Sales are considered a result-oriented and fast-paced environment job, where a team of experts is constantly trying to be productive and achieve the desired results in selling products or providing services of their company.
That said, a sales team can only be effective if they’re efficient. It is why numerous software is available on the market today to help the sales team become as efficient as possible. One of the most popular sales software is Salesforce.
What Is Salesforce?
Salesforce is a widely-known and trusted tool used for customer relationship management. It is cloud-based software that helps businesses connect with and get more data about their customer base. Thus, it is often referred to as a powerhouse tool for a sales team, carrying valuable and useful features to boost sales productivity. Plus, it works perfectly for almost all sizes of businesses.
Although its applications and features are vast, Salesforce is primarily focused on helping businesses with customer retention, customer satisfaction, customer data insights, customer acquisitions and so much more.
Salesforce is widely used by several reputable companies and popular brands including Amazon, Adidas, Toyota, Spotify, among others.
Tips To Using Salesforce To Boost Your Productivity
If you’re already using Salesforce and want to get the most out of this powerful solution, consider following these essential Salesforce tips to boost your productivity.
1. Consider A Just-in-Time Sales Enablement
Sales enablement refers to the process of using resources you would need to close more deals. These resources may include content, knowledge, tools, and data to effectively sell a product or service to customers.
When you invest in a Salesforce-compatible JIT sales enablement tool or sales productivity software, you can increase productivity and revenue while reducing ramp-up time by reinforcing your battle cards, sales playbooks, sales process, objection handling, and more.
Another enablement tool you can use for your business is Spekit. It is one of the reliable vendors that provides JIT enablement for Salesforce. These software applications with learning platforms give employees access to enablement resources and training content in real-time, everywhere they work.
2. Create A Customized List Views
List Views is a tool that manages different sets of data within Objects.
If ‘Recently Viewed’, ‘My Cases’, or ‘My Open Leads’ mean anything to you, then these are your default list view.
However, did you know that you can easily create a customized List View? You can slice and dice your data however you like to best manage and monitor your records and your activities.
For instance, if you’re a sales manager, you can manage your leads using three List Views, numbering them in an order that you would chronologically check every day. First, you can create ‘New Leads’ where you can respond quickly, ‘Progress Leads’ to see your current work, and lastly ‘Converted Leads’ to see follow-up activities and other customer retention strategies.
This can be done for any Object in Salesforce and it’s a lot better and more productive than managing a single List View with an overwhelming amount of data.
3. Use Pinned List View
When clicking on an object in Salesforce, it shows you the ‘Recently Viewed’ List View by default, which hardly provides you with any value.
If you don’t like that, you can set your default List View by simply clicking on the little ‘pin’ icon next to the current list view you’ve selected. This is a great way to save some clicks and make your working life more efficient.
If your List view is getting piled up or you don’t need some list anymore, you can simply unpin them. Just click the highlighted pin icon and choose a different List View to pin instead.
4. Personalize Your Tabs
The tabs can be pretty dull, but re-arranging and customizing them can make them more appealing and easier to track, boosting your productivity.
Tabs are a great way to find things you need in your daily work. However, like List View, they’re not always in the order that makes the most sense to you.
For instance, if your main job is to create and maintain accounts, you need the Accounts and Contact tab where you can see it right away – at the top of your list. Salesforce can help you re-arrange your tabs for your convenience.
To do this, simply click on the little pencil icon on the right-side end of the navigation bar. You’ll be presented with a list of tabs you can re-order. Then, click on a tab and drag it to a new place.
You can re-arrange as many tabs as you’d like. Just make sure that you save your new setup.
5. Take Advantage Of Salesforce Chatter
If you’re still relying on external chatting or communication tools, then you’re simply not making the most out of a powerful collaborative sales tool— Chatter. This app integrates seamlessly into the Salesforce platform, providing you and your team the functionality of a full-fledged social network.
Like any messaging app, Salesforce Chatter allows you to create groups focused on a specific campaign, account, or location and share files. Being more than just a chat app, you can also perform actions such as getting expense reports, creating an account, updating orders, or any sales-related activity without leaving the network.
It’s also sort of like a chat-slash-forum app, that allows members to posts topics and share ideas, increasing collaboration.
What’s more is that it can also help alleviate work stress with its gamification and incentive badging system, allowing employees to have fun and be rewarded.
6. Use Reports For Metric Analysis
While you can always ask a Salesforce admin to create KPI reports, you can also make one of your own.
The reports made by your admin or manager show general KPIs and statistics. But, if you want to gain insights from your records, creating your report allows you to do so.
Salesforce allows you to create reports in a simple, straightforward manner. These customized reports can provide you answers to some of the most significant questions related to your sales performance, including:
- The time it takes to close a deal
- Your biggest sales and lead source
- The industry where most of your accounts are
- Resolution for most of your cases
With these reports, you can increase your productivity and be able to formulate essential solutions that can change the way your company does business.
7. Enable Display Density
Here’s a quick productivity tip: you can change the amount of data shown on your screen layout at once, allowing you to squeeze in important details as much as possible.
To do that, simply find the display density setting placed in the right-hand corner menu. This allows you to control your Salesforce screen layout and field label’s location with two options— Compact and Comfortable.
The Comfortable layout places your labels on the top of fields, adding more space between your page elements. Meanwhile, a Compact layout provides a denser view, displaying your labels on the same line as the fields and giving a much lesser space between your page elements.
8. Use Tasks, Activities, And Emails
If you’re not taking advantage of Tasks, Activities, and Emails of Salesforce, then you’re missing out on some of the core functionality of a powerful CRM tool.
Activities allow you to log interactions with your customer, show brief comments about why you interacted with them, and record important meeting notes.
Tasks let you create a follow-up action such as setting a reminder or a date with a brief description. And you can even set tasks for other people in your team.
Lastly, Emails let you send emails to clients directly from your Salesforce dashboard. This is a time-saving feature and even provides you with email templates appropriate for your clientele. Plus, the email you created will be automatically saved in Salesforce, so you don’t have to log that activity.
9. Leverage The Salesforce App
Are you always on the go? If your company invested in Salesforce mobile app, you might want to take advantage of it to increase productivity, even when on the road.
This mobile app provides you with quick access to Salesforce even without an internet connection. This allows you to log in customer interactions, take important notes and make quick updates without going back to the office or powering up your laptop.
Its functionality and UI (user interface) are different from the web-based version of Salesforce. But it’s an effective tool that will make your working day more productive and efficient.
10. Try Inline Editing
Salesforce has finally made editing a piece of cake. The Inline Editing feature allows you to edit records at once so you don’t have to edit individual records, which can be a real productivity-killer.
To start, simply double-click the fields you need to edit and accordingly select the checkboxes to update the same field easily.
If you can’t double-click your List View fields to update them, you should ask your Salesforce admin to enable the inline editing feature from the user interface.
Take Away
There’s a reason why Salesforce is considered the number one CRM software. It provides access to tons of valuable tools that can help streamline your business operations and increase your sales team’s productivity.
That said, we hope that the above-mentioned Salesforce tips can help you and your sales team get the most out of this versatile and powerful solution to push your business towards success.
