Dreading your list of overdue tasks in Salesforce?

If you are like most executives, you dread logging into your CRM because it will present you with an overwhelming list of overdue tasks.   Despite your best intentions, there are days when key clients or prospects need attention and you quickly fall behind in managing your tasks.

CRM is a powerful tool and if setup correctly, can help you manage your action items list effectively.

However, we see several challenges with the current ‘best practice’ recommended by the typical CRM structure.   While there are some benefits to the practice of setting future tasks, they are outweighed by:

• The lack of data to re-prioritize these tasks
• The difficulty in re-scheduling these tasks
• The sense of defeat that overwhelms you when you see a list of overdue tasks

There is a better way

Based on over 100,000 hours of supporting executives, Prialto has discovered that there is a more effective solution to managing action items in your CRM.   The method we suggest is:

• Turn off the ability to schedule future tasks
• Instead create a date field in the contact record entitled “Next Action”

We do not suggest you stop tracking completed tasks but, as you will read below, there are some subtle benefits to tracking future action items in the contacts module.

As background, it is important to understand that CRM systems are designed as a set of separate modules (Lead, Account, Contact, Activities, Opportunities…).  These modules do not easily work together.  By tracking your open tasks in an existing module (we suggest ‘Contact’), you will have the ability to leverage all Contact data fields to prioritize your activities.

Views (summary views of your data in a specific module) are another key feature that is not available with open tasks.  Views allow you to:

• Create categorized lists of overdue actions:  View all of your records meeting certain criteria (for example, you can show all contacts with a ‘next action’ date before today that are located in California)
• Quickly re-prioritize:  Views allow you to quickly ‘mass edit’ entire lists of contacts and adjust their ‘next action’ date

Here are a couple examples of how you can use views leveraging ‘next action’ to your advantage:

• Value: Most companies Prialto works with have a ‘Value’ field in each contact record.  You can now have a view of all your top value contacts that have overdue ‘next action’
• Sales Process: By creating a field in Contacts for the stage a contact is in your sales process, you can then leverage views with ‘next action’ to show action items for just your contacts in your sales funnel.

Watch how we Manage Action Items, to learn how to leverage it yourself!

Developing a system is easier than you think

Prialto manages the relationships for numerous executives and has the unique opportunity to observe them at work.  Surprisingly, when they initially engage with us, many executives confess the nagging feeling that they often drop the ball on developing and maintaining relationships..

Below are proven tactics we’ve observed for relationship building. They are simple and don’t require you to push beyond your comfort zone.

1) Get a system

Many executives fail to rationalize to a single system to manage their contacts.  They rely on a combination of Outlook, Google, or a spreadsheet. These systems lack a way to retain key data and the failure to centralize makes any data that is compiled hard to retrieve.

We are big believers in social CRM, and we use Salesforce as the engine around which we manage all else. You need not equivocate long on which tool. The key is how it is used. We like Salesforce, but we slim it way down and eliminate many distracting fields. The key is simplicity. Complexity is the enemy of adaptation, and without adaptation you have an unused tool instead of a powerful solution.

2) Be memorable

If you want to build relationships, it is important to be memorable to your contacts.  You need to make sure your contacts think of you regularly. Several simple tactics to brand yourself include:

• Email signature: Your email is the most valuable branding tool you have.  Take one line in your signature and put a short message (less than 100 characters) describing what you do and the value you deliver to others.
• Develop a focused theme: Think of the two or three topics that most interest you – current events, celebrity chefs, backup IT support – it does not matter what the topics are nor, necessarily, that they all relate directly to your profession. Make sure people know your interests. This is your calling card, the reason people will call you and think of you when they can make an introduction.

3) Stay top-of-mind

It is important to constantly be pinging your network.  You need to meet contacts regularly for them to remember you.  We leverage CRM systems to do this in two ways:

• Tactful Email updates: With a little personalization of your mass emails, you can get 25%+ response rates from your network.  The topics are less important than the structure – keep them under 4 sentences, and make sure the content is valuable so that your network does not view you as a spammer.
• Share articles: Many people share articles via Twitter and LinkedIn. It is much more valuable to email relevant articles to contacts.  We recommend leveraging tags in your CRM to build lists of people with similar interests. You can also set up news alerts for individual, high value contacts around the interests you know they have.

