Best Practices for Implementing Salesforce CRM - Cloud Experts

Salesforce CRM Getting Started Guide• Key performance indicators (KPIs) – Get more targeted monitoring with KPIs. Good choices includeOpportunities won, Opportunities lost, Loss by competitor, Average deal size, Sales stage duration,Forecast accuracy, and Productivity.Encourage adoptionMany customers find offering incentives to users can have a big payoff. Here are a few suggestions forencouraging user adoption:• Identify and reward the strongest adopters. For example, reward those who created the most Reports orActivities or added the most new Contacts. One company gave away iPods to the strongest adopters.• Communicate about new product features that will help users in their daily work.• Take the approach, “If it isn’t in Salesforce CRM, it doesn’t exist.”• Tie adoption to compensation.• Mandate both timeliness and data quality. Reps must enter prospects and early-stage Opportunitiesimmediately, not just before closing the deal. Otherwise, you lose the advantage of early visibility andwon’t be able to measure close ratios.Increase user adoption with additional functionalityIn addition to encouraging adoption with support and incentives, providing features that make users’ liveseasier can play a huge role in adoption. For example, users love Salesforce CRM/Microsoft Outlookintegrations because they don’t have switch between applications. This feature also lets you capture datapreviously trapped in your reps’ personal computers. Here’s are some changes that get great results:• Leverage the AppExchange• Integrate Microsoft Outlook and Gmail• Provide productivity tools such as templates and dashboardsLeverage the AppExchangeBusinessWeek magazine called the AppExchange “The eBay of Business Applications.” Here, you’ll findhundreds of applications that work together with Salesforce CRM to increase productivity—includingdashboards for sales activity, lead and opportunity management, quote generators, and much more. Go to www.appexchange.com and check it out!Integrate Outlook and emailTo make users more productive, Salesforce CRM is tightly integrated with Microsoft Outlook. This utilityperforms several important functions that help Salesforce CRM and Outlook work hand-in-hand:• Email integration – Add emails from Outlook to a Contact or Lead record inside Salesforce CRM.Salesforce CRM will look up the Contact based on an email match and give you the option to associate itwith an Opportunity as well. This functionality helps you catalog important emails and provides atremendous boost to effective collaboration.• Address book integration – When sending an email from Outlook you can look up a Contact frominside Salesforce and add it to the To line of your email.• Contacts and calendar synchronization – Force.com for Microsoft Outlook lets you select whichContacts and calendar events you want to synch with Salesforce CRM. You can automate synching atscheduled intervals; a dynamic icon indicates whether a record is up to date.GUIDE 19