Salesforce
Which Edition of Salesforce Should I Get?
A great post from our friends at StarrForce:
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
9 Simple Tactics to Optimize Your CRM
Prialto works closely with sales teams to offload valuable recurring tasks and allow them to better focus on their clients. Our focus on making executive more productive within their current systems has allowed us to see what works universally well across organizations.
When prialto starts working with a new client, we often find that a company’s CRM design itself is a barrier to adoption. Just like Microsoft Word, CRM systems have incredible functionality, most of which goes unused. We recommend making a system as simple as possible and putting thought into each field tracked. Below are a few best practices we have observed through our team’s 100,000+ hours supporting prialto members.
- Turn off unused tabs: There are a number of tabs your team likely isn’t using (chatter, files, getting started…) which can be turned off to reduce complexity.
- Clean up page layouts: Most companies use standard page layouts with little customization. Your team is likely not using many of these fields (i.e. fax #, address, home phone, birthday…) which should be removed.
- Leverage structured data: Most standard CRM fields are text-based. The value of data increases dramatically with structured fields using pick-lists (i.e. client status, industry…)
- Add strategic custom fields: Here are a several custom fields we find quite useful: Next contact date: Typically this is the most valuable field in our members CRMs. Every follow-up is driven off of this field. Referral source: Rather than just tracking lead source, we also suggest linking the record to the contact who provided the referral. Value: Many of our members rank each company and contact in their CRM to allow for quick prioritization.
- Focus on relevant data: A number of lists throughout your CRM system can be customized to allow your team to focus on key data to your business.
- Optimize views: Each module can have customized views to allow your team to leverage your data and quickly prioritize accounts.
- De-duplicate data: As companies grow, data duplication becomes a serious issue. Setup your system early to flag and eliminate duplicates.
- Copy all communication to your CRM: To improve communication across teams, most CRMs allow you to easily add emails to the system by BCC’ing a specific address.
- Integrate a support team: Requiring your sales team to enter data themselves, diverts their attention from clients. Prialto works with sales teams to offload tasks such as data entry and prospect research. To optimize collaboration, we suggest adding additional fields to track status and priority.
If you are exploring how to optimize your CRM, we would be happy to provide referrals to CRM consultants we know and trust. And, if you want to optimize your sales team itself, visit www.prialto.com to learn more or call us at 866.910.8440.
The Top Sales Mistake: Turning Your Sales Stars Into Data Clerks
Over the past ten years, I have rolled out CRM systems at four different companies and have personally witnessed the power of CRM to:
- Improve management of customer and prospect relationships
- Provide better sales visibility
- Improve communication across a sales team
However, I also know full-well the statistics on CRM. Gartner estimates that over 60% of CRM implementations fail after the go-live date. I recently spent an evening talking about sales productivity with a leading sales rep for a Bain Capital portfolio company. What I heard shouldn’t surprise anybody but hopefully it is a wakeup call.
- Hunters aren’t built to enter data: We all know successful salespeople are wired differently. But, in a quest to fulfill the promise of new systems, we try to turn our team into desk-jockeys. This sales rep shared with me that his entire team feels like “… well paid clerks.” and that he “… didn’t get into sales to do admin.”
- Sales teams don’t see the promise of CRM: Star sales people see sales as an art and CRM as ‘big brother’. Like the sales rep I talked to they believe, “I hit my numbers and don’t see the reason to document in Salesforce just so they can monitor me.”
- Sales training isn’t working: Despite the investment in systems, stars prefer to be lone wolfs. With few established processes, sales teams end up with a few rock stars and a ton of new sales reps struggling to figure out the ropes. This sales rep shared with me, “Our company is a total mess. There is a huge learning curve for new reps and we lose many of them quickly”
No wonder that according to Forrester the average VP of sales lasts 18 months. With a sales team that sees no value in the systems, the worst thing you can do is add more process. So how can we stop this cycle and improve our sales productivity? Here are two, not-so-revolutionary, ideas:
- Stop having your sales people enter data they don’t see as valuable
- Free your salespeople up to focus on what they do best
While these ideas sound simple, they take some effort to implement. Here are a few basic steps you can take to get started:
- Review your sales administration processes: Analyze each process to understand a) the level of specialized knowledge and b) the priority for your business
- Focus first on those processes easy to standardize: Processes such as CRM data entry, appointment setting, prospect research, lead and contact management, travel, expenses, and reporting are great places to start.
- Create a true sales support function: Inside sales and lead gen are not focused on increasing the productivity of your sales team. They are measured by their own metrics. To solve your sales challenges, you need to provide your sales reps with a support system. We find the best way to achieve this is to integrate assistants into your sales team’s processes and track the impact on your reps productivity.
- Commit your organization to success: The benefits of freeing up your sales team to focus on sales can be powerful. A study by McKinsey of a global manufacturer showed an average gain of 15% more time for selling and decreased cycle time for internal sales processes of 20%. But, to realize the potential, an on-going commitment, technology platform, and training are required.
Prialto (www.prialto.com) works with growing companies to focus their sales reps on key client interactions. By integrating assistants with sales teams, Prialto helps improve sales productivity while, at the same time, providing better visibility into sales pipelines. To discuss how we can help you re-engineer your sales team, contact us at 866.910.8440