your reps' precious sales time.
Unfortunately the reality is that many reps are forced to use Salesforce systems that are the opposite of efficient. Untold amounts of time are wasted daily on manual data entry.
The result? Low quality data, unhappy reps, and sub-optimal profits.
Solution: Automate tedious tasks away and free up time for sales
Help your reps spend more time closing deals and less time doing manual data entry by using the automation tools your company already got access to when they got Salesforce.
The main tools to know are Process Builder, Workflow Rules (not to be confused with Flows), Assignment Rules, Escalation Rules, and Auto-Response Rules.
Together, these tools offer a powerful range of automation capabilities.
The best part is that they can do most things without requiring hiring a developer to write custom code. In Salesforce-talk this is referred to as declarative development (no coding) instead of programmatic development (think expensive coding).
You'll need Enterprise edition or above if you want Approvals and Workflows (that means it's not available to the two lower-level subscriptions, Essentials and Professional).
Pro Tip:
Salesforce will no longer be enhancing the Workflow feature in future releases. They're pushing for adoption of the Process Builder feature, so it's best to use that whenever possible.
Solution: Provide customized Email Templates and upgrade them with Merge fields
Although it’s not technically an automation tool, the email template tool is a great way to reduce rep time spent typing the same thing over and over. The new Salesforce extension for Google Chrome even lets you insert snippets into emails instead of whole templates.
Upgrade your templates with Merge Fields, which pull data from Salesforce and automatically insert it into the message.
Challenge 3: Inconsistent Sales Rep Approaches
You can write the best call script in the world, but if your reps don’t use it, it won’t help.
Unfortunately, for many reps, when the big client finally picks up the phone, all the scripts and plans go out the window. That leads to inconsistent results which are hard for you as a manager to keep track of and improve.
Ideally you want to find which questions and statements work best, get your reps using them like they were second nature, and iteratively improve them over time.
While leaving room for your reps to build authentic relationships with their unique personality, you’re subtly ensuring that the deal-closing questions get asked at precisely the right moment.
Solution: Using stage-specific Guidance for Success to house call scripts
Instead of expecting your reps to diligently follow a pages-long call script, break it up into bite-sized pieces and put the most important parts front and center for each stage.
Guidance for Success is the perfect tool for the job. It puts custom text at the top of your rep’s screen, and lets you customize that text for each stage in the sales path.
We’ve seen a lot of success using the following format: one short sentence defining the rep’s basic goal for that stage, followed by three bullet point questions that absolutely have to get asked. Simplicity is key.
Solution: Require certain key information at each stage
Using a tool called Validation Rules, you can define what information has to be in the system before a lead or opportunity can be moved to the next stage.
For example, before an opportunity can be marked as in “Negotiation” stage, you can ensure that we at least have a phone, email, and address.
Challenge 4: Reps losing deals because of disorganized or duplicate data
Have any of your reps ever complained about an experience like the following?
They proactively reached out to a key decision maker on an important opportunity who didn’t have any recent activity logged to their record.
Once they made contact, it turned out that the shot-caller had actually been contacted very recently, and is now annoyed to have been bothered again by someone who is out of the loop.
Once the apologies are issued and the call is over, the rep discovers another contact record with a different set of activity history.
They’ve been duped! A duplicate record has thrown a wrench in your business process.
Now the rep is frustrated, the decision-maker is questioning your company’s professionalism, and the likelihood of the deal closing is decreased.
Solution: Data hygiene - merging duplicates and cleaning out the crap
There are two main stages to duplicate management. First, cleaning up existing duplicates. Second, preventing them from being created moving forward.
Stage one has a better catchphrase: Get your de-dupe on! That’s Salesforce-talk for duplicate management, the practice of merging multiple versions of the same record so that everything is in one central location where everyone can easily find it.
Stage two is accomplished using Matching Rules, which flag potential duplicates and either warn users about them or prevent them from being created. Here is a great walkthrough video Salesforce created to give an overview of the process of using Matching Rules.
Pro Tip:
Merge more data faster with the Duplicate Check Salesforce app.
Of all the de-duping apps we’ve seen our clients try out, this one is the best bang for the buck. The rest either lack core functionality, or are priced for massive enterprises with infinite budgets and unimaginable data cleanup headaches.
Solution: Highlight key fields for each step in your sales path
In my time spent shadowing sales reps, one of their most frustrating moments is being on the phone with someone and not being able to find the information they need in time to get to the next stage.
This experience can leave even the most experienced reps feeling helpless and ineffective, when really it was just a lousy system holding them back.
What’s important during the initial contact is different from what is important during contract negotiation.
If your system doesn’t reflect this, reps will lose valuable time scrolling and clicking through various pages, frantically looking for the information they need.
You can easily overcome this challenge by highlighting up to five key fields for each stage in the sales path. When combined with a simplified record detail page layout, this is a recipe for success.
Bonus Best Practice:
Eventually, your goal is to be able to say those famous words with confidence: “If it’s not in Salesforce, it didn’t happen.”
Once you’ve gotten your system up to spec and your adoption on the rise, you can make the jump to tying compensation directly to Opportunities in Salesforce. That is where you want to be.
From there, you can gain new insights into your performance and jumpstart even more growth.
Final Thoughts.
Sales leadership is one of the most challenging and rewarding roles out there. Without the right technology to back you up, it’s easy to get overwhelmed and end up a statistic.
Leverage the full power of the world’s #1 CRM, Salesforce, to maximize your chances of success. Stop spinning your wheels and start gaining real traction.
Salesforce makes it easy to quantify ROI at every stage in the value creation process and on the Salesforce investment itself. The result is that it’s easy to convince the boss to invest in it and supercharge your sales reps.
The modern business world is inherently chaotic. Use the solutions above to cut through the noise and take targeted actions to get to the top and stay there.
