No two Salesforce implementations are the same. Each of our clients has unique processes and requirements and it's our job as Salesforce consultants in Dubai to design and built CRM platforms that reflect those bespoke requirements. The first step in working with Tenacre is to define the scope of work for the Salesforce project.
This process can be difficult for many of our clients, so we've written this article to provide assistance. Remember that your Tenacre consultant will walk you through each of these steps, you won't have to undertake any of these activities by yourself.
A report by the Aberdeen Group tells us that 84% of inquiries that businesses receives will not convert to a sale. These inquiries are usually expensive, you've paid out marketing budget for Google Adwords, Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter campaigns.
So what's the problem and how can you fix this?
For companies in Dubai and the GCC region, succeeding in sales and sales management is can be dependent on the tools and technologies that are used. Many of our clients relied on spreadsheets or basic CRM platforms before making the decision to upgrade their CRM to Salesforce with the help of Tenacre consultants.
Once the decision has been made to move to Salesforce, what are the benefits that you can expect?
A Salesforce project can often seem daunting, particularly if you haven't been involved in one before. Depending on the degree of change that Salesforce will bring to your company, the key to getting the CRM up and running is to prepare thoroughly. While each project that we work on is unique, there are common themes that the team at Tenacre has identified that could help you prepare better before the project kicks off.
Managing sales meetings as a Salesforce company means that how you run these meetings will be different to how other sales managers (that don’t have real-time information at their fingertips in the CRM) run theirs. With so much data in the CRM, this article explores the specific ways that you can leverage this data for more effective meetings and more profitable sales.
For professional services firms, we generally have two things to offer our clients; our time and expertise. Managing these assets correctly requires a unique skill set and management tools. Having worked with many professional services in Dubai to implement Salesforce, the consultants at Tenacre have had the benefit of seeing how many different types of companies manage their resources profitably.
Here are some of the things that we’ve learned.
Salesforce Engage fixes the problem is how to enable your sales team to quickly and easily deploy marketing campaigns that directly help them to close new business. With Salesforce Engage, a salesperson can load a new prospect into the CRM, and then activate a multi-step email marketing campaign right from their iPhone.
The only thing that's worse than losing a deal, is losing a deal and not learning anything from it. For sales professionals lost deals are a part of the job, and for the most part, we take it in our stride. From a business perspective, there's still a lot of value in these deals that need to be captured and evaluated. Some of the best sales-orientated companies that we have worked with take a rigorous approach to capturing and categorising each deal that they don't win. When Tenacre implements Salesforce CRM Dubai, we always add a feature that requires the salesperson to add more information to the record when they are closing an Opportunity as 'Closed Lost'. This information isn't to drag the sales staff over the coals, but to ensure that each of our clients are capturing and evaluating this valuable information.
Here's how why you should start evaluating each lost deal, and some tip's on how to start this process off.
I tell a story to all our new clients when we are training them how to generate reports in Salesforce CRM. This story is told to illustrate how to look for trends in Salesforce, and then take corrective action if necessary. The story goes something like this;
We see a lot of our clients that start to use reports from Salesforce to track the source of their leads. In a lot of cases, these reports will show that the main driver of new leads is Google Adwords. The second report that we show them is the source of closed sales, and in this case, it's not uncommon to see that Adwords delivers a far lower percentage of the revenue that would be expected, particularly from a high volume of leads. The point of the story is - what do you do next?
So you've made a decision to move forward with Salesforce! Congratulations on that, bringing the worlds #1 CRM into your business is a smart step that can lead to great outcomes with your sales, marketing or services. In the early stages of your project your main area of focus will undoubtedly be designing the system with your consultant, and making sure that the CRM is technically built out, bug-free and to your specifications. It's now time to also think about what happens after you go live with Salesforce.
How to you motivate the team to use it correctly over the long term?
I’ve been involved with Salesforce now for over 12 years, mainly as a customer but more recently as a partner, consultant and developer. In that time I’ve been involved in setting up dozens of CRM platforms for companies of various sizes (though mainly medium to small here in Dubai). Knowing what I know now, what advice would I give to anybody that’s getting ready to take on a Salesforce project?
I think the following might be useful;
I refresh the 'Opportunity Pipeline' report in my Salesforce system at least twice per day. Like most business owners I am preoccupied with seeing if we're closing enough deals and creating enough new ones. We like to see what business we are winning, and what we need to close to turn a poor month into a good one, or better still, a good month into an excellent one.
Most of us have sales meetings on a regular basis, usually each week or month. Making this time with your sales (and marketing) team effective can result in much better sales performance, so it's worth considering how you are running these meetings and if you can shake things up a little.
Here are seven tips for more efficient sales meetings.
At Tenacre, we like startup businesses, and in Dubai there are thousands of you every month!
Its striking that there are so many startup business that contact us before the company starts trading to get their systems in place. This shows that entrepreneurs recognise the value of starting a business in a way that organises data, gives the sales team the best possible chance of succeeding, and brings the entire team together on a single platform.
So what does a startup business get from Salesforce, and why should they spend precious capital on a CRM?
They say that 'information is power'. When you're a Salesforce client you are going to have the option of creating many, many reports that can show you information on your business. The key to viewing this information is to consider,
a) what you can learn from it, and
b) what you can do with it?
Here are five reports that we recommend all our clients use as standard.
Deciding what sales reports are to be used is often a decision that our new Salesforce.com clients spend time considering. For some companies, having a CRM system in place provides the first opportunity to really look at sales data in a structured way. The challenge for company leaders is to define what reports are to be used, and who uses them.
In this blog post we're not going to list of the reports that we think you should use as standard, we've addressed this previously. Instead we'd like to consider the value of sales reports strategically in your organisation so that your teams can gain some real benefit from them. Consider your sales data and reports in the context of
