RevOps Archives

Prep for a Profitable New Year

Three Essential Steps to Prep for a Profitable New Year

Ben Doran, Revenue Operations Consultant

These last twelve months have been action-packed with conflict, near and far, and an ever-changing business environment. On top of that, we have an economy that can’t seem to make up its mind, which adds to the stress of it all. While it’s understandable to hope for the new year to be better than the last, it isn’t always a given. A well-thought-out plan for your company’s 2024 growth is crucial, so we’ve put together three revenue operation steps to lead to a profitable new year.

Assess and Optimize Your Data Infrastructure

The foundation of effective revenue operations lies in data. It can unlock critical insights, allow businesses to react appropriately to customer needs, and steer an organization in the right direction. To capture, maintain, and use it effectively requires a healthy data infrastructure. So start by conducting a comprehensive audit of your current setup. Analyze the quality, accuracy, and integrity of your data. Identify any gaps or inconsistencies that are getting in the way of your operations. Evaluating where you currently stand will make the next step more manageable and beneficial.

Once you’ve examined your current data infrastructure, now is the time to make some improvements. The first thing you should consider implementing is a data hygiene process. These steps should target duplicate and incomplete data that get in the way of visualizing a complete and accurate picture of performance. It’s essential to ensure the information your business relies on is up-to-date and reliable. But don’t stop there; look into how your business can leverage advanced analytics tools to gain insights into customer behavior, market trends, and performance metrics. This data-driven approach will empower your team to make informed decisions and play an instrumental part in driving revenue growth in the upcoming year.

Evaluate Your Tech Stack

In our fast-paced world, staying ahead of the curve requires cutting-edge technology. It allows a business to run more effectively than competitors and creates growth opportunities, contributing to a profitable new year.

So what does this mean for you? Well, it starts with evaluating your current tech stack. Your CRM setup might have been state-of-the-art when it was originally implemented, but the technology evolves quickly. Perhaps the third-party integrations your business relies on are running on outdated or bulky systems. A thorough outline of the pros and cons of your current tech stack will give you a strong foundation for any potential upgrades you can make.

The investigation and collaboration phase will follow the tech stack evaluation process. Once you understand where your system currently stands, you can explore ways to enhance your operations with emerging technologies. Enhancement opportunities could look like artificial intelligence for predictive analytics or automation tools for streamlined workflows. When researching new tech, consider boosting efficiency while positioning your organization to adapt to changing market dynamics – flexibility is critical. It’s also important to note that you should take into account the cost of purchasing and implementing the new tech. You don’t want to focus on just the short term. Ideally, you’ll reap the benefits of your investment well into the future.

This process can get overwhelming, so collaborate with internal and external stakeholders. Your team leaders know how to prioritize system improvements, and revenue operations consultants have first-hand knowledge of the possibilities. It may sound like a lot of work, but at the end of the day, a well-optimized tech stack is a crucial driver of revenue operations success.

Align Revenue Operations and Business Goals

Most organizations have a clear set of profit-making goals they want to achieve each new year. It’s helpful to break down those goals by quarter and associate performance metrics with each because you need a clear direction to achieve great things.

But what about the role of revenue operations? Is there a detailed plan for how sales, marketing, customer experience, and finance will work together to reach the organization’s overall goals? If your team needs one, now is an excellent time to create one. Start by bringing in key stakeholders and mapping realistic action items for each department. This phase is an iterative process. You must regularly review and adjust these action items and strategies based on market trends and internal feedback.

This phase encourages cross-functional collaboration that breaks down silos and fosters a cohesive approach to revenue generation. When you align your revenue operations with broader business goals, you position your organization for a profitable new year.

Prepare for a Profitable New Year

As we embark on a new year, a comprehensive revenue operations strategy will set the stage for a prosperous future. Revenue Ops LLC can help you maximize your profit. Our certified experts will work with you to conduct a thorough data assessment, optimize your tech stack, and align operations with strategic business goals. Embrace these three essential steps, and watch your organization thrive no matter what lies ahead.

If you want to learn more or talk to one of our revenue operations specialists, please contact us today.

