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From Salesforce Adoption to Collaboration: 6 Tips for Sales Team Success

This article was published on August 2, 2021

In today’s super-competitive retail environment, companies that help their sales teams manage customer relationships effectively tend to find more success than those that don’t. For this reason, more and more businesses are turning to customer relationship management (CRM) systems to provide the support that sales teams need to deliver better results.

However, despite the benefits, some sales reps still view these systems as tools that benefit management much more than themselves. With that thought in mind, here are six CRM-based tips from NewVoiceMedia to help get your sales team more invested in your business and increase customer retention and revenue as a consequence.

1.     Salesforce is the world’s number one CRM system

If CRM system implementation fails, more often than not, it’s because of insufficient user adoption among sales reps. To this end, Salesforce has become the world’s number one CRM system because it focuses on delivering an intuitive user experience, and is packed full of features that make a sales rep’s job easier.

For instance, Salesforce ensures sales reps are able to access a complete and accurate become the world’s number one CRM system because it focuses on delivering an intuitive user experience, data set on their leads, which can be used with confidence at all times. As such, the system acts as a sales enabling tool, capable of turning every rep into a one-person sales and marketing machine.

Consequently, rather than being perceived solely as a tool for managers to track progress and compile reports, Salesforce helps those ‘on the ground floor’ to convert leads better, which, in turn, keeps them engaged and motivated.

2.     Create a clear CRM vision statement

A CRM vision statement should clearly define to your employees all corporate objectives related to delivering the customer experience you expect.

Ideally, the statement needs to be seen as ‘coming from the top’ via a senior executive, and expressed in a way that will engage staff. A failure to do either of these things will invariably result in the message not earning the respect from your sales team that it needs to succeed.

Conversely, fully motivating your sales staff to engage and buy into your CRM vision will help provide the foundations needed for delivering the customer experience you desire. What’s more, at the same time, it will help you to differentiate your core business values with those you create for customer interaction excellence.

3.     Measure CRM strategy success and KPIs

Every CRM strategy needs clear KPIs that support your vision statement. These are usually divided between sales, service and marketing metrics, and include things like number of prospects, customer satisfaction scores and retention rates.

 

Whatever KPIs you use, the metrics need to allow you to measure, track and evaluate the success of your CRM strategy. In addition, success metrics that are tied into compensation and rewards for high achievers are also an effective tool for helping to ensure the continued engagement of your sales team.

4.     Review your customer facing processes

If you are thinking about integrating a system such as Salesforce, it is also worth evaluating the approach your business takes to delivering customer satisfaction.

When introducing a new CRM platform, for example, many businesses simply decide to automate existing sales and service processes. If these processes are already flawed, however, the effectiveness of introducing a new CRM system will be reduced significantly.

If you haven’t already done so, then, before deploying CRM technology, think about whether there is anything you can do to streamline your customer-facing processes. Alongside the new system, refining these processes will help develop your customer communication mechanisms and reduce frustration levels within your sales team.

5.     Keep it as simple as possible

If you are rolling out a new CRM system for your business, it is easy to get carried away and include lots of mandatory fields. Unfortunately, this is both the quickest and fastest route to driving down adoption rates among your sales team.

As humans, we are hardwired to resist change. Therefore, if you try and enforce too many changes on your sales team too soon, you will most likely encounter resistance. Instead, keep things simple – especially at first – and roll out the new system and any other changes gradually.

6.     Encourage collaboration

From the outside looking in, the world of sales is often perceived as dog-eat-dog. In reality, though, it is the sales team that cultivates a culture of collaboration that often enjoys more success.

With that thought in mind, Chatter is a component of Salesforce that is worth encouraging your sales team to use. This is because it allows users to form a community for knowledge-sharing, ensuring the right people can find and share the information that they need from anywhere in the world.

For more on this topic, read our whitepaper 11 Steps to Success with Salesforce: Adoption to Addiction

Nicola Brookes
Nicola Brookes

Nicola is RVP Corporate Communications at NewVoiceMedia. She will mostly blog about customer service, industry news, events and company updates. Follow Nicola on Twitter at http://twitter.com/nbrookespr

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