Is Your Salesforce Setup Painful?

Painful Salesforce? You probably just need two admin aspirin.

Like your selling skills your Salesforce CRM should be powerful, functional, intuitive and logical. Even if Salesforce was professionally implemented, over the years users, managers, admins and executives come and go and soon enough your CRM is bloated with useless information and it no longer matches your business processes.

Data collection and workflows that seemed like a great idea at the time become burdensome to sales and support staff. Employees who used to love Salesforce now avoid it. New employees question why it’s so inefficient and painful to use. Common symptoms include:

1. Grumblings in the ranks
If you are hearing rumbles of dissatisfaction from your team it’s time to ask them to be candid and explain (constructively) why they suffer Salesforce avoidance. They say, for example, that they are asked to enter data into an opportunity before they know it so they type junk just to save a record. There’s a quick work around to this by creating page layouts and record types to match the stages of your business process but if you don’t ask and you’re not flexible to change your Salesforce CRM stays stuck in the bowels of old technologies.

2. You hear about deals not in Salesforce
Sometimes Salesforce is set up in such a draconian, convoluted or outdated way that users just keep deal information to themselves until they have time to do data entry. The consequences are that you don’t have an accurate view of your sales pipeline and the marketing team is working double time to produce additional qualified leads. Everyone gets the run around and no one wins.

3. Users create activities for the sake of it
Some organizations insist that users create an activity for every interaction and measure employees by number of closed activities; this is a total waste of everyone’s time. Managers should be prescribing a coaching Rx for users to create activities for IMPORTANT and meaningful interactions such as face-to-face meetings instead of generating painful busy work.

Final Thoughts
Your Salesforce needs change with time and it’s important to keep your CRM functionality as up-to-date as your business processes through minor configuration changes. Like your selling skills your CRM should be powerful, functional, intuitive and logical. You should also consider arming your team with integrated new tools that will make them even more effective at closing deals faster and keep them in the system such as Xactly Express or BigMachines Express.

Salesforce should not be difficult. It should match your everyday business processes and it should be easy for newcomers to pick up. If your team is jumping through hoops and bending over backwards to cram data into Salesforce don’t suffer in silence and endure the painful effects – contact us so that we can help you drive more business collaboratively, more efficiently and pain-free. Work Delivered.