Grow Your Business with Sales Cloud
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- List ways Sales Cloud can help improve your lead management.
- Describe how Sales Cloud can make your sales team more productive.
- Explain how the Salesforce mobile app can make your team a mobile powerhouse.
Manage Your Leads with All the Right Information
Now that you’ve learned the signs that you need a CRM, let’s take a look at how Sales Cloud improves your sales processes.
Automatically Prioritize and Route Leads
Hot leads don’t stay hot for long. They buy from whoever calls first—you or a competitor. Too often reps start with the largest, nearest companies, instead of with the actual hottest leads. There's a reason Sales Cloud is the world's #1 platform for sales: it corrects this problem with smarter ways to rank leads and route them to the best possible rep for healthier pipeline and bookings.
Manage Your Pipeline from Lead to Close
If you’re a sales leader, you live and breathe your pipeline. And your reps are (or really should be) accountable for tracking their selling activities. From the time they learn about a lead, until they close the deal, reps can record everything that matters in Sales Cloud. Say, “So long!” to sticky notes and, “Hello!” to a clear view of your deal flow. Sales Cloud makes it easy to automatically capture every call, email, and interaction—and task team members to pitch in.
Turn Up Team Productivity
There are only 24 hours in a day, and that’s not going to change. You want your sales reps to focus on selling, not on the administrative pains that go along with it. Sales Cloud can guide them through the sales cycle and help them prioritize by taking busywork and data entry off their plates. Here are a few favorite features you can use:
Take the Guesswork Out of Your Sales Cycle
"We had a fundamental belief that doing it right the first time was going to be easier than having to go back and fix it." —Steve Jobs
Most people agree that Steve Jobs would not advise you to waste time correcting your sales team’s mistakes when you could do things right the first time. Sales Path lets you add customized guidance to every step of the sales cycle, so your reps execute flawlessly every time. You know that one step your reps are always forgetting? Sales Path makes it impossible to forget.
At Salesforce, we require our reps to attach a product to a deal. That way we can bring in the right expertise at the right time. Because key steps like this are built right in, reps don’t have to struggle to think about how best to advance each deal. Sales Path gives them the information they need, at just the right time to move their deals closer to closed-won.
Make Progress from Anywhere with the Salesforce Mobile App
Remember the last time you went out without your smartphone? Neither do we—or your reps! Enable the Salesforce mobile app, and you can take advantage of the moments between meetings, elevator rides, bites of your sandwich—the possibilities are endless.
The Salesforce mobile app lets you tap into all your Sales Cloud data on the go. With your Salesforce license, your reps can download it free from the Apple app store or Google Play. Seriously, invest a few minutes to install it, and you can save oodles of time.
Make Every Day Super Productive
For your sales team to hit their monthly and quarterly targets, they need to make progress every day—the work can't just happen at the end of the selling period. Your sales reps need to start each selling day with a goal and track against that in Sales Cloud. Put all the information reps need front and center with out-of-the-box or custom home pages, so each person can see their key opportunities, next steps, and dashboards at a glance. After all, there’s nothing like a live scoreboard to motivate each member of your team.
Embrace Automation and Free Your Reps from Manual Data Entry
No one goes into sales because they love data entry. If there’s a manual task your reps are doing over and over, then with Sales Cloud you can automate it. Even if it just saves a minute each time you do that, think of the savings:
1 minute X the number of times each rep does the task X the number of reps you have = BIG savings!
Here are a couple ways Sales Cloud can help reps find more time to sell.
Automated Workflows
By automating your sales process, your reps can skip the busywork and take the right actions at the right time. The really great thing? With Sales Cloud, you can manage workflows and processes with point-and-click tools.
Emails Automatically Tracked
Does your team live in Office 365, Exchange, or Gmail? Connect your email to Salesforce, so reps can update their records effortlessly and send one-to-many messages with one click. Bidirectional synchronization captures these interactions back to your CRM.