Learn methods that increase Salesforce user adoption. These scenarios are applicable for B2C, B2B, and nonprofits. Simplify your user experience and get quick results with Salesforce.com. See how to leverage multiple relationships within a single record and more.
Author Archives: bwoelkers
How To Make Your Sales Training Work
You may be wondering how come your spending money on sales training and you are not seeing results. Well, the truth is, sales habits won’t change overnight, and without the right follow-up training, it can be close to useless. The goal of training is to educate and change behaviors, and we all know that behavior does not change easily. These new, learned behaviors need to be practiced for at least a month before they become second nature. This is why a scheduled follow-up is essential.
- Clear expectations: Your expectations must be communicated clearly, reps need to know what is expected from them and don’t be afraid to remind them.
- Inspect: Reps should be observed and monitored to ensure they are grasping and implementing the concepts learned in training.
- Realistic feedback: You should provide feedback often, and honestly. Remember to include positive reinforcement to let them know what they are doing right and constructive feedback as support to what requires improvement.
- Provide incentive: Typical to any type of training you should acknowledge and reward reps for implementing the new concepts they have learned. This will not only provide motivation but will also serve as a constant reminder.
- Reinforcement training: Should typically be conducted 90-120 days after initial training. This will ensure everyone has not forgotten about their original training.
By following up initial training with these practices, you will see better results. Reps are reminded, and encouraged, throughout the process that the training provided is taken seriously, and comes with expectations. This is one sure-fire way to get a better return on investment with the training investment you have provided.
Selling in a Bear Market
Selling when there is a downturn in the economy can be difficult, but there are plenty of people that still get rich during times like this. Keep in mind, in a bear market, business owners don’t need to follow the market, and scale back, they only need to do better than the completion.
Here are some tactics you can employ, not only to survive a recession, but flourish as well.
- Keep selling….but with more effort
When the economy is good, it’s easier to sell, that isn’t news to anyone. Selling is easier as people have more money to spend and less economic worries. Studies have shown that a buyer will view, review, and reconsider a purchase an average of seven times. Whereas sales staff often gives up after only one. This inst enough persistence even when times are good. This is why you need to try harder, and put forth more effort during a bad economy. - Focus on your target market
In tough times, a company should narrow its focus on what it does best. Now is not the time to have weak product lines or distracting ventures. Business should focus on strengthening its core products and services. These are what contribute the most to sales volume and margin. - Increase the marketing budget
Marketing isn’t a cost, rather an investment that generates revenue from new customers. If businesses look at marketing in this perspective, it should be easier to increase the amount spent on marketing. This is especially true when times are tuff. Remember, you need to reach more people to get the same sales volume. - Make it easier to do business
It’s all over, tightening credit. It’s easy during downturns to tighten credit policies, shorten hours, etc. but what you are really doing is making it more difficult for customers to do business with you. If your competition is making these types of cut-backs you should do the opposite; Offer terms, ship for free, extend warranties, provide better service, and watch their customers come to you. - Clarify your Value proposition and ROI
Recession or no recession people are always going to spend money. The only difference is many will be more frugal. But people needs have not changed, and they are still going to spend money on goods and services that they perceive as having value. Now is the time to show them exactly how they will benefit by buying from you. You may want to consider creating case studies, product demonstrations or webinars.
Salesforce.com Winter 09’
Within this release of salesforce.com you will find over 50 new features, spanning all of the application product line. This marks the 3rd release this year and reminds us of Salesforce’s growing commitment to provide the worlds #1 hosted CRM solution on the planet. Highlighted in this posting are Salesforce.com Opportunity Splitting and Campaign Influence.
The new Opportunity Splitting features address some of the current shifts in business needs. Back in the day a sale would almost always be attributed to one person, but today we know that often a couple people, or even a team, are involved in a sale. With Opportunity Splitting you can track all the individuals that participated in a sale. This will effectively eliminate duplicate records and having reports that accurately reflect where the sales reps are spending their time as well as their productivity.
Another great new feature is Campaign Influence. This is one of the most exciting features to come out with Winter 09 and is a Salesforce Marketing attribute. This will dramatically increase the effectiveness of your marketing campaign by allowing you to track on an opportunity by opportunity basis, determining which campaigns are working and which are not.
Automation is also improved in this new edition of Salesforce.com. The Schedule and Email Reports was one of the most requested features. This new feature allows customers to have reports automatically generated and sent out to the appropriate individuals. No more having to manually run a report then sending out to the same people every week. It is all automated! We want to thank our customers who requested this feature.
Force.com also receives some new and improved features in the Winter 09’ edition. Customers will be able to leverage the power of Visualforce to create email templates. This will allow customers to pull information form anywhere within their application to build dynamic email templates.
New features like these will make you more productive and profitable. May the Force be with you.
Cloud Computing
Cloud computing is a new concept that many confuse with grid computing. This emerging technology incorporates technologies like Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Web 2.0 where reliance is on the internet to satisfy user needs. A few examples would be Salesforce.com, Google Apps and Amazon EC2, where the software resides on servers in the cloud, and users merely access them, most commonly through an internet browser.
Salesforce.com is able to further reduce costs by running their application on a multi-tenant architecture. What this means is they have only one copy of the application serving multiple customers. This reduces development costs by having only one application to maintain and upgrade. It also reduces server cost, because servers are not sitting around idly waiting for requests, as is the case with dedicated servers or client-server architecture.
