28 Sales Representatives Trained in Salesforce
Created Customized Reports for 264 Accounts, 4241 Leads, and 151 Opportunities
About
The organization is a leading provider of clinically relevant analytics and insights for value-based networks in the healthcare industry. It supports life sciences organizations across the United States to deliver excellent and cost-effective healthcare services through data analytics insights.
Challenge
The organization has been operating with Salesforce for quite some time now. But, inadequate initial set-up, lack of team training, and long-term improper use have brought up several issues that could no longer be avoided.
The organization was at a loss on how to take full advantage of Salesforce’s expansive features. They wanted their CRM customized to their business processes and have their sales team adopt and use it consistently. They have 28 sales representatives in total, and only two sales reps were actively using Salesforce. Their Salesforce administrator has been pushing tenure team members to adopt the CRM, but some sales representatives have not logged in since 2017. One sales rep could have anywhere from 200 to 300 accounts, yet they weren’t storing them into one system. So, they contacted OBO to help onboard and improve Salesforce utilization among their sales team. They needed OBO to advise them on the best practices and implementation solutions for their organization.
They did not measure sales activity because they were barely using Salesforce. And although they had thousands of deals in their pipeline, the sales management team was only able to report open opportunities. The system had several account duplicates, and sales activities were not tracked or synced in the system.
Solution
Phase One: Salesforce Clean-Up
OBO created a step-by-step implementation plan to get the organization on the right track. The first phase was to “clean up” the existing Salesforce instance by removing old, invalid data, cleaning duplicate records, and updating opportunities and inaccurate reports.
Merged Duplicate Records and Removed Irrelevant Data
OBO exported relevant object data to a Google spreadsheet. They cleaned up the data by deleting irrelevant records and saving pertinent data. They also merge duplicate records to eliminate confusion amongst the sales team. Once they finished cleaning up the data, they integrated the spreadsheet to reflect on Salesforce.
Updated Records and Reports
Reporting was the most extensive area of frustration in Salesforce for the business development team. The reports were inaccurate and misleading, which created disorganization and unnecessary manual efforts. OBO started fixing opportunity reports by updating records with relevant data. They then exported opportunities to a Salesforce integrated spreadsheet that the organization can review and update. Once the opportunities were updated in Salesforce, the product, market, and type reports contained accurate, up-to-date data for business development and management teams to analyze. In addition to updating opportunity records to improve reports’ quality, OBO also updated the filters to provide more relevant data in reports. OBO filtered them to include closed-won deals, lost opportunities, and opportunities in progress.
Phase Two: Salesforce Implementation
Once OBO cleaned up the irrelevant and inaccurate data, they then moved on to implement Salesforce items. These items included field updates, field requirements on record creation, developing the HubSpot/Salesforce integration, updating permissions, and creating new reports and dashboards.
Integrated Salesforce with HubSpot
The organization procured HubSpot for marketing efforts, such as email blasts, workflows, and website forms. They needed to develop an integration between HubSpot and Salesforce to provide business development teams with insight into lead interaction with their marketing efforts. OBO used the native HubSpot/Salesforce integration app, which allows data to be selectively synced between the two systems and provides an intuitive, user-friendly interface to adjust sync settings. OBO bi-laterally synced activity data (such as email sends, opens, clicks, notes) and selectively synced contacts and leads.
Created Reports and Dashboards
OBO created dashboards to show opportunity, activity, and lead reports on a global scale across the entire sales team. They set up dashboards for each business development team member to help keep track of their tasks daily. They included valuable reports in the dashboards, such as daily tasks, current in-progress opportunities, and new leads reports. These features gave high-level insights into each team member’s progress. In addition to individual dashboards, OBO also created global opportunity pipeline reports for the organization. These reports track opportunities versus quarterly goals, allowing managers to track won and projected sales against a revenue goal. OBO set up reports that display in-progress opportunities over 80% to enable managers to easily view which deals sales reps are closing at a given time.
Quicker User Permission Access
The organization had one System Administrator in Salesforce. All other users had basic permission access, which resulted in them having to contact the System Admin every time they needed to change an object’s owner. OBO eliminated this bottlenecked process by implementing permission sets alongside profiles to give users the appropriate system permissions based on their role. Permission Sets are more flexible, “stackable,” easier to manage, and scalable, as they allow Admins to assign permissions to users more easily when internal roles change.
Established Required Actions
Many Salesforce records in the organization were inaccurate or lacking critical data because there were few required actions users had to follow. OBO instilled a system-wide standardization to associate objects before saving records and require pertinent fields to be populated to increase data relevance.
Phase Three: Salesforce Processes
After OBO rebuilt Salesforce to match the organization’s processes, they then set user processes and standards to ensure records, reports, and data uniformity.
Naming Conventions
OBO developed and implemented a standardized naming convention for Salesforce records. Navigating the system became more straightforward and increased the efficiency of data search for users.
Record Sales Activity
OBO trained the members within the organization to record all sales activity in Salesforce. Historical sales activity provided insight into when and why a record was contacted and by whom. The history prevented business development team members from reaching out to a lead who has already been in recent contact with a different rep. It also helped managers analyze the effectiveness of their strategies used in converting a lead to a closed opportunity.
Established a Process to Check for Duplicate Records
Although Salesforce alerts a user if they attempt to create a record with an existing email, detection of duplicates based on names alone is not guaranteed. Hence, the organization followed OBO’s quick search approach to ensure new records created do not already exist.
General Record Keeping
Few fields were routinely populated on Salesforce records by the organization’s users. OBO generated a field usage report and adjusted the Salesforce page layouts to only display relevant fields. They then guided the organization’s users to conscientiously populate as many data points as possible on a given record. The lack of data in records perpetuates a user’s preference to avoid using CRM; therefore, members must routinely add all pertinent information.
Conclusion
Setting up Salesforce or any CRM without a concrete process of using it within your organization will draw many issues. Your investment in any CRM will be rendered to waste without proper protocols in place. Additionally, investing in team training before implementing CRM’s within your organization will prove helpful in the long term. Your data and reports will be more accurate, and your analytics will be more insightful. Automation technology is fantastic at boosting efficiency, so long as your people are also doing their part in contributing data. If you are looking to increase your team’s knowledge and productivity using your existing CRM, contact us!
