11 steps to success with Salesforce®: Shifting from adoption to addiction

By Daniel Plume for NewVoiceMedia

For significant revenue growth, it is critical sales teams are engaged and operating at their highest potential, completely aligned to corporate objectives. For most of us that means investing in world-class productivity tools such as Salesforce® for our sales and marketing teams.

In order to support informed sales and marketing investment decisions, a growing reliance is placed on the accuracy of the data maintained within the CRM system. It is therefore imperative your CRM system has a complete and accurate dataset that can be used with confidence as the single source of truth at all times.

However, sales reps often view the use of a CRM system as a burden on their day, something useful for management but delivers little value to them. As a result, if the day-to-day users fail to see the value and are simply not engaged and using the system, it is highly likely you are failing to achieve your objectives.

A well-implemented CRM system supporting a highly engaged sales force delivers many benefits, for example:

For sales managers

• The delivery of “believable” pipeline reports in real-time that drive accurate revenue forecasts

• The ability to measure prospect interaction touch points and ensure deals forecast to close receive appropriate attention

• The ability to benchmark and assess current sales and marketing processes against industry gold standards, eliminating wasted cycles and squeezing the most from expensive sales and marketing resources

• A customer and prospect “interaction memory” that allows for better decision making and highly targeted marketing campaigns

For sales

• A sales enablement tool that turns every rep into a one-person sales and marketing machine; increasing individual productivity and effectiveness and boosting the chance of over-achievement against target

• A richer understanding of customers and prospects leading to faster lead conversion and expanded cross and up-sell opportunities

• A collaboration tool for effective team selling and faster prospect and customer issue resolution

• Targeted sales coaching based on factual data gained from insight into where reps are actually spending their time

In both cases the ultimate outcome is revenue growth, which in turn fuels personal success!

We all know Salesforce® is only as good as the data being captured by users. If you have an issue with low user adoption, then it is likely you also have poor data quality. This in turn will result in sales management making inaccurate revenue forecasts and other departments, such as marketing, making business investment decisions based on data that represents only a fraction of the truth.

So, if you are launching Salesforce® to your sales, marketing or customer service teams, or if you are thinking of re-launching; here are 11 tips you should review to ensure you are set for long-term success.

Your CRM vision allows your employees to understand what the ideal customer experience should be. Are you able to articulate the definition of sales and service excellence for your organisation?

This has to come from the top, with a senior executive owning the vision, motivating staff to understand, engage and buy into achieving the vision and to execute it with customers and prospects.

This will allow you to further differentiate your core business proposition with customer interaction excellence.

1. Document your CRM vision and align executive sponsorship Example CRM vision statements:

Build and maintain long-term relationships with customers by creating personalised experiences across all touch-points and by anticipating customer needs and providing customised offers.

Deliver a customer experience that consistently develops enthusiastically satisfied customers in every market in which we do business.

We will be a leading financial services company which is trusted by you and renowned for getting it right.

“ ““ “

“ “

These are the clear, measurable strategies and KPI’s supporting your vision. You will find a common list of compelling business strategies driving most CRM initiatives with “Revenue Enhancement” and “Customer Satisfaction” usually somewhere near the top. However, most organisations have multiple objectives behind their CRM initiatives and successful leaders do a good job of documenting these objectives in the form of CRM metrics.

Evaluate your overall business strategy

Gather the metrics used by executives in your organisation to measure customer facing departments

Audit your current customer position

Seek input from multiple sources on the current causes of customer pain

Document your CRM strategies including business objective, problem, solution, and metrics for success, to create the desired customer experience.

2. Document CRM success strategies and metrics

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There are 5 simple steps to developing your CRM strategies and KPIs:

Your CRM metrics enable you to manage, track and evaluate your success. CRM metrics are both internal and external indications of accomplishment. They are used to justify, monitor, and track CRM success and are a feedback mechanism for the continuous development of CRM strategies and tactics.

Success metrics should be tied to compensation for all employees and ideally tracked and monitored within your CRM system using real-time performance dashboards.

