5 Ways to Manage Your Sales Team Using Salesforce

One of the most important factors of a successful Salesforce implementation is ensuring that your management team is actively promoting and relying on the platform. Without this, sales teams often view their CRM system as an afterthought, only updating it as they see fit. This craters both adoption rates and data quality, which could set you up for failure, wasted time and money.

In this blog, we’ve shared some specific tactics to help you manage your team effectively and achieve awesome results using Salesforce. Before you get started, it’s helpful to consider the following questions:

What is your team’s sales process?
- Does everyone on your sales team know it and use it the same way?
How should your sales team interact with Salesforce?
- Does Salesforce accurately reflect your sales process?
How can Salesforce positively impact your sales team’s performance?
- Does Salesforce shape the path for your sales team to complete their most valuable activities every day?

Nothing drives adoption quite as well as large commission checks!

1) Measure the process, not just the result

Many businesses are overly focused on closing sales, which makes a lot of sense. However, it’s important to remember that closing the sale is the final step of the sales process and only measuring results will give you very little insight into how to coach reps and spot trends in their process.

Salesforce gives you all the tools necessary to measure your sales process from inception to completion, and you should be focused on doing exactly that. This gives you great a opportunity to see where your sales team members are strong and where they need more training.

Measuring your sales process should include anything from initial leads, opportunity cycles, activity metrics, all the way up to closing the deal.

One great way to track your process is to setup a dashboard to highlight your teams performance and sales activity. This will highlight reps that are doing the right things from start to finish and will set a great example for the rest of the team.

Salespeople love to compete, so harness this energy to help them win by using Salesforce. Some sales teams pass around a trophy each week for the team member who had the highest activity score. Depending on your sales process, this could be a number of different activities like calls made, emails sent, opportunities created, or referrals requested.

2) Encourage sales people to build and use their own reports

Sales reps armed with data can find opportunities where they previously could not. In order for this to happen, sales people need to know how to create reports on Salesforce.

You don’t need your entire team to be Salesforce reporting experts, but they should be able to find answers to questions that arise as they work through their deal cycle. This behaviour leads to revenue and should be encouraged as much as possible.

We recommend basic reporting training when you start using Salesforce with your team. Eventually, you can challenge your reps to come armed with new ideas, expressed in reporting, as you conduct your regular meetings.

These reports can translate directly to dashboards. If salespeople are building and managing a dashboard specific to their work, it keeps them aligned to the metrics that matter, both towards their commission and the company’s goals.

3) Rely on dashboards and reports for leadership meetings and sales rep 1-on-1’s

Leadership can preach all they want about the virtues of CRM, but if you still end up reviewing Excel spreadsheets every week, the CRM system will never gain the traction it should.

When management teams continue to rely on old systems, the sales team will follow that path and things will slip through the cracks.

In order to increase sales performance and hold your team accountable, it is crucial that leadership relies heavily on Salesforce reporting. Once the sales team knows leadership is extensively using the tool, activity metrics will increase, along with your revenue.

To ensure your team is held accountable, base one-on-one sales meetings on your Salesforce reporting metrics. This will not only give reps a clearer understanding of how their work is viewed by leadership, but promote healthy competition among the team.

4) Make the process user-centric

In order for data quality to remain high, the system must be end user focused. Take steps to ensure your sales process is adequately reflected in the system, without being overbuilt.

Nothing is more frustrating for a sales person than having to fill out 5 or 10 extra fields to satisfy a management reporting requirement. Remember, you hired people to sell, not to do data entry.

In addition, look for areas where automation can save sales users time. Automation that helps with quoting, price approvals, email templates, and data integration can lead to less data entry, fewer errors, and higher user satisfaction.

5) Keep sales people in the system

Lastly, we strongly advise eliminating any redundancy and consolidate as much of the sales process as you can within Salesforce.

There are a number of reasons to do this, and the biggest reason is that the system will be easier to use if everything is in one place.

We often see very intuitive and well designed CRM’s that are missing a crucial process, like quoting, for example. In this case, the sales team has to move to another platform, create and send the quote, and then bring it back into the CRM once completed. This process is disjointed and, as you can imagine, time consuming and prone to errors.

Look for opportunities to make your CRM the central part of your users day-to-day by completing tasks with just a single click in Salesforce.

How do you use Salesforce to manage your team?

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