Episode 7 - Attaining Customers through Effective CRM Sales Processes
This is our second episode of a 3-part series called “Attract, Attain, Retain”. And that is the Marketing, Sales, and Service Life Cycle of any business relationship.
Last episode, we discussed the attraction side of things and the beginning of that lifecycle sequence where we covered Marketing and the importance of first attracting attention to your brand or product or service.
If you haven’t caught that episode yet, I’d encourage you to start there and then continue on with this one.
With Sales, we're trying to attain customers once we've attracted their attention. It's very hard to attain customers if we're not garnering their attention through effective marketing.
Some of the primary objects or records that you'll be dealing with if you're working inside of Salesforce or any other CRM will be primarily Accounts, Contacts and Opportunities.
Let’s first dive into our contact records and their origin stories, which usually comes by way of leads.
The data points we have on lead records are carried over into an account, contact, and opportunity through what is known as the lead conversion process. And that is the line where Marketing hands over to Sales the person and the opportunity for them to work to hopefully a successful conclusion.
It's important to recognize that a lot of that data is copied over from the lead record such as the company name which becomes the account name, whenever you convert that lead.
The person's name becomes the contact record name, their phone number and email address are also populated on the resulting contact record.
Then the opportunity typically has the name of the account or what was originally the company name on the lead record. And then oftentimes you'll want to, in the lead conversion process, enter in what this opportunity is, whether it's selling widgets or generators or electric vehicles or whatever it may be. Something along the lines of “Acme Industries, dash generators.
Then salespeople work inside of that opportunity record. Some CRMs call this a deal. It's a potential deal when in its early stages.
Any discussion about Opportunities in Salesforce would be incomplete without addressing the importance of Stages. Think of stages of an opportunity as different milestones that a deal reaches on its journey towards closure. These stages may be a small few, but I have seen sales processes on opportunities out in the real world that had up to 15 different stages.
Stages on an opportunity are tied into a lot of different things. It's important to understand in successfully working opportunities that a lot of pieces or functionality in Salesforce are interconnected.
You can set the probability for deal closure for each stage in your sales process based on past data and performance. And let's say for sake of an example your sales process has seven different stages.
And as you progress from one stage to the next, each of those stages gets you progressively closer to a successful closed won opportunity.
Eventually if you do close and win that opportunity that probability becomes 100%. If you end up losing that deal, the probability drops to 0 percent and it's closed, lost opportunity.
But along the way, you can configure your Salesforce instance to match your actual sales processes. And that’s processes being plural because Salesforce can handle multiple sales processes. You may take your opportunities or deals through different stages and perform different actions to try to close various deals depending on what type of deals you're dealing with.
And last week we talked about record types being in essence the adjectives of Salesforce, the different types of records for whatever object you're dealing with. And so for an opportunity, if you're selling real estate, for example, you may have some real estate deals that are land and other that are homes, others that are multifamily units such as apartments, and all of those may be going through different sales processes, depending on what type of deal or opportunity you're working.
For a home, you'd want to capture the number of bedrooms. But for a land listing, the number of bedrooms should not appear on that record. And so you can show and hide different fields on an opportunity in Salesforce by employing Record types. And you can also have different stages, based on the record type of an opportunity.
You should always employ record types on an object once you've outgrown the use of a singular type of opportunity, once you have multiple opportunity types, if you're selling land and homes, that would be a scenario where multiple record types would be called for. Another would be if you're an auto dealership and you're selling gas and electric automobiles.
If you have need of either showing and hiding certain fields on the page layouts and or having different sales processes, then that is the point at which you’d want to introduce multiple record types and sales processes to the Opportunity object.
For example, in the sale of electric vehicles, there's usually a step along the way of educating the consumer as to the proper way of charging a vehicle because it is such a different paradigm than gas vehicles and so a lot of education is required that would not be required of someone purchasing a gas vehicle.
There I could Envision having different stages on opportunities. If you're selling a gas vehicle, you wouldn't have a charging education stage, but you may need that stage for the sales process of an electric auto.