4) Find excuses

Building relationships is all about finding excuses to reconnect.  Here are some we find helpful:

• Market visits: When we visit a market, we quickly pull a list of contacts in that market and call / email them about our visit.  We prioritize this list by value and next contact date, two key fields in our CRM
• Always reply to email announcements: When others blast you, they want to hear from you.  We always take a few seconds to respond with a note and jot this into our CRM, to remember that they reached out to us
• Send a book: When we speak with someone and they show an interest in a book we discussed, we often send a copy of the book the next day.  After this, they never forget us

5) Help others and they will help you

You always hear this advice and, it is true.   When you make introductions and referrals for your contacts, they often help you in return.  However, we recommend going one step further and tracking these referrals in your system to remember how much social currency you have built up with a contact.

6) Build personal, not just business, relationships

We can’t overstate the value of getting to know a contact personally.  Several best practices we have observed include:

• Remember the personal: We always make an effort to find something in common with a contact.  From the LSU fan we call after each big game to the guy who loves to talk about his ranch, we always note these tidbits in our CRM.
• Ask about them: When you send a mass email and someone responds with some encouraging words, don’t just say thanks, ask how they are doing.  You will be surprised at what you learn.
• Embrace Awkward Conversations: They provide a shared experience.

Your Sales Reps are using systems, just not yours

Prialto has a lot of experience working with busy executives, well over 100,000 hours worth.  Although each client is unique, we’ve discovered some very interesting trends. One of the most notable is that the best sales reps are the ones least likely to rely on their company’s CRM. This is a surprising result and bears further analysis.

Before Prialto brings on a new account, we conduct a Needs Analysis, which looks at each executive’s practices, pain points, and preferences.   We recently surveyed 100 sales professionals from four large companies on the primary tools they use to manage sales contacts. The results (see chart below) were shocking.   Just over  1/2 of the sales reps saw CRM as their primary method for managing contacts:

What does this mean for your business?

The implications for your business are significant.   With most sales teams resisting standardization (only one team surveyed saw over 80% of their reps naming CRM as the primary sales contact management system), the likelihood that your company has a similar issue is high.

We see several consequences from this lack of standardization around CRM:

• You are not getting all data
• Your team isn’t leveraging the systems you have built for them
• Your team isn’t as productive as they could be
• You don’t have complete visibility into your pipeline

Why is this happening?

There are a several reasons we regularly see that lead top sales executives to rely on other systems:

• Inflexible CRM systems: Often the best sales reps choose to use another system because it works better for their processes
• Contact Ownership: It is well know that many sales reps double-enter contacts so that they have a complete database in case they decide to leave companies
• Multiple systems: Surprisingly most companies allow sales reps to maintain contacts in both Outlook and the CRM
• Unclear Value: Sales reps often feel like data clerks rather than the sales stars they are wired to be

What can we do?

Don’t give up hope.  CRM adoption is one of the toughest challenges to solve in sales.   However, we have consistently found that it is a solvable problem.  Here are a few basic strategies that can get you started:

• Optimize CRM for your reps: CRMs can be customized for individual reps. With a big sales force, we don’t recommend you customize for each rep but identify your top early adopters and let them innovate within your systems.  Also, leverage best practices from firms such as Prialto to add strategic fields.
• Let them own their contacts: We encourage you to build a system that let’s sales reps who leave on good terms take their contacts with them

• Standardize on one system: Don’t support multiple systems for contact management. For example, if you are running Salesforce and Outlook, make Salesforce the contact system of record and integrate all other systems into it.
• Offload the admin burden: Remote labor is a powerful concept.  Companies like Prialto integrate assistants into the processes of their teams to offload the repetitive admin tasks and free up their time.

