How Salesforce can help Sales Managers overcome challenges

Nothing beats the thrill of witnessing one of your team closing a sale. But getting them to the position where they can even pitch, let alone close, is a challenging, stressful one. 

Identifying the issues sales managers and directors face every day is the first step. The next is coming up with a solution to them, without increasing the team’s workload. Ideally that solution will also streamline the sales process. (Even better, it’d make everyone a cup of tea while doing all of this, but let’s not get carried away.) 

One of the keys to making successful sales is knowing your customer. What do they need and want? What is their buying history? How do they interact? When is the best time for you to contact them?  Keeping track of all of this information is too time consuming to be achievable without the aid of a CRM solution, such as Salesforces’ 360-degree customer profile. Salesforce provides in-depth knowledge of your customers, including purchasing habits and previous interactions, freeing up your sales’ teams time to make sales.

Another challenge for sales directors is how to reduce the time that essential daily tasks take to allow the sales staff to get on with actually making sales.

These start with creating, managing, and sending quotes. Salesforce CPQ solution automates this task, by providing quote templates that enable you to customise the way your sales team quote your company’s products and services: products can be added to the quotes; quantities, configuration and pricing can be adjusted; standard or customised quote templates can be selected from quote records; and quote PDFs can be generated and emailed to customers.

Another time-saving function is the task notifications tool in Salesforce’s Lightning Experience. Email alerts are automatically generated and sent to designated recipients, reminding them of the things on their to-do lists. The email alert facility is also available from Salesforce Classic. Both can be used to remind or update staff about workflow rules, approval processes or entitlement processes.

A business is only as good as its staff. They’re the face, or voice, of the company and if they’re unmotivated in their sales pitch, a potential customer won’t be motivated to commit.

Keeping staff motivated is one of the biggest challenges for sales managers. If not done properly, the company will lose sales and, potentially, staff, as they may leave in pursuit of jobs they find more rewarding.

To help with this, Salesforce has created Work.com, a corporate performance management platform which is available as an add-on license for Professional Edition, Enterprise Edition, Unlimited Edition, or Developer Edition, and is included in Performance Edition.

Work.com is a tool that sales managers can use to lift staff morale by acknowledging their successes, no matter how small, in the workplace. Performance can be celebrated on a leader board, the team can see each other’s goals, feedback and recognition and rewards can be given for these achievements.