Back to School: Your Guide to Salesforce and Salesloft Training Resources

As summer waves goodbye and the back-to-school vibes fill the air, it’s the perfect time to refresh your systems knowledge and learn something new. In the world of revenue operations, Salesforce and SalesLoft shine as a dynamic duo. And, if you want to harness their full potential, education is your golden ticket. So, grab your backpack and join us as we explore the world of Salesforce and Salesloft training resources that will position you at the top of the class in revenue optimization this fall and beyond.

Salesforce Training Resources

Trailhead

The Trailhead program is the first place to start when reviewing Salesforce training resources. With modules and trails suited for all levels, it has everything you want to know about the application and more. Plus, you can earn badges along the way to show others the progress you’ve made!

Salesforce Certification

While Trailhead is a great place to learn, there comes a time when you need to show your Salesforce proficiency. The Salesforce certification program is an excellent mechanism for publicizing your skills. Achieving certifications like Salesforce Administrator, Sales Cloud Consultant, and Service Cloud Consultant is a great way to grow your knowledge base and your career.

Trailblazer Community

The Salesforce Trailblazer Community is your bustling marketplace of wisdom. It’s where users, developers, and administrators gather to exchange ideas. You can connect with fellow enthusiasts, ask burning questions, and share your own pearls of wisdom.

Salesloft Training Resources

Salesloft University

Like the Trailhead program, Salesloft University is the first place to go when you want to expand your system understanding. The courses, webinars, and documentation will help you become the Salesloft expert you’ve always aspired to be.

Salesloft Certification

The Salesloft certification program is where you put your learning to the test. Earning a Salesloft certification not only signals to the rest of the world that you have in-depth experience with the tool but will push you to discover new solutions to persistent sales challenges.

Salesloft Knowledge Base

The Salesloft Knowledge Base is your library for all things Salesloft. It’s where you find answers to those questions that seem simple but are more complicated than you initially thought. It’s a great resource to troubleshoot issues that pop up during your regular interactions.

Collective Learning

For business owners and operations professionals, mastering Salesforce and Salesloft isn’t just about earning gold stars; it’s ultimately about applying the skills to your company’s growth and development objectives. While the resources highlighted above are invaluable to overall understanding, here are three other pathways that can play an essential part in your team’s development.

Team Training: School is in Session for Everyone

Gather your team for some group learning fun. Organize workshops or virtual training sessions to ensure everyone in your organization is confident and comfortable with the current technology and the operational processes. It’s like hosting a school-wide pep rally for your revenue ops team.

Integration Resources

Explore resources that help you seamlessly integrate Salesforce and Salesloft with your tech stack. Maximizing efficiency usually requires you to strategically connect programs in such a way as to make everything run like clockwork. Something has to change if your applications aren’t playing well with each other.

Consulting Services

Seek consulting partners, like Revenue Ops LLC, who specialize in the Salesforce and Salesloft platforms. We customize your implementations and integrations to fit your unique business needs. Our RevOps specialists serve as personal operations mentors whose services range from streamlining workflows to providing monthly system support.

Hit the Books

As we embrace the back-to-school spirit, remember that learning more about the applications your company relies on can lead to significant breakthroughs. With a variety of training resources that cater to every learning style, there’s no limit to your revenue-boosting potential. In this back-to-school season, put on your thinking cap, sharpen your pencils, and dive into the playground of Salesforce and Salesloft training resources. The school year is just beginning, and the honor roll awaits!

CRM is Critical to Effective Revenue Optimization

Ben Doran, Revenue Operations Consultant

Effective revenue optimization means that your business is doing everything possible to increase revenue. It starts with thoroughly analyzing your data – sales, marketing, customer experience, etc. Then moves to a rollout of new tactics and strategies based on the improvements identified during the discovery.

The idea is that your team pulls out all the stops to bring more money in the door. The responsibility doesn’t just fall on the sales team; it’s an approach that should include all functional departments.

The CRM Factor

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) originated from the need to store information on potential and current customers. For the most part, it was a glorified spreadsheet that the sales team primarily used. While customer data storage is still one of its principal purposes, the technology has evolved to accomplish much more. Modern CRM systems can break down information silos, connect departments, and provide real-time reports on customer trends. It’s a tool that lives at the center of your organization, which every team member can access and leverage. CRM is a crucial component for revenue growth when implemented and managed effectively.