The goal: reward performance, not data

Studies show that 70% of a sales reps time is focused on administration.  Prialto works closely with companies to help ease the administrative burden on sales reps.   By giving your team a true infrastructure and investing them in your systems, you can reduce sales rep turnover, focus on revenue growth, and have confidence the data is in the CRM.   We hope that the tips above have inspired you to try a different approach with your team and we welcome any questions/comments.

Scheduling manually is inefficient

Most senior executives don’t stop to think about the time they spend on scheduling.   However, when we analyze their processes, most new Prialto members spend a great deal of time on meeting “ping-pong”, the back-and-forth email exchange to agree on a time and place to meet.   Your Prialto PA can help you offload this burden and provide a better experience for your clients and prospects.

Offloading scheduling isn’t a big a step as you think

Prialto guides many executives as they begin to work with their new assistant for the first time.   While some executives are intimidated by the concept of giving up their calendar, there is nothing to be afraid of.   Below are a few simple tips to get you on your way to successfully offloading scheduling:

1. Provide context: Before beginning, it is important to help your assistant understand your business, preferences, and preferred style of communication.  Spend the time upfront to discuss with your assistant and develop a regular dialog
2. Start slow: You do not have to give up your entire calendar at once but can ease into things by copying your assistant only on those meetings you want them to set
3. Surface key information: You can save your assistant a lot of time and improve the quality of your service by using the following techniques when you copy your assistant to schedule a meeting:
   1. Summarize important information (i.e. time, participants, location) at the top of emails so your intent is clear
   2. Change e-mail titles to let your PA and contact know who will be meeting
4. Get out of the way: It is very important that you don’t also try to manage a meeting schedule that you have asked your assistant to schedule.  We frequently see communication mishaps in these scenarios.  Once you have asked your assistant to schedule a meeting, we teach them to work directly with your connection
5. Review and provide feedback: If you use a CRM, your assistant will log all communication in the CRM.  You should review communication and provide continual feedback to your assistant
6. Develop a vernacular: To allow you and your PA to easily communicate without separate emails to explain your intent, we recommend establishing a code.  For example, if you said “I would like to meet them soon”, this could mean in the next week or so.  See our guide on Scheduling Vernacular for more details
7. Leverage templates: You and your PA should maintain a set of standard templates to encourage consistency.  We have placed our standard guides in the Prialto Library

One more thing

A CRM and a good CRM process can be amazing tools with which to collaborate with your assistant and track key interactions. Configure your CRM to work with your assistant and schedule with more power. See: The Secret to Growing Your Business: Power Scheduling or contact us at 866.910.8440 to learn more about Prialto.

Scheduling need not be stuck in the dark ages

The art of scheduling has changed considerably since the dawn of the computer.  Most executives still rely on Outlook or Google to manage their calendar and contacts.

With over 100,000 hours of service supporting executives, Prialto has observed three key scheduling mistakes:

• Treating everyone the same: Why should you provide a casual acquaintance the same access to your calendar as a vital client?
• Focusing on in-bound meetings: Do you primarily schedule with people that ask for your time or are you pro-active in getting meetings crucial to growing your business?
• Doing it yourself: Why are you dealing with the back-and-forth Ping-Pong?

If the questions above resonate with you, remember, the tools you are using aren’t broken, just the way you are using them.  By integrating CRM and a remote assistant team into your process, you can quickly address these mistakes and maximize every moment on your calendar.

We need to stop treating each contact with the same priority…

At Prialto, we regularly observe executives scheduling each contact the same way.  This mistake will result is a calendar cluttered with meetings that can’t help you grow your business.

Unfortunately, Outlook and other contact management programs aren’t built to effectively prioritize contacts.  We have found that CRM software is the best solution and in many cases can be integrated directly into your email and calendar programs.  CRM offers executives three key benefits:

• Prioritize your contacts: Ranking contacts by both a) “Value” to their business and b) “Relationship strength” allows you to quickly prioritize your meetings.
• Maintain contact: Keeping in regular touch with valuable contacts is key to growing your business.  We recommend that executives track “Next Contact Date” for each priority contact.  By leveraging “Value”, you can then make sure you are giving priority to your most valuable contacts.
• Connect with your contacts: To connect with your contacts, it is important to track information such as personal interests, who introduced you, and introductions you / your contacts have made for each other.

