Create an Effective Business Strategy with Sales Cloud
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Plan for how your sales team will engage with Sales Cloud.
- Determine your business goals for Sales Cloud and how they’ll influence your success metrics.
This module helps you create a strategy for how Sales Cloud features can help you achieve your business goals.
Gather Your Team
Whether you wear many hats in your business or you’re a dedicated admin, now’s the time to assemble a success team.
Working closely with a group of your stakeholders is important because it helps you drive success from planning to implementation and adoption. Your success team ensures that work gets prioritized, is meaningful to the business, and offers positive change for your sales team.
Key Player |
Role |
|---|---|
Executive sponsor(s) |
The person who prioritizes and approves how your team’s time is spent on Sales Cloud. |
Operations manager (or equivalent) |
The person who knows the most about the day-to-day sales process. |
End user(s) |
A team member who has time to test out Sales Cloud and give feedback. |
Admin |
The person who makes changes in Sales Cloud and manages the implementation. This might be you! |
Depending on the size and structure of your business, one person can cover two or more of these key player roles (yourself included). It’s important to fill the roles outlined above, so you can get input from a range of perspectives.
Working with a team allows you to respond to changes and configurations more quickly and accurately, and it makes for a smoother launch.
Establish Your Goals
Before you start implementing Sales Cloud, it’s essential to take the time to define how it can work for your business. Customers implement Sales Cloud to drive successful lead generation, optimize sales strategies, forecast sales, and much more.
The first step is to identify your business goals and how Sales Cloud can help you achieve them. Even if your team has already determined what it wants out of Sales Cloud before purchasing, now’s the time to revisit and formalize those goals.
Let’s look at how one company defined its goals for Sales Cloud.
Linda Rosenberg, admin for a shoe manufacturing company called Cloud Kicks, recently implemented Sales Cloud to better track the company’s revenue. Her team wants to achieve the following.
Goals |
|---|
Establish a single place where sales teams can get insights into their deals in real time. |
Understand ROI based on where their leads originate. |
Understand what types of activities contribute to closing deals. |
With these concrete goals, the Cloud Kicks team can easily determine how they’ll use Sales Cloud features.
Use your planning period to start working with your sales and leadership teams to define clear and specific goals, like Cloud Kicks did. Consider the full picture of what your business wants to achieve.
When defining your business goals, consider these questions.
- What will my business look like in 3 to 5 years?
- What future customer needs do I want to satisfy?
- What are the top pain points my business experiences today that we hope to fix?
Getting your executive sponsor(s) to support and participate in the planning stages is essential to getting the most value out of Sales Cloud. Make sure you keep the lines of communication and feedback open, so that the goals you set for Sales Cloud follow your company’s priorities.
Now get to it! Outline your goals where and how you work best—a whiteboard, a doc, a spreadsheet. Just make sure you end up with a reliable, shareable framework that you and your teams can review as you implement Sales Cloud.
Define Your Key Metrics
Once you outline your business goals, the next step is to match these goals with how you’ll measure success.
Work with your sales team and executive sponsor(s) to determine the key success metrics you’ll track. You want your business goals and metrics to steer your Sales Cloud implementation, not the other way around!
As you finalize your success metrics, make sure they’re SMART.
- Specific
- Measurable
- Achievable
- Relevant
- Time-bound
Here’s how Cloud Kicks used its business goals to establish success metrics.
Goal |
Metric |
|---|---|
Establish a single place where sales teams can get insights into their deals in real time. |
The number of deals closed to date versus the goal. |
Understand ROI based on where the sales team’s leads originate. |
Total pipeline amount by lead source, by location (state/country). |
Understand what types of activities contribute to closing deals. |
The number of Activities logged per Opportunity by type (for example, onsite meetings, phone calls, and so on). |
Plan for Your Users
We know that change brings up challenges for any team. Planning for how your sales team will engage with Sales Cloud helps them feel comfortable from the start.
You want your users to be as excited about Sales Cloud as you are. Including them in the planning process is a great way to generate interest and ensure you set up Sales Cloud in a way that truly helps them reach their goals.
Beyond the planning stage, continue to ask for feedback from your team. That way, they have plenty of opportunities to tell you whether your Sales Cloud configurations are relevant to their day-to-day work, and you can make adjustments as needed. The first time you train your users on the platform should not be the first time they hear about it!
Here’s how Cloud Kicks communicated its Sales Cloud plan to their teams.
Goals |
Metrics |
Sales Team Benefit |
|---|---|---|
Establish a single place where sales teams can get insights into their deals in real time. |
The number of deals closed to date versus the goal. |
Sales team member(s) can check in on how they’re tracking toward their goals in real time. |
Understand ROI based on where the sales team’s leads originate. |
Total pipeline amount by lead source, by location (state/country). |
Understanding where they’re performing above or below their goals, so they can prioritize rep focus. |
Understand what types of activities contribute to closing deals. |
Number of Activities logged per Opportunity by type (for example, onsite meetings, phone calls, and so on). |
Can see which day-to-day activities have the most impact. |
In the same way that knowing your goals and metrics helps you set up Sales Cloud correctly, prioritizing what your users want helps you get them on board. That way, Sales Cloud can be a success for your whole business.
Define Your Sales Processes
Before diving into Sales Cloud, take full account of your existing sales processes.
- Gather any existing sales process documentation.
- Identify where your processes need more definition.
- Articulate how your business works best and fill the gaps.
Cloud Kicks uses two distinct Sales processes, one for retail sales and one for custom shoe projects. Retail sales follow a different sales cycle than custom projects, and that means they go through different sales stages.
The Cloud Kicks team outlined both processes step by step, because they want to track and report on these types of sales separately. Distinct sales processes mean distinct data.
Linda mapped the processes in Sales Cloud, and the sales team was then able to account for what makes each process unique and improve revenue reporting.
Once you have your goals, metrics, and sales processes defined, as Cloud Kicks does, you’re ready to take a look at which features and functions Sales Cloud offers to help you reach your goals.
Resources
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Trailblazer Community: Sales Cloud Getting Started
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PDF: Implementation Workbook
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Salesforce Video: Prepare for Success