Identify A Strong Internal Champion

By nature, insiders have more vested in the outcomes of a new system than outsiders.  Furthermore, there are numerous cultural issues which every organization has.  Culture is the glue which allows for getting things done in a complex environment.  It is a great asset.

You must have a strong champion that aligns with the organization and knows how to influence for change.  Furthermore, the champion is the one that must master Salesforce.com with the processes built into the organization’s implementation.  They have to be technical and business minded to overcome objections and communicate benefits.  Their guidance becomes important for how fast and how much to change during the course of training, support and requirements gathering.

Develop A Mantra Which Sticks

Mantras are powerful shorthand for focusing action.  A mantra sticks in the minds of people.  Instructions and authoritarian policies on the other hand create resistance and do not connect emotionally.

Our mantra with users is, “If it’s not in Salesforce.com, it did not happen!”  Salesforce.com is not a magic bullet in and of itself to solve business process issues.  It is the culture and habits of the team using Salesforce.com.  Thus, capturing every task, communication and field item creates the inherent value to the organization.  Without commitment to the system, it becomes nothing more than a glorified database.    Ensure your organization has a mantra which can be stated between people at meetings and at the water cooler easily.  It helps drive enthusiasm and adoption.

Create A Support Outlet

There should be a framework for how a business process is executed in the Salesforce.com implementation and customization.  However, there are always specific scenarios that need answers quickly and precisely for users.  Forward momentum needs to be maintained and a great way to do this is to provide a responsive support process.  This can be done with FAQ’s via a wiki, Salesforce.com Case management, or a variety of integrated tools which help to build a knowledge base.

Over time, facilitate knowledge sharing by pointing users continually to this resource and have them self-moderate.  This helps the organization to own the system they are vested in.

Salesforce.com Adoption Is A Challenging Road

We are creatures of habit.  If a person is determined not to change, there is little any person can do to thwart such a strong position of resistance.  Users want to have easier ways of doing things.  A well-designed system should provide the context for work to get done faster and more productively.  The adoption phase should focus on helping with the emotional resistance to change.  Strong leadership, a focused mantra and responsive support are three ingredients to drive success.

Feel free to comment on areas you have seen in change management and how you have seen these in action below.

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It is all too frequent to witness companies who are caught up in the frenzy of the social bubble. Seth warns about this in his article on social media noise. It’s a good read to hopefully focus people on the substance of connecting and delivering value rather than driving metrics that have nothing to do with revenue.

We preach the gospel of marketing process and systems and our customers that understand this realize that there are not shortcuts. They often learn this after trying all kinds of marketing schemes. Likes, connects, and tweets may be high, but sales are not. It’s a typical story. The problem lies in the fact that marketers miss what buyers actually want and do. It’s about them, not about the buyer, and therein lies the blind spot.

Instead of jumping into the next social fad, consider building something that produces a predictable and repeatable result:

• Understand your funnel. We do not like being sold. We do buy, however. And when we buy, we walk through a process. If you can understand the distinct steps of a buyer’s process, then you can identify the process of your marketing funnel.
• Provide value at each step. As a buyer takes a step, ensure there is appropriate value. Make it about them, not you. The right value packaged at the right time enables your process to create a memorable and trust-building experience with prospects.
• Identify conversion points. There is a right time for selling to begin. Your system should measure and deliver actions for your sales team at the right time. By doing so, a relevant conversation ensues with the buyer.
• Continually refine. You can manage and change what you can measure. As your process works to service your leads, refine it to increase conversions and deliver increased value.

Outcome thinking is disjointed and without focus. Process thinking is about building something that is personal, relevant and timely. It is harder work, and thus, perhaps why so few pay the brain bill to make it work. If there were a shortcut, everyone would be taking it. The truth is that a good sound process will always deliver above the latest marketing hype.

What are your thoughts? Feel free to comment below.

Your business is nothing more than a process.  After all, that is what a business is.  It is a sequence of repeatable, and sometimes custom steps which create a predictable result, either a product or service. Process is what we all use, but often times, it is difficult to capture and create the systems that make our processes work with ease.

The beauty of Salesforce.com is the ability to support how your business runs.  The steps involved for making a sale, creating attention, delivering value or supporting your customers can be created in a highly customized fashion.  No two Salesforce.com systems are alike out of the thousands of users because of the ability to customize around your specific way of doing business.

As you are working on creating process within Salesforce.com, here are four tips to help you make Salesforce.com work:

1. Segment your business.  Break down your processes into discrete areas.  It can be daunting trying to tackle your entire process.  The smaller you can break down your internal processes, the more manageable it will be.  Ensure the process you focus on is complete in it steps and fulfillment to deliver a result.
2. Think Tasks And Communications.  There are two outcomes for each step of a process – a task and a communication to a partner, customer or team member.  Ensure your steps capture both aspects and that you can set up Salesforce.com to support the desired outcome.
3. Identify Automation Opportunities.  Certain steps can become repetitive and tedious.  Think how automation via triggers or custom programming might be able to accelerate the mundane processing your users would encounter.  Automation may mean an automatic task, contingent data fields populated or a triggered custom email.
4. Develop Key Metrics.  To see if a process is working, you need to be able to monitor it in real-time.  Use custom dashboards and reports that will give you this feed-back to see the effectiveness and also allow for refinement of the process steps.  It is critical for achieving perfection in the process through iteration.