… pro-actively schedule meetings with key contacts…

Most executives are too busy to develop new relationships with prospects and referral sources.  This results in calendars filled with meetings from in-bound requests.  Instead, we suggest you grow your business with meetings that matter to you.

The secret to getting quality meetings is to find excuses to reach out.  You can leverage your CRM to create these excuses:

• Use visits as opportunities: Tracking the metro area of each contact allows you to easily sort by value and reach out before a visit
• Track and nurture introductions: You should track potential introductions / opportunities (both those you can make and receive) in a CRM to make sure you follow-up effectively
• Share with your contacts: Tracking interests of your connections and sharing articles helps build relationships.  Tags in a CRM are an excellent way to quickly filter your contacts when you find interesting articles.
• Find things in common: Track personal details (i.e. a contact’s favorite sports team) and reach out when events occur (i.e. LSU losing the national championship)

…and increase the time we spend on growing our business.

Sales and business development executives on average spend 70% of their time on administrative tasks.  To grow your business, it is important to offload recurring processes to an assistant:

• Eliminate scheduling ping-pong: Once you agree to meet a contact, setting the time and location can take weeks.  Prialto Productivity Assistants (PAs) are trained to manage this process for our members.
• Offload prospect research: Knowing the personal and professional background of a prospect makes building a relationship easier.  This is another great task to offload to your PA.
• Use your PA to enter CRM data: You can email or call your assistant with information to update in your CRM

Most importantly, by giving an assistant access to your CRM, you empower your assistant to manage your calendar and contacts effectively. Prialto PAs are trained to:

• Serve as gatekeepers and prioritize meetings with high-value contacts
• Reach out to contacts prior to a market visit by their member
• Help you spark regular dialogs with key contacts

Gear your schedule to work for you

We’ve seen many busy executives make dramatic differences in growing their businesses by implementing these best practices. Adopting our system is not rocket science, but we find the most successful executives are the ones who first assess the limitations of their current system and then leverage our best practices to create a much-improved system for scheduling.

Teams easily manage and collaborate in real-time on projects and tasks, attach files, set alerts to remind when dates come near, view in Gantt or calendar views, and include threaded discussions. The web app is used by organizations of all sizes for managing a broad array of work, including projects, task lists, business processes, sales pipelines, marketing programs, and more.

Check out the case study on how Prialto leverages Smartsheet to create a scalable project management system: Smartsheet Blog

Technology-powered tools now available for scheduling are amazing:

• Web apps like Tungle.me and timebridge provide slick functionality for publishing your calendar to the world of people who’d like to select a time to meet with you
• Apple’s Siri takes key scheduling steps on your voice command without you even having to click or swipe

But simply saying “I’ll have my smart phone call your smart phone,” has some key limitations.

Relying entirely on these tools naively implies a business environment in which all parties have an equal interest in meeting.  Your most important contacts will appreciate a more personal touch, and human input is critical to navigating the art in that the back-and-forth of “scheduling Ping-Pong”.

So how do you empower your remote admin in the complex and subtle game of business etiquette that starts when two busy people decide to meet and then need to lock down place and time?

It’s not “just” scheduling

Prospective Prialto members will sometimes say they “only” need help with scheduling, as if to imply this is a simple, commodity task.

They are right when the playing field is even and the parties looking to meet have plenty of time. Then it really is simply a matter of finding the next open spot on the calendar. The algorithm is indeed simple, and technology alone may get it done.

Those experienced in leveraging a professional scheduler will more often understand how much time gets consumed. They also know that there is an art to navigating through the complexity of how to time reminders, decide on where to meet and at what time.

Three tactics for getting it right

So how does one best leverage their assistant to track down targets and get you the right meetings in the right place and at the right time?

