Plan for growth with these Salesforce best practices
Sales teams around the world are under-performing. Your average sales team is operating at a fraction of its full potential. Lead assignment systems are too basic. Lead response times are too slow. Qualification takes too long. Conversion rates are too low. But all is not lost. Implementing a few simple best practices in Salesforce can transform your very ordinary team into a high-performance sales team.
Most sales teams are under-performing – woefully. That’s not to say that they are not hitting their targets – many are. But they are capable of achieving so much more. They are not hitting their stretch targets. Most sales teams could – if the stars aligned – achieve 2x, 3x or even 4x the revenues they are generating today.
The challenges are many:
- Sub-optimal marketing practices limit the number of Leads that can be generated
- Manual lead creation processes create business-critical delays
- Slow response times mean hot leads go cold
- Manual or over-simplified lead assignment processes are inefficient and supress productivity
- Inexperienced sales reps have a negative impact on conversion rates
- Hot and high-value Leads get stuck in queues
- In call centers, long queue times lead to high abandon rates
Sounds familiar? Some or all of the above factors are negatively impacting the performance of Sales teams across the globe, in some way, shape or form.
But for organisations that have adopted Salesforce as their CRM and #1 business productivity tool, it doesn’t have to be that way.
Creating a high-performance Sales team on Salesforce
At Ortoo we build lead management solutions on the Salesforce platform, which dramatically improve lead response times, conversion rates and sales revenues by adding intelligent automation to the Lead and Opportunity object in Salesforce. Indeed our solutions can be applied to any Salesforce object, including custom objects, but here we will focus on Leads and Opportunities.
Here’s how Ortoo can transform your sales operation into a high-performance sales team, in 9 easy steps:
Step 1:
Create more leads with automated lead capture
To a degree, most organisations have embedded marketing automation techniques into their outbound marketing campaigns in some way, shape or form. Building campaign landing pages, capturing leads, tracking IP addresses, matching them to third party databases and developing nurturing programs is now a common lead generation practice. But a lot of companies are failing to do the basics and, in so doing, they are missing out on some low-hanging fruit.
Inbound email enquiries can all be captured as Leads – automatically. Whether it’s a speculative unstructured email sent to a sales inbox (e.g. sales@acmeproducts.com) or a structured pre-sales enquiry sent via a contact form, those can all be captured as Leads.
Going one step further, prospects can be invited to submit an RFQ (Request for Quote) or an RFP (Request for Proposal) and the responses can be routed automatically to Salesforce. Likewise, leads received from lead brokers can also be processed automatically.
Step 2:
Increase potential throughput by automating the Lead creation process in Salesforce
Generating more Leads is one thing but making them available to sales or marketing teams in a format which enables immediate response/qualification is another matter. Leads often pile-up in a sales admin’s inbox or in a campaign-specific marketing inbox – and sometimes, heaven forbid, they are even stored in an Excel spreadsheet to be transferred at a future date to Salesforce.
If you or a member of your team is manually creating leads in Salesforce then it has to stop. A lead which is waiting in someone’s inbox is a lead which cannot readily be processed by your marketing and/or sales teams. And it is going cold – fast.
Deploy Email-to-anything, and automatically create Leads or Opportunities in Salesforce directly from inbound emails.
Step 3:
Reduce response times by assigning Leads instantly
Even if a lead is created in Salesforce, it doesn’t mean that someone is necessarily processing it. It could be stuck in a queue or assigned to someone who is off sick or temporarily unavailable
Email-to-anything can automatically assign newly created Leads to Salesforce queues. But if you want to supercharge your sales teams’ performance, then you need to deploy an advanced assignment engine.
Q-assign routes Leads or Opportunities to individual users, teams or queues, instantly. What’s more, it knows who is available and is ready to process each Lead in the shortest possible time.
Step 4:
Reduce response times still further with auto-reassignment rules
Some queue-time may be inevitable. Reps or agents might be busy processing existing opportunities and a new Lead could be sat in an agent or team queue for some time. Where a lead is sat unattended in a queue for x seconds or minutes then auto-reassignment rules can be activated to route them to different (shorter) queues or even specialist teams. Q-assign can also set the status of overwhelmed reps to “unavailable” – automatically.
Step 5:
Increase conversion rates with lead matching
Every lead has different attributes: product type, value, territory, complexity, language etc. And every sales rep also has different attributes: skill-set, experience, location, language etc. Matching complex and/or high-value leads to inexperienced reps will inevitably result in lower conversion rates. Likewise, giving simple, low-value leads to your most experienced reps will not yield an optimum return, given their skills. For maximum productivity, each Lead needs to be matched to the very best available sales rep at that moment in time – the one best equipped to make a conversion.
