I’ve been implementing information systems for last 20 years, most of the time CRM. After such a long time I should know a thing or two and I still found this book extremely valuable.
Matt divided the book into 5 parts – Identify, Plan, Contact, Qualify and Report and the biggest difference – to most of my implementations – is, that he focuses on teams which get a lot of leads. Which completely change the rules of the game.
Sales development reps are your highest volume Salesforce users, yet in terms of support, they get the scraps
Identify
- Create a timezone field on lead – I never had such request but it make complete sense and just when you get this request you realise, there isn’t any support (besides picklist field) for such thing in Salesforce. It looks easy at first (it is just +- 12 hours), but do you really need all of them, what about summer/winter time, what about timezones which are divided. Plus use it for dividing leads into call times;
- average SDR needs 14 clicks BEFORE his call to prospective customers just to check all the data and update a status;
- lead or no lead? When I implement Salesforce at NGOs I go with no-lead scenario because they don’t really need to „separate“ contacts on multiple places. And I’m glad to hear that I’m not alone and normal companies might have use case for it as well;
- update the „standard“ lead assignment to something better with flow – check for existing company and route to their AE and use only email domain for the mapping.
Plan
- limit number of status to 6 or less;
- add some rules from which status you can change to which;
- use leads‘, contacts‘ and opportunities‘ status to set status on account;
- make campaign names useful (not for marketing but for SDRs so they know what it was about), include additional details (such as link to presentation and elevator pitch) and extend the standard campaign member statuses (and you can use this app from AppExchange to set it on all campaigns);
- add field with LinkedIn address which open a prepopulated search so they can find the contact quicker (and then save the right link into this field) – use workflow to set the default value when it is empty;
- use flows to add important information to record details dynamically.
Contact
- leverage path (check Trailhead what it can do for you);
- add custom fields to tracking progress – disposition, last attempt date, last connect date, # of attempts;
- create report based on those custom fields and you can monitor how they fulfil their SLAs;
- speed up entering info – the standard log a call is nice, but it takes a while before it loads up. But you might create a custom action which predefines all the fields and it is enough to click it, which will speed up the process for people a lot;
- don’t rely on tasks (the „always have open task“ rule), rather use the custom fields to monitor progress;
The presence of an open task doesn’t guarantee follow-up any more than the presence of a dictionary guarantees good spelling.
- formalise you cadence and create automation to update Next Action Date;
- power up your list views.
Qualify
- route meetings round-robins – this goes all the way how your SDRs work with AEs – is it 1:1, are those two separated groups, etc.;
- pre-opportunity vs opportunity discussion is just awesome;
- always create opportunity from contact – it creates contact role (you need it to Einstein Activity Capture work properly), bring campaign history, allows for campaign influence measurements. Because the manual creation of opportunity is pretty long create a checkbox on contact which will call flow which will create the opportunity.
Report
I’m sure you’re hearing the same exact things, but I measure activities, conversations, meetings passed, meetings accepted, and trending.
- PREVGROUPVAL AND PARENTGROUPVAL are support awesome, you just need to learn them!
All in all
194 pages, $3,79 and more tips then anywhere else. A lot of automation you can use, great ideas for reports and dashboards, this book is definitely worth the investment (in terms on money and time to read).
There two downsides of the book – the picture (at least on mine Kindle) are pretty badly visible and all the links in the book doesn’t work anymore 🙁