by Barry Thomason | Apr 6, 2016 | Business, Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Marketing, Sales, Software, Technology
As a continuation to our post on the Salesforce Adoption Maturity Model, let’s discuss Basic Adoption in detail. Basic Adoption is usually attained when the entire team is tracking sales activities and managing prospect and customer relationships within Sales Cloud. The key to Basic Adoption is consistent usage – everyone is using the system on a regular basis and following similar processes. It’s not about perfection, it’s about consistency. Most companies in the Basic Adoption phase have made modifications for their specific business processes to help track important information about the Leads, Contacts, Accounts, and Opportunities they are engaging.
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by John Burdett | Feb 15, 2016 | Business, Entrepreneurship, Marketing, Sales, Software, Technology
Customer Relationship Management (CRM), or as we like to call it – Consistent Relationship Management, solutions have been around for decades now and most everyone has tried to institute some level of CRM processes whether it is basic contact management or implementing a robust system like Salesforce. However, most companies have failed at adopting CRM processes and solutions. So why is implementing best practices within a good CRM solution so critical? Here are three main reasons why we think CRM is the most critical business process within your company and also why it’s important to have a good solution in place to manage these important business processes.
If CRM is Broken, Your Company is Broken (more…)
by Nikki Francisco | Jan 4, 2016 | Business, Marketing, Sales, Software, Technology
Most businesses use Salesforce for sales, but Salesforce is much more than just a CRM. In fact, you can (and should) manage your whole business on the Salesforce platform.
You don’t need to buy different systems to manage different aspects of your business. When it comes to helping you run your business, Salesforce can do it all. Here are a few ways you can use Salesforce as a centralized platform to manage your business. (more…)
by Nikki Francisco | Dec 6, 2015 | Business, Human Resources, Marketing, Sales, Social Media, Software, Technology
Salesforce’s internal social collaboration platform, Chatter, is one of the top social collaboration tools according to review platform, G2 Crowd. This isn’t surprising. Chatter has enabled businesses to share valuable information amongst themselves, changing the way they collaborate and communicate internally.
Chatter is a versatile tool for your company. Here are three of the best ways you can use it to help your business: (more…)
by Barry Thomason | Jun 3, 2015 | Business, Entrepreneurship, Marketing, Sales
I saw this quote the other day from Ken Blanchard’s classic “The One-Minute Manager.”
“If you can’t tell me what you’d like to be happening, you don’t have a problem yet. You’re just complaining. A problem only exists if there is a difference between what is actually happening and what you desire to be happening.”
Though this quote does not come from a sales context, I think this idea can also apply in the early stages of sales situations when we are trying to figure out if we have a lead or an opportunity on our hands. A lot of times sellers (especially inexperienced sellers) struggle to understand if they are dealing with a lead or an opportunity. When we can’t be sure what we are dealing with, we end up guessing, which leads to wasted effort. (more…)
by Barry Thomason | Jan 20, 2015 | Business, Marketing, Sales
Marketing is a big, complex discipline. If you think marketing is just brochures, mass e-mailing and a little advertising, think again. To see a fully developed marketing framework, take a look at Pragmatic Marketing. This framework is used by some of the world’s leading marketers and it is something that smaller businesses should aspire to use. The reality is that smaller companies don’t usually have the money, time, or expertise to do all of the things that need to be done to implement a comprehensive marketing framework. If something like the Pragmatic Marketing framework is out of reach for you and you still need to grow, what can you do? Focus on lead generation. Here’s why:
- A well-executed lead generation program can be more effective and less expensive than having sales reps produce and develop all of their own leads (Note: sales reps should always produce and develop some of their leads, just not all of them). You can do a lot of lead generation in a one-to-many setting like mass e-mails, newsletters, events, or webinars which can be produced on a shoestring budget.
- Most of the process of finding and developing leads can be automated with tools like Marketo, Pardot, Hubspot, Silverpop, and Infusionsoft.
- You can easily measure if your lead generation efforts are producing results. There are a lot of valuable things that marketing does that are difficult or impossible to quantify. Lead generation is not one of those.
- By engaging with prospects in a lead generation campaign, you will gain the knowledge you need to ultimately implement a comprehensive marketing framework. Plus, it will force you to create some basic marketing collateral.
- As Forbes recently reported, Agile Marketing is the way to go – start small, iterate, learn, and improve. Lead generation is the foundation of your marketing framework.
Smaller, growing companies constantly have to make decisions on where to focus their resources. Since you probably can’t do everything you need to be doing from a marketing perspective, lead generation is the place to start. Just be sure that over time you keep your eye on the big picture and move toward a comprehensive marketing framework as your resources permit.
