Expand your Small Business with 7 Salesforce Essentials Best Practices
by Dorian Earl
DevCon founder & CEO
A must-have CRM tool for small- to medium-sized businesses, Salesforce Essentials helps organizations grow and succeed via its user-friendly interface, customizable feature and robust analytics.
This powerful technology helps:
• streamline operations
• improve customer engagement
• increase revenue
But you need a deep understanding of its features and capabilities—plus a strategic approach—to get the most out of it. As a small business Salesforce consulting partner, we’ve pulled together seven Salesforce Essentials best practices to help you realize this CRM’s full potential.
Practice 1: Define your business processes
Effectively using Salesforce Essentials requires you understand your business processes (sales, lead qualification and customer service). Defining these ensures your team is aligned and working efficiently.
Effectively using Salesforce Essentials requires you understand your business processes.
Map out your sales process. Identify key stages from lead generation to close. Use Salesforce Essentials to create custom fields, stages and workflows aligned with your sales process.
Define your lead-qualification process. Determine criteria for qualifying leads. Use Salesforce Essentials to track and score leads based on these criteria.
Create a customer-service process. Develop a process for handling customer inquiries and issues. Track and resolve cases using Salesforce Essentials.
Practice 2: Customize your Salesforce Essentials dashboard
Use the customizable Salesforce Essentials dashboard as your home base. From here, you enjoy a panoramic view of your entire operation. You can manage your sales pipeline, track customer interactions and analyze business performance.
Ensure your dashboard matches your specific needs by customizing it. Here’s how:
Identify key metrics
Determine your most important metrics, including pipeline stage, conversion rate or revenue. Salesforce Essentials helps you generate custom charts and graphs displaying these metrics.
Customize your layout
Rearrange dashboard components to prioritize your most-relevant info.
Create custom views
Filter and display data based on your specific criteria.
Salesforce Essentials helps you generate custom charts and graphs based on your most important metrics, including pipeline stage, conversion rate or revenue.
Practice 3: Leverage Salesforce Essentials reports & dashboards
Salesforce Essentials’ robust suite of reporting tools offers insights into your business performance and identifies areas to improve. Make data-driven decisions and optimize your business processes by leveraging Salesforce Essentials reports and dashboards:
Identify reporting needs
Determine the reports and dashboards most useful for your business, such as sales pipeline reports, lead-conversion reports or customer-service metrics.
Customize reports and dashboards
Create custom reports and dashboards tailored to your needs. This might include adding custom fields, filters or charts.
Analyze your Salesforce Essentials reports and dashboards to identify areas to improve.
Use report insights to optimize your processes
Analyze your Salesforce Essentials reports and dashboards to identify trends, patterns and areas to improve. Use this info to optimize business processes and improve overall performance.
Practice 4: Automate sales processes
Automating routine tasks means more time spent building customer relationships and growing your business. Salesforce Essentials offers powerful, time-saving automation tools to help streamline your sales processes:
Use lead-capture forms to automate lead generation
Automatically capture leads from your website or other sources.
Use flow rules to automate lead behavior and follow-up
Assign leads to appropriate sales reps based on predefined criteria.
Use email templates and autoresponders to automate follow-up
Automatically follow up with leads and customers with ease.
Practice 5: Improve customer engagement
Use Salesforce Essentials to stay connected with customers, increase loyalty and drive long-term growth. Various tools and features help improve customer engagement and build strong relationships, including using email-marketing campaigns to stay in touch with your customers. You also can send targeted campaigns tailored to customer interests and needs.
Practice 6: Integrate Salesforce Essentials with other tools and applications
Integrate Salesforce Essentials with other tools and applications—including email-marketing software, accounting software and project-management tools—to streamline business operations and improve overall efficiency:
Identify tools and applications most important for your business
Determine the tools and applications you now use or plan to use to ensure their compatibility with Salesforce Essentials.
Use AppExchange to find and install integrations
Find and install integrations to help streamline business processes and improve efficiency.
Test your integrations
Ensure integrations work correctly and deliver desired results.
Practice 7: Train Your team
It's essential to ensure your team is appropriately trained and equipped to use Salesforce Essentials effectively. Necessary training and support ensure they’ll fully leverage this technology’s capabilities and maximize ROI.
Develop a training plan
A comprehensive training plan should cover all of Salesforce Essentials’ key features and capabilities.
Provide hands-on training and support
Ensure your team has access to resources and materials needed to effectively use Salesforce Essentials.
Encourage ongoing learning and development
Provide ongoing training and support.
Salesforce strategy
Using Salesforce Essentials effectively demands a strategic approach and deep understanding of its features and capabilities. Following these seven best practices can optimize your business processes, improve customer engagement and maximize your ROI. Whether you’re a small-business owner or sales professional, Salesforce Essentials can help elevate your business to the next level.
Why not book a FREE initial call with an affordable Chicago Salesforce partner and see how Development Consulting Partners can move you closer to your goals?
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Seeking superior Salesforce support? Experience the DevCon Difference℠. Development Consulting Partners, LLC is a certified Salesforce Consulting Partner. Founded in 2017, our affordable Salesforce consulting partners organization serves clients across North America via a coast-to-coast team of trusted Salesforce experts. These specialists implement affordable & customized business solutions centered on the possibilities offered by the world’s #1 CRM platform: Salesforce. Find out how our consultants can invigorate and elevate your organization.