Sales Metrics Service Metrics Marketing Metrics

Number of prospects Customer satisfaction score Number of campaigns executed

Number of new customers Average number of cases handled New customer retention rates

Number of retained customers Average number of service calls per day Number of leads by campaign type

Number of open opportunities Average time to resolution Revenue generated by campaign

Close rate Cost of service Number of customers acquired by campaign

Renewal rate Average handle times Numbers of customer referrals

Number of sales calls Average talk time Pre-pipe to pipe conversion rate

Number of sales call per opportunity Average hold (wait) time Pre-pipe drop off rate

Amount of new revenue Number of escalations

Amount of recurring revenue Compliance with service SLAs

Amount of cross-sell / up-sell revenue Number of hand-offs to low cost channels

Time to close by channel Number of product bugs raised

Margin Customer defection rate

Sales stage duration Complaint time to resolution

CRM calls for a fresh approach to business processes, rethinking how they appear to the customer and reengineering them to be more customer-centric so they deliver greater customer value and satisfaction.

Many enterprises fall into the trap of automating existing flawed sales and service processes. If you haven’t already, you should use your CRM deployment as an opportunity to re-think, automate and streamline your customer facing processes.

This should be an iterative review process that suits the dynamic nature of your business. As your business grows and changes along with the advent of new customer communication mechanisms such as social media, you will need to constantly review these processes.

3. Continually review customer facing processes

Communicate the vision, plans and report progress often

Listen early and regularly to all user feedback

Re-launch at regular intervals to keep the system alive

You should plan and invest for a proper launch of your Salesforce® investment. To maximise adoption you should allocate sufficient funds for the initial and ongoing training of your users.

Six quick tips for success:

Leverage executive sponsorship and use this to endorse all communications

Don’t roll out too much at once, drip feed new functionality slowly

Invest in training users regularly, at launch and with frequent training updates.

4. Plan for a proper launch (or re-launch) and invest in adequate training

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CRM success demands high data quality. A poor initial data load or an inability to keep data clean will result in users rapidly disengaging from the system.

A recent PwC Global Data Management Survey found:

• 75% of respondents reported significant problems as a result of defective data

• 50% had incurred extra costs due to the need for internal reconciliations

• 33% had been forced to delay or scrap new systems

• 33% had failed to bill or collect receivables

• 20% had failed to meet a contractual or service-level agreement

5. Place a strong focus on initial and on-going data quality

Avoid the temptation to roll out lots of additional mandatory fields; it is the fastest way to turn users off and drive down adoption rates. Roll out the system and introduce changes gradually, ease of use is critical to success.

Think very carefully about what data it is absolutely vital for you to collect during each stage of the prospect / customer interaction process and what is really just “nice-to-have”. Contemplate deferring certain pieces of data collection to later in the sales process for example, making additional fields become mandatory when the sales stage advances beyond a certain point, and so avoid the need for collection too early.

6. Keep it simple – ease of use is key

Ensure every manager conducts every sales meeting from within Salesforce® using the dashboards and underlying data to evaluate every individual opportunity. Ask your sales managers to adopt the attitude, “if it isn’t in the CRM application it doesn’t exist”, as this is a sure fire way to increase user adoption.

Coach every manager to not just use the CRM application to manage by numbers, but to use the tool to help coach sales reps, to make sure all bases are covered in every deal, and to ensure your chosen sales methodology is being carefully adhered to.

7. Insist managers manage with the application

Conduct regular reviews to ensure Salesforce® continues to reflect the current business process. If the process has changed and fields have become redundant, remove them from view. Keep screens uncluttered and the data collection process smooth and easy to understand.

Before building new functionality consider reviewing the AppExchange® to see if there are tools already available for the community that would meet your needs and can be quickly and easily incorporated into your processes.

8. Be strict about your change management process

Encourage users to adopt Chatter as a mechanism to share experiences, best practices and to solve customer and prospect issues faster. Switch on Chatter for those objects where it makes sense for automated data sharing via Chatter feeds and email digest reporting, enabling users to join in with relevant discussions and areas they can contribute towards and drive success.