CRM Criteria

Your CRM should fit like a bespoke suit; it must fulfill your operational requirements and complement your organizational value propositions. Nowadays, how a company provides a product or service is more important than what it sells or provides. So, it’s helpful to customize your CRM system to fit your unique processes and workflows. These are a few attributes that we look for in an effective CRM system:

Interconnected

You should be able to integrate the essential applications your company relies on with your CRM. Connecting your applications saves countless hours of toggling back and forth and provides comprehensive real-time reporting efficiently, among other benefits.

We like to think of the CRM as the hub of the technology system, with other technology, like your marketing automation platform and sales enablement systems, acting as the spokes of a wheel.

Easy to use

Ideally, a CRM streamlines your business processes and presents a clear path for selling your products and services while managing daily operations. However, the system’s efficacy largely depends on its setup and the functions applied. Underutilization will be counterproductive, so you should take advantage of as many of the system’s features as necessary.

Regulated

Your CRM should facilitate a way to administer the system efficiently. Managing users and privileges should be relatively easy. In addition, automating processes should be a fundamental function of the system. Data validation rules and other advanced security features would also be helpful.

Choosing a CRM

Whether you’re finally deciding to move off of Google Sheets or just looking to expand or upgrade your CRM technology, you must consider these factors during your decision process:

Growth

Scalability is an important consideration where technology is concerned. You not only need to think about your present circumstances but your future plans as well. And growth applies to both business sales and users. Ideally, your selected CRM system will expand and evolve with the business.

Price

Obviously, a robust CRM system can be costly, but hopefully, the returns make the investment worthwhile. Usually, the more advanced functions, automation capabilities, and native integrations the system offers, the more you will pay. In addition to the software costs, there will likely be startup and development costs to migrate and implement existing data and frameworks.

System Demands

Make sure the tool you choose fits your current process. Getting caught up in all the upgrades and integrations is easy, but you’ll just be frustrated and upset if you don’t use them. It’s best to start simple, satisfy current needs, and build from there.

Effectively Optimize Your Revenue

Effective revenue optimization is crucial for growth and business sustainability. With that comes the need for a CRM tailored to your unique needs. Hopefully, the above points encourage your team to look intensely at your current tech stack and provide you with some tools to start thinking about the next phase of CRM development or how to evaluate a potential change for your organization properly. When done correctly, a well-implemented CRM system will be the lynchpin to help your organization make data-driven decisions and help you optimize your revenue.

Revenue Ops LLC is an experienced team of sales, marketing, and customer success professionals committed to helping clients improve performance. The ultimate goal is to streamline workflows so our clients can make data-driven decisions that maximize revenue. We apply our deep knowledge of CRM systems like Salesforce and sales enablement tools like Salesloft to optimize sales potential by stimulating and tracking customer interactions.

Are you looking for some help and guidance through this process? Our certified consultants are ready to talk with you!

What is Customer Engagement?

Customer engagement is trending right now. Not only does everyone have something to say about it (including us), but new customer engagement products are being released every day. All the hype is warranted because strengthening customer relationships leads to revenue growth. However, a team looking to enhance their engagement can quickly get confused by everything out there. So, let’s discuss what customer engagement is.

Customer engagement is the process of connecting with your customers. It’s more than a singular event; it’s a cultivation of the client relationship. Think of it as the totality of every touchpoint and interaction. Not just that, but it can be measured by the emotional connection each customer has with your brand.

Why are Connections Important?

Customers expect more from you than they did in the past. You’re not a big fish in a small pond anymore. Consumers not only have a variety of options at their disposal, but they demand personalized connections. You can thank ______ (fill in the blank with your favorite tech company) for changing how products and messaging are delivered. Therefore, expecting that a one-size-fits-all approach will work with your customer base is both naive and likely to bring an unfortunate outcome.

Happy customers are good for business. They tell their friends nice things about your brand, and, more importantly, they become patrons. Loyalty translates into recurring revenue and more profit. By some estimates, retaining a customer is at least five times more efficient than acquiring a new one. Is there anything else that needs to be said?