Q-assign can analyze every Lead, as it arrives in Salesforce, and match it to the best available sales rep based on any number of configurable criteria. Sales Managers can monitor, measure and adjust team member attributes, organise reps with common-skillsets into specialist teams and benefit from shared knowledge and economies of scale. Then they can switch on dynamic assignment rules and route Leads accordingly.
Matching the right Lead to the right agent at the right time inevitably leads to higher conversion rates and higher throughput – a no brainer.
Step 6:
Increase conversion rates still further by prioritizing hot Leads
Q-assign uses highly configurable lead scoring systems to categorize and rank Leads. Hot leads can be readily identified, prioritized and matched to suitable reps or teams. Unqualified and or low-value Leads can be de-prioritised and placed in queues.
By prioritising hot Leads, they are fast-tracked through to suitable agents and, inevitably, conversion rates can soar.
Step 7:
Increase average deal values by prioritizing high-value Leads
If you distribute Leads on a simple round-robin basis then all Leads are treated equally, with hot and cold Leads, and low and high-value Leads being assigned in turn. The average deal size is what it is – total revenue divided by total number of deals.
But if the higher value Leads can be readily identified and prioritized then the average deal size can be dramatically increased. Reps can be prevented from wasting valuable time on low-value Leads and instead can focus their valuable time on converting the high- value opportunities.
Q-assign can identify high-value leads, automatically convert them to opportunities and assign them to the best available sales rep, significantly boosting the average deal size.
Step 8:
Optimise! Empower Managers with Intelligent Assignment Rules
Q-assign empowers Sales Management teams by putting them in control of all the variables using a single-pane-of-glass approach – and breaking the dependence on IT. Managers can control and fine-tune team members attributes and availability, adjust weightings, caps and quotas to maximise throughput and optimise conversion rates and manage automated escalations.
Managers can even adjust assignment rules to enable bulk auto-re-assignment and deploy predictive shift-management to anticipate workload and capacity at a future date.
Step 9:
Analyze results, provide feedback and continuously improve
By creating and deploying a continuous improvement process, a high-performance sales team can go from strength to strength – quarter on quarter, year on year. It’s vital to analyze results, share critical feedback with stakeholder business units and continuously improve. Sales Managers can interrogate Lead history reports to analyze revenue and pipeline. Marketing Managers can look at lead sources, industry info and key ratios, and then optimise marketing activities to yield higher quality, higher value leads for the next sales cycle – and in greater quantities.
Reap the benefits and pay close attention to the compound effect
Each of these improvements should lead to a performance increase in their own right. But if you are struggling to get buy-in from stakeholders around the business, be sure to draw their attention to the miracle that is the compound effect. This will open many eyes, especially at board level.
Because of the effect of compounding, a small improvement at each stage of the sales cycle can lead to a dramatic improvement in overall sales. Consider a company who typically generates 100 leads per day and has very predictable conversion and close rates as follows:
| Lead status | Number |
| Number of leads generated | 100 |
| Number created in Salesforce and passed to Marketing (Conversion Rate 50%) | 50 |
| Number qualified by Marketing (and passed to Sales) – same day (C/R 60%) | 30 |
| Number qualified by Sales and created as an Opportunity (C/R 67%) | 20 |
| Number of deals closed by sales (C/R 50%) | 10 |
| Average deal value | $100 |
| Revenue | $1000 |
Now consider a 10% improvement is made at each stage in the Sales cycle:
| Lead status | Number |
| # of Leads | 110 |
| # of Leads available for qualification (C/R 55%) | 55 |
| # of Marketing Qualified Leads (C/R 66%) | 40 |
| # of Sales Qualified Leads (C/R 74%) | 30 |
| # of Deals closed (C/R 55%) | 16 |
| Average deal value | $110 |
| Revenue | $1760 |
Due to the compound effect, by achieving a 10% improvement at each stage of the sales cycle we actually get a 76% increase in revenue – an eye-watering number which, if transferred to a real-world scenario, would completely transform the fortunes of most businesses.
Conclusion
Automating your Salesforce instance to optimise Lead throughput and conversion rates can transform your average, run-of-the-mill sales outfit into a state-of-the-art, high-performance sales team – putting your company in an unprecedented position of strength, geared for years of revenue growth and market-share gains.
For a quick chat about your use case, and/or a demo of e2a or Q-assign, please don’t hesitate to contact us at sales@ortooapps.com