1) Start slow in the beginning to go fast later:

Many tech equipped, near autonomous knowledge workers have forgotten this basic management need, but there is always a tradeoff between the ease of getting something done yourself today verses taking the time to enable someone else to take it off your hands later.  One should never offload key tasks to a new employee without great care. True, you might as well do a task yourself if you will always have to micro mange and explain it to your helper with painful specificity. But micro managing your new scheduler in the beginning is totally appropriate. Take the time to:

• Explain the etiquette of your business and client base
• Download the places you like to meet for which kinds of meetings
• Download the names of your VIPs, the key clients and/or personal contacts that get the highest priority
• Sensitize your assistant on how to discern in your email exchanges the importance of a contact and how that should translate into how a meeting is scheduled

To do all this, you ought to initially watch every email your assistant sends out and then set times to go over and give feedback on how they can be improved. Doing this for just a few days, will quickly yield great time savings and peace-of-mind.

2) Surface key information to the top of long email threads.

A good assistant may successfully disentangle long and complex email threads to decipher what you want done on an email, even if you simply copy him in with no instruction. But it may require a lot of unnecessary energy and time.

A couple of simple specifics as you CC your assistant will save lots of time and energy.

Here’s an email that works well:

Here is an e-mail that does NOT work well:

Develop a scheduling vernacular with your PA

Maintaining positive client relationships with a PA in the middle requires sensitivity. You can’t meet with everyone all the time. You have to prioritize and, while most everyone understands this need, you want to avoid inadvertently insulting even a lower priority contact.

Develop special words that you can place in the kind of email copy above to help your PA prioritize on your behalf.

For example:

• To indicate that you indeed want to meet while tactfully letting your assistant know that this meeting is not the highest priority, say things like “please schedule a coffee” or “please schedule for this month”
• To indicate that a contact, Charlie, is a high priority client who you want to defer to, say something like “please schedule at place and time that works well for Charlie

Oh, and one more thing

See Andy Mowat’s article on how to leverage your assistant to do CRM right. If you are looking to have an assistant help you schedule, you probably are tracking lots of contacts. A CRM and a good CRM process can be amazing tools with which to collaborate with your assistant and track key interactions. But if you’re a relationship person, you probably don’t want to spend too much time meticulously inputting data. Configure your CRM to work with your assistant.

If you are like me, every time a friend suggests a new cool online tool (SaaS software, web application, or mobile app), you quickly write it down to research later.  But, inevitably, after taking a quick peek at the website, that interest quickly fades.

I used to kick myself for not adopting every new tool I heard about.  I constantly asked myself, “Bob found this tool useful and he appears more productive that I am, why can’t I adopt it?”

There is a scientific reason

The simple scientific fact is that, like social relationships, there are only so many SaaS applications you can effectively manage on a regular basis.  In 1992, British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, studied social networks and found that a human can maintain ~150 stable relationships.

Further studies have shown that Dunbar’s Number remains consistent, even with the advent of social networks.  As another data point, Pinch Media, which tracks iPhone app usage, has shown that 30-days after an app is purchased, less than 5 percent of buyers continue to use it.

Want the power of these applications without the effort?

Through our team’s 100,000+ hours supporting Prialto members, we have observed the practices of senior executives and sales teams.   We estimate that a busy executive can manage 6 to 8 applications on a consistent basis.   However, there is a second tier of apps that executives need functionality from but can’t spare the time to use (i.e. expense management, CRM, social media monitoring..)

If you are like us and enjoy learning about new applications but fear adding another one to your processes, please take a minute to share:

• The top apps you use regularly
• Apps you would like to get value out of without using/learning

Productivity Applications 1-Minute Survey

About Prialto

Helping executives manage web-based applications is at the core of Prialto’s mission to deliver a turnkey productivity solution.   Prialto has built a database of applications and best practices for executive productivity.  If you would like to learn how you and your team can leverage global assistants to increase productivity, contact us at www.prialto.com or 866.910.8440

Which Edition of Salesforce Should I Get?

You’d like to get the edition that best meets your needs without buying more than you need.

You’re looking for the proper balance between price and requirements.

Want a simple explanation of which Salesforce Edition to get? Here you go:

Why purchase Salesforce Professional Edition rather than Salesforce Group Edition?