Salesforce.com does not run your business perfectly.  It is merely a tool which requires intelligent and deliberate customization to support the business processes you discover are successful.  Be sure to think like a designer and perfect like a refiner.  Use these tips to drive your organization.

What are some processes you would like to automate?

If there is not a process for nurturing unready Leads, then you may miss opportunities to engage when the timing is right.  Here is how you can manage your Salesforce.com Leads more effectively:

• Segment By Ratings.  Lead Rating is a native field.  Customize this to have meaning from the generic “Hot,” “Warm,” and “Cold”.  The readiness of your Lead may be by time (i.e., 60 days, 90 days, etc.) or fit (i.e., Needs Product, Cannot Use, etc.).  This segmentation will be valuable for various marketing buckets.
• Prepare filtered marketing campaign lists.  This entails creating Campaigns in Salesforce.com for segmentation as well as filtered lists.
• Integrate a marketing automation system.  This is a system which will sync based on your segmentation.  Triggered email communications over a period of time can be used to nurture Leads and monitor their activities.
• Send timely and personal communications.  Based on your segmentation criteria, develop regular email marketing that speaks to the concerns and interests of the prospect.  Some may need to be slowly educated.  Others may need to see continual success before they jump.
• Monitor responsiveness.  If your Leads are engaged with opening emails, visiting your site and consuming your digital content, then create a follow-up task list in Salesforce.com to take appropriate action.

With this kind of strategy to augment your tactical sales process, your team can work with Leads based on nurturing and marketing activities that prepare buyers for the sales conversation.

How can this help your sales process?  Feel free to comment below.

Salesforce.com can be extended to be interactive with your customers via a secure customer portal.  This allows for your customers to manage information about themselves via a login and view of shared Salesforce.com information.

Managing Cases

The standard customer portal allows for Case record management via a self-service portal.  When this is set up within your Professional or Salesforce.com Enterprise Edition, users can login to a portal site hosted on your site.  They can create new Case records or manage existing records to see progress and resolution on their issues.  This is valuable for keeping a place that your customer can see historical and current issues with your company.  It provides great value to the business relationship.

Custom Portals

If you want to create more self-service for your customers, then a custom built portal would be required.  Other data objects and fields, either standard or custom, can be shared out.

Depending on your business processes, you may want to share out invoice and accounting information with a customer.  Or you may have project information that is being managed in Salesforce.com that you want to status a customer on and allow for self-service.  They can view current status or input comments to the current project information.

There are many possibilities.  The value-add depends on what is important in your business relationship with your customers and how it might also help increase productivity for your team.

There are likely opportunities which make sense for creating a portal for your customer with the rich information resident in your Salesforce.com system.  Look for the return-on-productivity or return-on-investment to design a customer portal.  Feel free to connect with us if you would like help.

How would a customer portal be valuable for your business?

In our Salesforce consulting work, we often build requirements via a roadmap and implement custom project management that works for how a specific client does business.  The process often includes the design of a new custom data object which supports the workflow for a project management process.  Once this is set up, a team can now operate from one real-time system.

Here are 3 tips to help your project management process work inside Salesforce.com:

1. Establish clear data relationships.  Your project management may be a continuation of an existing Opportunity record or it may be a new data object altogether.  The other relationships such as billable time, job costs and relationships need to be customized and related in a way that makes sense to the flow of how you manage projects.  Ensure it is easy to add new information and access how information is viewed to gain a quick grasp of projects.
2. Ensure task sequencing.  Salesforce.com is a task-based system.  Each person on your team needs to set new tasks for themselves and others.  Once tasks are completed, they need to be closed as part of the activity history.  This keeps a record for yourselves and your customers on what has been done.  The litmus test is that any person should be able to open a project record and know what has been done and what is remaining.
3. Use reporting for real-time management.  Your reports and dashboards should be set up to manage across all of your projects.  This will give you greater capacity for more projects as you can prioritize workload and monitor how projects are progressing.  Furthermore, your reports can be used to status customers on how their specific project is doing in weekly meetings that help them understand progress, budget and work quality.

With strong leadership and a well-designed system, your system is able to help your team collaborate effectively with greater productivity.  Everyone should be on the same page and moving in the same direction.

There are many other best practices, but focus on these items to further create effective systems in your business and customer experience.

How are you doing project management and what has been your experience with your systems? Feel free to comment below.

The question at the outset poses a big assumption and problem, the assumption that what you’ve built is worthy of attention and therefore traffic. The question more appropriately asked should be, “How can I earn more traffic?”

Getting traffic is easy, getting attention from the right person requires talent and continually reinventing. This causes every business owner to stay awake at night because what was remarkable yesterday can become boring tomorrow. Status quo is obsolete and never to return. If you are boring it is easier for your customer to move on to the next vendor with as little as a click of a button.

