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Introduction
Salesforce Administrators are vital to the success of any company with a CRM. They handle day-to-day tasks like provisioning new users with ease. More importantly, they are often charged with setting the direction a company takes with regards to process improvement, systems implementation and automation. This is where they can really make a big impact. One way Salesforce Administrators can increase the speed at which they contribute to the success of their company is through the use of Apps from the AppExchange or Chrome Extensions.
Sales Operations play an important role in company success too. Often times they are the unsung heros, making connections, discovering trends in data, and suggesting efficiency improvements that Admins can implement. Sales Ops and Admins, like peanut butter and jelly, are the perfect combination for success.
Here’s six Salesforce Administrator and Sales Operations tools they should keep in their toolbox to maximize their Sales Team's productivity.
Sales Rep Productivity
Chances are, your company has something it’s trying to sell - a set of products, a consumable good, or a service. One of the best ways to sell more, is to increase your sales rep’s productivity. Using a CRM, like Salesforce's tools, is a good start, but it can be a difficult task to get sales reps to spend the time needed to keep data current. Requiring them to update opportunities, one record at a time, in a browser is a real drag on their time. Search for a record, update the data, save the record. Repeat. Why not use a tool like GridBuddy that allows you to connect to your Salesforce data through a single view that is actionable and doesn’t require advanced developer skills or tons of code to create and maintain?
With GridBuddy sales reps can quickly and easily update multiple attributes on multiple opportunities all from one screen. GridBuddy enforces your access rights and other security features of Salesforce too, and provides a great user experience whether you are sitting at your desk, or out in the field using your mobile device. Not only does your company benefit from more productive sales reps, your sales ops team and your admins also benefit from better data to help drive better decisions!
Documentation
The one area of business that seems to be most overlooked is documentation. This typically only becomes important when a staffing change is about to take place, and sometimes those changes are unexpected and come completely out of the blue, with little or no warning. By then, it’s all but too late to start thinking about documentation. The moment your Salesforce Administrator walks out the door on their last day on the job, their years of knowledge and history of why the CRM is configured the way it is, with certain processes automated & others not, also disappears.
You can certainly bring in a consultant to dig in and determine all the ins and outs - that’s one solution. You can also see if Sales Ops can step in to help, since they often work closely with Admins. A better solution for using Sales Ops tools is to start building documentation now, before you discover a need for it.
A tool like Spekit can easily facilitate and automate the creation of your documentation. Creation of a Salesforce wiki, or data dictionary as the foundation of your data infrastructure and training programs can produce some great benefits like shorter on-boarding time for sales teams, better reporting capabilities through easier discovery of what data objects really mean and how they are used. Learn more about the benefits of a Salesforce Data Dictionary across the organizat
Training and Onboarding
Training tends to go hand-in-hand with documentation. It’s a pairing that’s been around for a long time and becoming more and more of a differentiator in the recruiting process and ramp-up time of new employees. Sales reps should be busy all day calling on prospects, and closing deals - that’s where the money is. And you want to arm your sales reps with the best knowledge possible, as fast as possible, so they can beat the competition and win more deals. Therefore, access to the knowledge they need, directly in-context is critical to getting your Sales reps spending more time selling and less time looking for answers.
Training on Salesforce has evolved by leaps and bounds in the past few years with the introduction of Trailhead. If you don’t know what Trailhead is, head over here to learn more and get started. Using Spekit’s Chrome Extension as part of your training program allows you to further customize the onboarding and training experience of your new users.
You don’t need to define everything separately, your end users can simply hover or right-click on a field name or a word in Trailhead or in Salesforce to access your company-specific knowledge and definitions within Spekit. With Spekit and Trailhead, the pairing of training and documentation just got even better - like a juicy prime rib, paired with a fine red wine
Email Automation
As a sales rep, would you find it valuable to know when a customer opened your email? Of course you would! Strike when the iron is hot - time your follow-up communication perfectly so your customer stays engaged and interested in your products and services. Using a tool like Cirrus Insight allows you to manage your sales process without having to leave your inbox and without having to log into your CRM.
Imagine being able to spend more time talking to customers and closing deals - that’s what Cirrus Insight gives you - time. Through its Salesforce integration, coupled with some automation, data in CRM stays current and sales reps are more productive. Set follow-up reminders, use email templates, allow customers to schedule meetings with you without the back and forth emails - Cirrus Insight give you all that and more, right from your inbox!
Document Generation
What’s the most important thing about CRM? It’s the data. Good data can make sales happen faster, and bad data can ruin opportunities faster than ice melting on a hot summer day! And where does the data life cycle start? With communications between your sales teams and your prospects. One tool that can help increase the integrity of your data, as well as the efficiency of your sales teams is Conga Composer.
With Conga Composer, you can create PDF, powerpoints or even excel templates that are populated directly from your Salesforce data, removing the manual aspect of preparing invoices and entering that data in multiple locations. In other words, Conga Composer encourages companies to take full control over the communication process with prospects and customers. Document automation allows organizations to create the ideal customer engagement experience while retaining the flexibility to determine how much automation makes sense for their organizations.
Project Management
How can you tie all these tools together and manage everything easily? You need a project management tool like TaskRay. First off, TaskRay doesn’t care what business you are in. All TaskRay cares about is helping you manage processes and projects quickly and easily. You get multiple views into your projects: Kanban, Gantt-style and even calendar views.
TaskRay provides an easy to use interface, to create project dependencies and assign tasks to individuals, simply drag and drop! And because TaskRay is 100% Salesforce native, it uses the same security and sharing controls you already built into Salesforce. Whether you are running an agile development shop or franchising restaurants across the country, TaskRay can help you manage your projects with ease.
In the end, everyone benefits from sales rep productivity: Sales Ops can make better decisions faster; Salesforce Administrators can build our smarter automated processes; and hopefully all this helps your company’s bottom line grow!