Being mindful of these different stages, typically some of the early ones that you see out of the box with just standard opportunities and the way Salesforce is set up by default whenever you first are setting up a new Salesforce instance, you will see stage names such as prospecting or qualification.
And then all along the way, you want to be sure that you're capturing the information that you need and you can configure your CRM to validate that certain data points are entered at certain stages and not allow those opportunities to go past a certain stage until that data has been entered.
There's also a really tight correlation to how opportunity stages behave as do the status designations on leads. Last week in the Attract episode about marketing, I talked about multiple lead processes and those dictating the different status selections on the Status picklist field on a lead.
The same can be said of the opportunity and how that ties in through what is known as the sales processes.
And whenever you have multiple different sales processes that you need to facilitate, such as the sale of gas and electric vehicles and those having need of different stages, then you would employ different sales processes.
That enables you to have different stages of opportunities such as an electric vehicle having the education stage from that previous example.
With those sales processes, you can accommodate those different stage designations.
Also tying into your various stage designations on opportunities are probabilities.
With each progressing stage, the probability increases towards that being a closed-won opportunity
That data can be refined over time and the more data and history that you have and the more opportunities that reach a certain stage, you get better and better ability to forecast, knowing that once an opportunity reaches a particular stage, there’s a certain percentage chance of it closing successfully.
Those percentages then can be used to help forecast your pipeline as far as the expected revenue.
It may surprise you if you've not worked in a long, complex sales cycle to understand that some of these deals that we're dealing with inside of Salesforce may be multi-million dollar deals. There may be a lot of legal back and forth, a lot of haggling, a lot of negotiation happening, and some of these sales processes may be multi year processes.
If you think about Large projects like the building of a skyscraper or sports stadium, or something that requires a lot of time on the clock and you want to really make sure you get it right. This is not something that organizations just fly into overnight.
There's a vast difference between the closing of a deal related to some massive infrastructure project versus someone buying a Snuggie off of late night TV, an impulse buy, what is known as direct response marketing where you see something and you buy it immediately, there's not a lot of qualification or warming up.
You just capture the attention, you close the deal. And that's more of a business to consumer, direct response play - from marketing to sales, it’s a very shortened sales process and lifecycle.
Salesforce tends to really excel in the enterprise for more complex or protracted or prolonged sales processes that can take months or years along the way.
All of this is interconnected with opportunities and other objects, such as accounts and contacts.
Accounts being the companies that are represented for those opportunities. Contacts being the people that work for those companies or accounts that those opportunities belong to.
But the primary driver for most of the financials inside of Salesforce would be the opportunity object.
Let’s now focus on how AI is going to change sales processes out there in the enterprise. And I think it can't be understated enough how fundamentally disrupted Salesforce and all software is going to change with the advent of AI.
We are already seeing big changes happening and it's going to take time still, but with the sales side of things, some of the things that generative AI can do quite well is it gives you the ability to auto generate product descriptions, which doesn't seem like a big deal unless you have thousands of products. Imagine being able to just auto generate those and the time savings there.
It can also help you with the crafting of emails and responses.
Beyond the Generative AI standpoint, there’s also Predictive AI that will have a say in your Sales future.
Salesforce’s AI platform known as Einstein can recommend your next best actions, because pattern recognition inside of a large system with a lot of data points, a lot of history by way of AI is very beneficial because the system of AI can identify reasons why or patterns that have led to successful closure of deals, where if all things being equal, what were the activities by the sales reps that led to this deal closing versus that one not?
And so there's patterns of quicker follow up times or scheduling meetings at a certain time after initial creation of an opportunity or capturing these data points that aren't captured typically on deals that are lost.
These are things that can be identified earlier in the sales process if there's potential problems or things happening even in the service cloud with a lot of returns or problems and complaints with certain companies, then that's going to potentially prevent future deals from closing.
