There are many annoying commercials, You may love or hate these promotions. Trivago the travel site or mypillow.com are cited examples. Do they work? Do these ads sell, earn customer loyalty?
Trivago, for example, majority owned by Expedia had its IPO in December of 2016 at around $12, and today trades at $18 with a market cap of $4 billion. The company however is not profitable.
A good reporting strategy gives the right people in your sales team up-to-date information on deals and opportunities so they can make effective decisions and take proactive action to drive better results.
Does that sound a tall order? Not with the reports available from Salesforce.com and training that focuses on getting the best from those reports.
Salesforce reports enable everyone in the team to get the information they need for their role. Sales managers can review overall progress, as well as the performance of individual representatives so they can focus resources on closing deals faster or dealing with problems.
Sales administrators can ensure that workflow progresses smoothly to minimize any delays and help maximize customer satisfaction. Sales representatives can easily review the status of deals and progress against their personal targets. And, senior executives can obtain a snapshot of sales performance against overall strategic business objectives.
With Salesforce, you can easily customize the same core reports with just a few clicks to give each of the stakeholders the view they need.
Concise reporting presents information in a way that can have impact, ensures understanding and is actionable. Information in and of itself is useless. You must be able to turn your data into action. Salesforce provides a variety of different standard reports in tabular, matrix or summary formats. You can also create custom reports that are more specific to your precise needs.
To clarify information, you can incorporate a range of graphics, including bar charts, pie charts and a funnel chart that communicates progress of opportunities and leads.
Effective reports depend on accurate, timely input. But, that has to be weighed against the time taken to create reports. Sales representatives, for example, should spend their time on customers and prospects, not paperwork.
With Salesforce, it’s easy to create reports. Just drag and drop on the fields, filters, groupings and charts you want and reports are ready for distribution, analysis and action with minimal effort.
The best reports help teams take proactive action to drive results. Salesforce enables your team to focus on issues or bottlenecks that could be holding back deals or opportunities. It’s easy to identify opportunities stuck in the sales process, determine the actions needed to close deals due in the next reporting period, discover opportunities that were due to close by a certain date and recognize the need for training or support.
With that information at hand, it’s easy to refocus resources or bring in expert help to drive faster results.
Sharing the information in your reports can help build teamwork and collaboration with real impact on reports. Distributing customized reports to stakeholders keeps them fully informed on progress against key metrics and highlights areas where they can contribute.
Marketing, for example, may identify a need to generate more leads or provide content to nurture existing leads. Product or technical specialists can identify opportunities to work with representatives during an evaluation phase. Representatives can view the performance of other members of the team, creating a competitive environment that motivates and inspires.
With Salesforce, you can develop an effective reporting strategy that takes full advantage of its ease of use, impact, customization and collaboration features. To help familiarize your team with the basics and best practice of Salesforce reporting, LiveSalesforce.com Training offers a range of training programs that have helped leading organizations take performance to the next level.
Watch these videos for free on LiveSalesforceTraining.com (login required):
If members of your sales team are failing to hit their quotas month after month, who do you blame and what should you do about it? Do you blame the sales representatives, encourage them to try harder or, worst case scenario, fire them and hire new recruits?
Whatever you do, you are putting your company’s revenue and profitability at risk. Letting the situation continue without any remedial action could lead to further shortfalls in revenue. Putting new representatives in place will take time and may not produce the results you need.
There is a better way. First, look for the underlying reasons for the problem. Then, introduce training to improve performance in the problem areas you have identified.
Poor communication and lack of information are two of the factors that come up again and again in any analysis of poor sales performance. Were the sales representatives concentrating on the wrong customer needs? Were they talking to the right decision makers? Were they ignoring bottelenecks in the pipeline or neglecting stuck opportunities?
These scenarios are easy to identify when the information is available in a CRM system like Salesforce.com. But, that information only has value when it is actionable.
A training program that focuses on creating actionable reports from customer information can help to unleash the value in your CRM system, overcome communication problems and drive increased sales.
The Sales Superhero program from Live Salesforce.com Training is an example of that type of training. It provides participants with the ability to understand and create different types of reports and customized dashboards that support faster and better-informed sales decisions.
By following the best practice recommendations, all members of the sales team, including directors, sales managers, sales operations managers, key account managers and sales representatives, can access, share and communicate information essential to sales success.
The program shows how to create sales acceleration tools like soon to close opportunities, overdue opportunities and stuck opportunities. It will help team members share an overview of the current sales situation with reports on revenue by product, opportunity pipelines and opportunities by owner pipeline.
To help individuals improve their performance and productivity, the program covers reports like personal opportunity report, opportunities by account and lead conversion history.
By creating actionable reports like those, sales teams can overcome the problems that lead to lost sales and falling revenue. The reports can also improve communication and collaboration between all members of the sales team and help each member perform to the best of their professional ability.
For more information on the Sales Superhero program visit http://bit.ly/1K2FvLg
Email Marketing Automation is a powerful tool that can help you qualify and nurture prospects to create sales opportunities. It also helps maintain strong relationships with customers. Salesforce includes useful marketing automation facilities to help you plan and measure campaigns and develop templates and processes that simplify and speed up the production of marketing campaigns. That’s backed by a comprehensive training program that will develop and hone your marketing skills.
