Salesforce features predeveloped apps to help organizations manage customer relationships more effectively. The tool comprises automation, marketing, and customer service applications. Organizations can configure and customize the tool to fit their specific needs.
To ensure Salesforce records maximum performance, cost-saving maintenance, and high productivity, every organization needs to get familiar with the tool’s best practices. These include good data hygiene, code creation, and simplified approval processes. Implementation of the best practices should be in line with Salesforce concepts, products, and services.
Prioritize good data hygiene
Salesforce is a preferred tool used by sales teams, marketers, customer service teams, and management. The tool generates data from multiple sources. Due to the volume of data, an organization can never be sure how clean it is.
Cybercriminals can take advantage and send malicious data into the system to crush it, steal information, or demand ransom. Data traffic into the organization through Salesforce should be scanned and filtered to ensure no invasive data gains access to the network. The importance of Salesforce security must be prioritized in every business. Its security should be a concern to every stakeholder in the business.
Prioritize good data quality
An organization should not only focus on data hygiene but also its quality. It ensures the CRM is kept organized. When data is generated from multiple sources, some of it can be duplicated, and some of it could be missing. This may result in giving incorrect information to clients and marketing teams. It becomes harder to track the data or respond to client requests. Ensuring data quality involves several steps.
- Data cleaning to remove duplicates.
- Data integration to integrate third-party data into company records.
- Archiving to remove historical data from the CRM system.
- Storage to store current data that might be required soon.
Create alerts to notify the sales team of new data
Sales teams and marketers stay busy all day long, following up on clients. They need to make phone calls, respond to emails, and schedule meetings. Sales teams spend approximately 28% of their time organizing Salesforce data daily. They lose approximately 2.24 hours daily, which is a lot of time in one year. To reduce the time lost, create alerts to notify the team every time an important email or lead is received. That means they will only require checking emails based on the alerts they receive.
Designate one person to manage the CRM
The latest business trends show customers are shopping more online. To gain success in the market, marketers need to use tools that help them connect with customers on whichever platform they are. Salesforce is regarded as the tool that provides marketers with the truth about customer behavior and needs. It is a complicated tool that requires consistent updating and cleaning.
An organization cannot entrust such a sensitive process to every user. They need to designate one person with the responsibility of managing the tool. This will be the Salesforce administrator, and they should preferably have the technical skills for managing the tool. He is the point person to whom the other staff will go whenever they need technical help.
Streamline Salesforce processes
Oftentimes, it is difficult for employees to log in to Salesforce or find the information they need. This is because IT professionals make it complex for users to access the tool. They might have good reasons due to security, but it hinders productivity. Create a centralized Salesforce knowledge to help users access the information they need.
Keep vibrant communication with users to identify developing challenges and solve them. Understand what the user needs and address their pain points. Streamlined Salesforce’s process improves productivity and promotes the use of CRM. There are different ways to streamline the processes.
Create automated salesforce workflows: Data by Asana shows that employees spend 60% of their time sorting out documents and communicating tasks. They also spend 30% of their time sorting out duplicates. This lost time can be managed better by automating Salesforce workflows. This can be done by using tools such as Salesforce Approvals and Process Builder.
Create more leads: It takes a lot of time to generate high-value leads in an organization. A company should utilize key channels that increase potential leads. These can be channels such as social media ads/publishing, use of influencer marketing, and website content.
Provide support: Providing support is a necessary task in the Salesforce streamlining processes. Help the teams understand how the streamlined processes work. Help them know what to do to make the user experience better. Avail tools that make use of the CRM easier.
Do routine testing
Salesforce is a program developed by programmers like any other software. It is not perfect and may fail at one time or another. It can be due to problems in updating, attacks, or challenges within the organization’s network architecture. It is harder to know if there is a problem unless it grows into a bigger magnitude. Do not wait until it reaches such a level but prevent it by continuous testing.
Test its existing features and every new integration. Testing is a good practice to ensure the CRM is well maintained. It is a good way to detect bugs, malicious data, and data inconsistencies. It ensures the CRM applications are up to date so that productivity is not affected by downtime. The process helps organizations overcome Salesforce challenges such as data migration, mapping, scope definition, and promoting bad data.
Conclusion
Salesforce helps organizations understand their customers and based on that, the management develops improved customer experience strategies. CRM helps organizations overcome technology barriers across departments by providing them with a holistic view of their clients across multiple channels. The number one salesforce best practice is for organizations to ensure they understand their processes and workflow to know which tools or features are required during implementation.