5 Compelling Ways To Increase Your Salesforce Benefits This Year

It’s always possible to increase your Salesforce benefits. Our customers have proved it time and time again.

And every business wants to maximise its’ Salesforce benefits in 2021. But how will you do it?

Here are five ways our customers achieved this in 2020. See which ones apply to you.

1. Measure sales against target in Salesforce

Every sales team needs to track sales performance against target. It’s fundamental to effective sales management. But there’s no target tab in Salesforce. This means many businesses export data out of Salesforce to measure performance against target.

But they don’t need to. Here are three ways to measure sales versus target in Salesforce.com. You can:

• Use a simple dashboard gauge. This measures revenue against a pre-determined target number.
• Use the Forecasts tab. This is an advanced management tool and provides strong forecasting functionality.
• Use a custom solution. Simpler and more automated than the Forecasts tab, this automatically links Opportunities to a target at the User, Account or Product Category level.

How to measure 2021 sales targets in Salesforce explains the three options in more detail and tells you when each is appropriate We also have an accompanying webinar recording that demonstrates the three options in action. And Is Your Sales Funnel Big Enough To Meet Your Sales Target explains how to create an accurate sales forecast in Salesforce.

2. Add Products to Opportunities

Do you use Opportunities in Salesforce? But you don’t use Products? Then you have the chance to further boost your Salesforce benefits.

But that might not be your first reaction. Not every business uses Products. Here are five reasons why customers initially don’t use Products:

• “We’ve too many Products.”
• “We sell large Products configured from multiple smaller items.”
• “We sell our Products as bundles, not individual items.”
• “We don’t sell Products. We sell intangible services such as consultancy, training or support contracts.”
• “We sell items we purchase from third parties e.g. telephony companies that sell products and services from end manufacturers.”

We provide simple ways to overcome each of these perceived obstacles. And the benefits of using Products in Salesforce are significant:

• Improved visibility of the sales funnel.
• Improved accuracy of Opportunity Amounts and values.
• Increased potential to identify up-sell and cross sell possibilities.
• Improved control over pricing and discounts.
• Streamlined business processes including automated quote and proposal production.

If you’re new to Products then Learn the basics about Products will get you started in understanding how to achieve these benefits.  And using a product selection wizard makes it easy for sales people to add products to opportunities.

3. Build great Salesforce dashboards

When a Salesforce.com sales executive demonstrates Salesforce to potential customers, guess what’s the first thing they show? Dashboards.

There’s a reason for this. Improved visibility of the sales funnel and sales performance is the single biggest benefit that Sales Managers gain from an effective Salesforce environment. And the way to get that visibility is dashboards.

Yet so many executives don’t have the dashboards that allow them to manage the sales team effectively. That means they can’t take the proactive steps needed to drive revenue growth.

A well-constructed sales dashboard allows managers to answer the question, “Where do I need to focus attention in order to increase future revenue?” To do this, the dashboard should focus on five key areas:

• The size of the sales funnel.
• The quality of the sales funnel.
• The trend in the sales funnel.
• The sales performance against target.
• The lessons from historical performance.

The good news is that poor dashboards are easy to fix. Doing so will lead to a step change in your Salesforce benefits. 12 examples of the charts that should be on your Salesforce dashboard gives great examples of how to get started. Download the accompanying Powerpoint if you want to use it for future reference.

And if you’ve a set of good quality Salesforce reports, configure your dashboards to make the information easily accessible. 10 best practice tips for awesome Salesforce dashboards contains excellent advice on how to do just that.