So how do you get more traffic? Build something that attracts people to want to see it.  It is continual work which builds upon your value to the world.  If you are clear and you are valuable consistently, then the world finds its way to your door.  Here are some areas to focus on if you are willing to pay the price:

• Know who gets you.  Get clear on who will resonate with your value and your message.  What is their title, demographic, cares and preferences?  You can’t please everyone and you are not fit for everyone.
• Focus on helping.  We put up our guard when we feel like we are being sold.  We all still have problems.  How do you help?  Get clear on this goal.  It is the one that matters most to the buyer.  Communicate in a way that talks about helping.
• Remove roadblocks.  Make it easy to do business with you.  Think through all the conveniences that someone who wants to do business with you or tell others might need.  Remove the obstacles.  We are all busy and don’t like to expend extra effort.
• Be referrable.  Ensure your content can easily be shared on social networks and email.  We live in a highly connected world.  One person is connected virtually to many.  Traffic comes from this one to many relationship.

There is an audience out there awaiting for you.  They are waiting for you to lead and connect in a way that is highly relevant.  Get clear and provide value consistently.  You will be building a brand and a system for inbound marketing.

What areas can you focus on?

Everyone is inundated with irrelevant and intrusive marketing messages.  When we decide what we are looking for, then we search for it and when we feel ready, we engage.

Your sales process should begin with qualified leads.  Qualification can happen from self-selection and marketing automation systems that help to identify and profile your leads.  This digital information should be fully accessible to salespeople on your team to be able to orient themselves to who is ready.

Assuming your inbound marketing and marketing automation systems are set up to help your sales team, here are some process steps to consider for converting leads into buyers:

1. Set a first stage in your CRM.  This should be a stage that sales deems as qualified.  Qualification should be concretely defined by your organization based on authority, budget, fit and timing.  Sales should engage based on qualification.  In the early stages, the feedback loop to marketing should create refinement of the qualification criteria and how this step is accomplished.
2. Set a meeting with value.  The goal of sales should be to get a meeting.  Meetings are a first step to the relationship.  It should be valuable.  A consultative approach mapping out a process is one example.  A webinar that gives valuable ways to solve your customers’ problems is another.
3. Offer the value proposition.  Your value proposition may be standard or custom.  If it is standard, then point to the product order page.  If it is customized, then get a proposal produced quickly.  Your meeting should have captured what was required.  If your sales process requires more than one meeting then use these to build an ongoing proposal as details are captured in your CRM fields.
4. Continue providing value.  Selling your prospect can be repelling.  Now that you have understanding of their specific problems, go to work providing resources to help them solve the problems.  Stories of how others have solved their problem or tools which are useful are valuable.  Be the resource for providing value, not just selling something.
5. Prepare the service order.  There is a handoff after a sale is made.  Be sure that your sales process creates a world-class experience to kick off your service or deliver your product.  Create process steps for handing off to your operations or project team.  This is about the new customer.  Poor salespeople can focus only on themselves and not create a fluid customer experience after the sale is made.

These are generalized sales process steps that serve more as a framework.  Your sales team is a vital part of your integrated marketing process.  They develop the relationship to further build trust.  Be sure that the steps are well-defined and executed to create a cohesive customer experience.

What are your thoughts?

Furthermore, they work with other attorneys, courthouses, clients and documents related to cases.  This is all managed from their central customized system which our consulting team implemented.  I caught up with Sonya Clements on their team recently to get an update.  Here are some notes from our chat.

Salesforce Success Interview With Sonya Clement:

Sonya Clements works on the Prevost And Shaff legal team on family law, bankruptcy, personal injury, credit card defense and automobile finance fraud cases.  She has had 15 years in the industry and helps to execute a customized service process for her law firm.

For b2b sales which tracks engagement with your buyers in Salesforce.com, customizing your system to create a personalized experience helps your sales team be on message.  Your marketing team can use information to continually position the message and segment your database to drive in new leads or increase buyer readiness.

The data which sales collects and marketing harnesses as well as vice-versa can serve as a powerful feedback loop to drive lead conversion.  Customizing Salesforce.com should be implemented with this feedback loop in mind.  Here are some best practices for your customization which can help drive this lead generation and lead conversion process:

1. Categorize By Product Interest.  Within your sales qualification processes, your team can capture information on product or service interest.  These picklists along with related granular information can be used in reporting with marketing to create campaigns that are automated and triggered in real-time or on a periodic basis for events and buying cycles.
2. Segment By Authority.  Each lead and contact in Salesforce.com has a relationship in the decision making process.  Those with decision making authority versus business influence or technical influence can be segmented and delivered different marketing materials based on their agendas and interest.  A stream of technical data might be more relevant for one audience whereas ROI information and change management practices might be appropriate for senior managers.
3. Assign lead scoring.   Whether you use a marketing automation system or assess lead readiness with salespeople, create a customized way of scoring leads for their readiness to buy.  Their activities and engagement with your content would be a key metric.  Furthermore, their timing and urgency may be another.  As marketing drives in more data to Salesforce.com allow your sales team to act respectively with the most ready leads.