AI can keep an eye on the whole health of a relationship, or what is known oftentimes as a pulse score, keeping a pulse on how we are doing with our clients so as to improve the odds of keeping them and closing new deals and reaching new relationships with other people that work for that same company in order to increase our footprint there.
If we are performing well, satisfaction scores are coming in that we'd like to see. And then also with the Einstein predictive side of things, it can predict what will help increase our odds of reaching a successful conclusion to opportunities.
Knowing history, there will be far too many companies that drag their feet in embracing the competitive edge that AI can provide - those companies will quickly fall by the wayside and will go out of business. If you are a business owner, how are you going to compete if you resist leveraging the power of AI in the long-term. Failure is inevitable and resistance is futile, if you want to stay in business.
And for those of you currently employed by someone else - what is your employer’s approach and embrace to AI. If they are keeping it at arm’s length or shunning it, you are on a sinking ship. I encourage you to find a company with vision to the future that is willing to embrace AI now and not wait and hope that they get with the program.
Another area that artificial intelligence is very helpful towards Sales effectiveness is that of scoring.
You can start scoring your opportunities to help prioritize among your sales reps which opportunities have the best potential for winning or have the most potential profitability and focus on those that are highest in order to make an effective use of time and focus your efforts.
Opportunity scoring is something you can ask any AI system for examples of how to do those algorithms and formulas.
AI will also revolutionize how automations are handled.
There's usually automations that happen once an account has its first closed won opportunity, such as changing from a record type of prospect to customer, as a common way of telling who are our customers versus those that haven't spent a single dollar with us yet.
You'll see more and more automations being done by AI over time, simply because it will be faster and easier. There's been a lot of different tools inside of Salesforce that have handled automations from workflow rules to process builders, to flows and Apex triggers, and some of these tools have been retired by Salesforce
But I see no reason why all automations in the not too distant future will be prompted.
I can envision the day where a lot of what's built on Salesforce is more of AI driven question and answer session, akin to the old choose your own adventure books - but instead of this being a children’s story, you will be able to effectively narrate or write that which needs to happen inside of your CRM. These would be question and answer scenarios.
Here’s exactly how this will likely play out soon.
Oftentimes, in business, there's always a finite number of rules and processes that businesses run with. I often was brought in as a technical writer to document those policies and procedures.
Within and with all those policies and procedures, which for sake of our discussion, let’s call those business rules, there are always exceptions. And then there's always prioritization to those rules and exceptions. This facilitates decision making, given various scenarios throughout the context of our business rules and exceptions.
I think over time we will see automation stories or user stories, if you will, that will set and dictate the rules and exceptions that a business abides by. And that can be divided down by geography or department or user or whatever it needs to be.
I think that oftentimes those that have more experience on a platform start to cling to what they know and have a hard time wrapping their mind around things changing. And there’s the sunk cost fallacy of once you’ve invested heavily in an area, you are more hesitant to change course, even when logic dictates a change of course would be wise.
The main point today is that our future will be more prompted than coded or clicked. And a lot of this prompting with an AI will be done with voice. Some will be done with typing. And this is why communication skills and soft skills in general Beyond communication, but collaboration as well, are so vitally important in the age of AIs
Because you have to effectively be able to communicate what you want and imagine being in a scenario where you've got to dictate the rules libraries, and the exceptions libraries for businesses. This can and will be done with natural language.
If you can't communicate that clearly, then there will be a lot of confusion and a lot of things open to interpretation and hallucination by AIs. But that is where we are heading because it'll be easier, it'll be faster, and there will be no reason why people and businesses will cling to the more complex path.
Easy always wins. Faster, easier, always wins. This is the path that CRM is heading and especially in the area of Sales.
Next week we will round things out in this three part series as we hand off the duty of maintaining these relationships to our service that we provide to our customers.
Next week we'll look at the retention side where we finish the three part series on attract, attain, retain.
We'll explore customers retention by providing excellent customer service and implications as to how AI is changing service in the CRM world
Once again, thank you for your time and be sure to subscribe and I'll join us next week as we discuss service and retention.