Salesforce Professional Edition does everything Group Edition does plus:
1. Can support more than 10 users
2. Offers mass email ability
3. Supports customizable dashboards
4. Has better support for AppExchange apps
5. Supports role hierarchy/sharing model (translation: in Group Edition there is no security among users, everyone sees all records)
6. Supports products, marketing campaigns, and offline edition
7. Supports the Mobile client

So if you don’t need one or more of these additional capabilities you’ll be fine with Group Edition.

If you haven’t already tried Salesforce you can get a free trial by clicking here.

Why purchase Salesforce Enterprise Edition rather than Salesforce Professional Edition?

Salesforce Enterprise Edition does everything Professional Edition plus has:
1. Profiles (the ability to support multiple departments)
2. API integration
3. Partner Portal support
4. Custom workflow, including assignment rules and auto escalation rules
5. Team selling
6. Record types
7. Customer portal support
8. APEX code

So if you don’t need one or more of these additional capabilities you’ll be fine with Professional Edition.

Note that its easy to upgrade your edition of Salesforce but not to downgrade:
1. Salesforce will allow you to upgrade your license type at any time.
2. But you can only downgrade a license type when your contract expires.

Want to know more about Salesforce Editions and licensing? Check out this post from the StarrForce blog Salesforce license types.

Need hep implementing Salesforce? Check out  Quick Start packages from StarrForce for more information.

Have a Salesforce question? Get free support: Twitter @starrforce

If you are a management consultant, venture capitalist, lawyer, accountant, IT firm, executive coach or any other service professional, you face the same challenge: How do you balance execution and client acquisition?

And, if you’re good at what you do, you in all likelihood are a better practitioner than salesperson. It’s the love of your craft that got you into the business, not your love for sales.  How are you supposed to build a relationship business with cold-calling techniques?  There has to be a better way!

The initial dead end

We recently worked with an executive coach who was having challenges in scaling his practice. His clients love him, but direct referrals alone couldn’t grow his business quickly enough.

The coach – I’ll call him Jim – spoke with Prialto about having us call target lists he was generating from his professional networks, but we advised him that the approach he’d outlined would not work. Three months later Jim came back to us: “Eric,” he said, I have a very professional productivity assistant (“PA”). She’s great. But I’ve NOT gotten one meeting arranged by her in three months. This is not working for me, and I need to change something.”

The problem wasn’t that cold calls don’t work, but that the premise for the calls was wrong. Jim’s PA was essentially making “cold calls” to strangers, and asking them to meet and talk with Jim about his practice. While nicely worded, it was clear to these strangers that Jim would be coming to talk about himself and to pitch work.

Unsurprisingly, they had no interest.  To cap it off, Jim himself didn’t enjoy direct selling.

From a chore to a passionate calling

We advised Jim to find something that he enjoyed in his work and focus his meetings and outreach around this instead. Jim had a passion for the problems that executives face and the more he learned about them the more valuable he became to his larger customer base.

Jim started a simple blog about these issues. His first postings were based on his, current clients. With their permission, he took a few thorny subjects he had helped clients on, scrubbed the personal information, and wrote about them in a clean direct format.

His PA then began calling the same list that had been ignoring Jim’s meeting requests and asking if Jim could interview them for his blog. Jim, the PA explained, wanted to hear about one key challenge and what they’d done to overcome them.

A constant flow of meetings

Literally within days of this tactical change, Jim was getting receptive meetings with people in his target market. Most importantly, the meetings were enjoyable for both parties. Jim got to learn about a subject he found intrinsically interesting, up –close executive issues. The people he met with got to talk about almost everyone’s favorite subject: Themselves.

These first couple of meetings, turned into a constant and predictable flow of appointments. Over several months, several of the executives that Jim interviewed asked more about what he did when he was not interviewing for and writing his blog. And a few of these curious executives became clients.

What’s critical is that this was no ruse. Jim was not pretending to want to interview these folks. Jim truly enjoyed the subject. He was passionate about it and this came through.

By being genuinely interested in these executives, they became interested in working with him.