To set the scene, we’ll look at the way a leading information security company used email to drive business for their sales force. This is a useful model for developing your own campaigns.
The company recognized that its prospects would move through three stages in the marketing cycle. This is a simple example. Companies can have many process driven stages.
▪ At the first stage, prospects are qualified and consider their needs for information security.
▪ Once prospects understand that they have a need, information is provided to help develop their security strategy.
▪ At the third stage, prospects evaluate potential solutions that align to their strategy and decide on purchase options.
▪ Level of interest (qualify and scoring)
▪ Products or services of interest
▪ Aligned collateral by product and service
▪ Aligned the collateral to marketing stage
Scoring which determines interest at each stage and corresponding messaging in the campaign moves prospects from initial stages to closed and post-closed. The post closed stages can include asking for referrals and up-sell, cross-sell opportunities.
Consider these Marketing Stages as a continuum. There is a start but no end to the processes of marketing and sales.
A series of emails targets each prospect as they move from one stage to the next and offers them content that will help them make informed decisions. Each subsequent stage moves the customer closer to the sale.
At the first stage, prospects were offered a short survey asking about the importance of security to their organization. The second stage provided independent reports and white papers on information security challenges and trends. The prospect’s survey responses and engagement with collateral, how many times opened, was it forwarded, etc. scored and qualified prospects. Finally, at the third stage prospects were offered product information and the opportunity to engage directly with a sales representative.
To measure the effectiveness of the campaign, prospects were driven to a landing page where they could select and download the content or request further information. To reach prospects who did not respond to the original offer, the company emailed a different offer at weekly intervals.
When prospects downloaded the content, they received a follow-up mail. This email offered prospects the opportunity to request content for the next stage, ask for further information or speak with a representative.
By monitoring whether prospects opened the emails, shared them with colleagues and requested further information, the company was able to further qualify prospects by level of interest and propensity to buy.
The progressive nature of the campaign helped build confidence in the prospects and demonstrated that the security company was capable of acting as a trusted advisor – an important factor in consultative selling.
When prospects reached the final stage and requested a meeting, the company could feel confident that it would be dealing with informed decision makers who would respond to a professional presentation, rather than focus on price alone.
This campaign illustrates the role of email in qualifying and nurturing prospects and ensuring they understand the real benefits to their business of a product or service. It shows how qualifying the prospects at an early stage, helps to deliver relevant content to the right decision makers based on their level of understanding and information needs.
The example also highlights the importance of monitoring campaign effectiveness and adapting strategies to improve results. By monitoring the number of times prospects open each of the emails or forward them to colleagues, you can develop a score that indicates their propensity to buy.
These are all important issues that are covered in Live Salesforce Training programs. Our classes can help you make the most effective use of the email automation facilities in Salesforce to develop targeted campaigns, improve response rates and win more business.
How much time do you spend on Facebook, YouTube or Twitter most days? Does it help you do your job, or is just a good way to keep up with friends and family?
Looking in the right places on social media could give you great insight into what your customers and prospects are doing, and what their customers are saying about them This is insight that can give you some helpful openers by showing you understand your customers’ needs.
Take a look at product review pages or Twitter feeds that cover your customers’ products. Are their customers criticizing the products? What are the main concerns, and are consumers highlighting problems that your company could solve? If product quality is an issue, for example, raise this at your next meeting and explain how you could help resolve the issue. By quoting comments from real customers, you are giving independent credibility to your proposals for an improvement program.
How much do you know about your customers’ purchasing teams? Have a look at their profiles on LinkedIn. You can find out a lot about their background, qualifications and previous experience. This is all useful information that can help you pitch your proposals at the right business or technical level, confident that your contacts will get the message.
Are you up to date with the latest developments in your customers’ business? Chances are you check websites regularly to get information on customers’ products and services. But, websites can be out of date. It takes time and effort to update a web page. It pays to check your customers’ Facebook pages. Updating a page there is easier and faster, so you may find information that is more up to date.
Look for announcements about new products, investments or recent appointments – all of which could affect your business. Check details of exhibitions or conferences they are attending. Participation in an event can indicate the direction your customer is taking and that may open new opportunities for your business.
Social media can also give you valuable information into what your competitors are doing and how their customers perceive their strengths and weaknesses. And, of course, you should also be aware of what customers are saying about you. Product reviews can help you understand the good and bad points of your own and your competitors’ products from a customer’s perspective. That information can provide valuable ammunition when you are dealing with objections.
What are your competitors saying about their own business on their Facebook pages? If they are announcing new account wins or further success with existing customers, does that open opportunities for your business? Announcements about new products could also have an impact on your business.
Don’t overlook the potential benefits of social media inside your own company. Do your colleagues have their own work-related Facebook or Twitter accounts? If you need help with a sales project or a customer issue, check colleagues’ Facebook profiles. You may find the knowledge or expertise you need. Post details of your own projects to keep colleagues up to data or to ask for support or input. If you have Salesforce you have Chatter. This is the ideal way to collaborate with customers, vendors and team members.
Investing time in social media can help you prepare for successful meetings with customers and prospects. You will have up to date knowledge of the company, its direction and the people you are dealing with – factors that put you in a stronger position.