Train every user in the use of search, reports and analytics so they understand the ease and value of how to access and report on their own data. One of the biggest adoption barriers is the perception of users that it is easy to enter data, but hard

9. Encourage collaboration, sharing and reporting

to extract information and get value from it. Once trained in the ease and power of reports and dashboards this adoption barrier diminishes rapidly.

Teach users the power of the personal productivity tools that will enhance their daily lives, turning them into one-person sales and marketing machines. For example the use of mass email, HTML email tracking, Salesforce for Outlook and Stay-in-Touch reminders are all fantastic productivity enhancements that are often overlooked.

for the community that would meet your needs and can be quickly and easily incorporated into your processes.

Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that “if you build it they will come”. If you launch a sophisticated CRM system such as Salesforce® it doesn’t necessarily follow you will get good user adoption. Think of adoption as a behavioural issue you will need to embrace.

To start with you need to overcome the typical sales view that the CRM system is a management tool that adds no value to them. To solve this, you will require the use of motivational techniques such as the introduction of regular rewards, which include peer recognition for doing the right thing. The use of the stick, which is the first resort of sales managers, is proven not to work and can often have a negative effect on morale over the medium and long term.

10. Turn change into a positive and fun process

Appeal to the fact sales professionals have a highly competitive nature. The introduction of leader boards, points, badges and rewards are a sure fire way to get them motivated. Hook it all up to Chatter to communicate progress and generate wider peer recognition and even the staunchest resistance will crumble!

The final step on this journey to CRM success with Salesforce® should be to evaluate computer telephony integration, or CTI, to create a single customer success platform designed around customer interaction.

CTI delivers some exceptional benefits to your Salesforce® investment, including things like:

Improve your sales teams’ activity with click-to-dial

Simplify coaching and sales team management

11. Integrate your communications platform with Salesforce®

Integrating your communications platform with Salesforce® creates a single user interface for your sales and service teams. Making it their single view of the truth and their only required business application means adoption comes as standard.

Track and record all your activities inside Salesforce® for deeper insight into your sales and service departments

Improve first contact resolution and reduce average handling times through intelligent routing

Offer your callers powerful self-service or an option to connect to a live agent through an intelligent and integrated IVR

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1. Document your CRM vision and align executive sponsorship

2. Document CRM success strategies and metrics

3. Continually review customer facing processes

4. Plan for a proper launch (or re-launch) and invest in adequate training

5. Place a strong focus on initial and on-going data quality

6. Keep it simple - ease of use is key

7. Insist that managers manage to the application

8. Be strict about your change management process

9. Encourage collaboration, sharing and reporting

10. Turn change into a positive and fun process

11. Integrate your communications platform with Salesforce®

Simply by embracing the final recommendation and introducing game mechanics into the adoption equation can drive significant results. Through our customer implementations we have seen some truly surprising outcomes that include:

In summary, to truly drive a successful CRM implementation and gain the greatest return from your investment, pay close attention to the following 11 areas:

Conclusion

★ 50% increase in user adoption

★ 60% increase in social collaboration

★ 25% increase in lead conversions

★ 20% sales productivity

★ 30% reduction in sales cycles

To find out more about gamification and its huge potential for your business head to our website:

Gamification for Sales

Gamification for Service

To find out more about integrating your communications platform with Salesforce® head to our website

ContactWorld for Sales

ContactWorld for Service

Daniel curates the creation and distribution of marketing content at NewVoiceMedia. Daniel has worked in the telecommunications and IT sector for 5 years, almost exclusively with cloud technology. In his spare time he is a keen sports enthusiast, playing cricket throughout the summer, football in the winter, and can be found playing darts mid-week.

About the Author

NewVoiceMedia powers customer connections that transform businesses globally. The leading vendor’s award-winning cloud customer contact platform revolutionises the way organisations connect with their customers worldwide, enabling them to deliver a personalised and unique customer service experience and drive a more effective sales and marketing team.

For more information visit www.newvoicemedia.com

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