The Benefits of Engagement

Now the fun part. By focusing on customer engagement, you can increase profits and connect with clients in new and more valuable ways. Instead of hoping that your clients are happy, an ever-evolving customer engagement strategy provides a reliable indication and usually results in healthy customer relationships. You have some work ahead if you want to achieve this level of customer affinity, but don’t worry because it’s well worth it.

Start Engaging

The first place to start is with an analysis of the current state of your customer engagement. Do you have a cohesive strategy (product, operations, and customer experience)? Is every touchpoint with your base tactical and in-line with your mission? Those questions should keep you occupied for a minute.

The next step is to work with key stakeholders on potential ways you can improve. Ensure you hear different departments’ voices and use a team-centered approach. It’s important to note that you should constantly revisit this strategy and rollout phase to keep up to date with what’s happening on the frontline. Stay tuned for the next post on how your team can take your customer engagement to the next level.

If you’ve heard enough and want to talk, don’t hesitate to contact us.Stay tuned

Revenue Operations Glossary of Commonly Used Terms

Revenue operations (RevOps) has become an established discipline within organizations as companies strive to connect with customers and provide them with the product and services they want. Since RevOps introduces its own set of vocabulary and acronyms, we thought it would be helpful to identify and define some commonly used terms that you might hear or see in your cross-functional interactions. So, we hope our revenue operations glossary will serve as a guide.

RevOps Terms

Automation: Automation frees up your employees’ time by replacing tedious or repetitive tasks with software to complete those tasks on a schedule or based on changes made within the system/triggers.

Accounts: An account represents any business entity or household you want to track, including companies, organizations, consumers, partners, or competitors. Accounts are considered Standard Objects in Salesforce. Accounts can be linked or connected to many other objects within Salesforce, like contacts and opportunities, allowing you to easily access the information you know about the entity the Account represents.

Build: Customization of your technology system to meet the specific needs of your business. The build comprises the time it takes from initial implementation to launch.

Cadence: A set schedule of customer interactions that are usually automated. It’s a formula for when an email should be sent, a call should be made, social media outreach should be done, etc., that will maximize the opportunity for successfully engaging with a prospective customer.

Contacts: The individuals at a customer’s organization (Account) with whom you interact and conduct business.

Fields: The containers in Salesforce where pieces of information are held within an object. Names, individual pieces of contact information, and currency can be fields. Salesforce has some standard fields, which are included in every instance out of the box, and also allows you to create custom fields specific to your Salesforce instance and business needs.

Flow(s): The visual representation of automation that happens within your Salesforce system. It contains the trigger and criteria for what should be evaluated when the flow is supposed to run and the automated actions that should take place in your Salesforce org after the flow has been completed.

Instance: The collection of interconnected data that makes up your organization within Salesforce. It’s your individual Salesforce organization that is unique from all others.

Journey: Used in Marketing Cloud, it’s a series of automations that send a specific email communication or text message to the prospect based on certain criteria. Specific criteria determine whether the prospect should enter the journey and their actions while in the journey determine the path the automation takes and the customized interactions they will have with your company.

Leads: Leads are people who have expressed interest in your company but who we haven’t yet gathered enough information for to qualify as legitimate sales prospects.

Lead Source: How a lead wound up in your system. They could be direct from your website, or you meet them at a trade show, etc.

Marketing Automation: Using software to schedule and initiate personalized engagement at scale with clients or potential customers. The marketing automation platform can be used for mass communication, like sending an email newsletter, or for personalized one-on-one emails triggered based on prospect interaction.

Marketing Cloud: A Salesforce marketing automation platform that allows users to automate and monitor customer engagement. It is primarily used for B2C marketing communications.

Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (Pardot): A Salesforce marketing automation platform that allows you to automate and monitor customer engagement. It is primarily used for B2B marketing communications.

Marketing Operations: The function of overseeing marketing activities, technology, communications, campaign planning, and strategic planning for the organization. Generally, this team owns the marketing technology stack.

Objects: Objects are digital tables that allow you to store essential data and information in Salesforce. Salesforce comes equipped with some Standard Objects like Accounts, Contacts, Opportunities, and Leads, but it also gives you the option to create custom objects to reflect your individual organization’s needs better.

Opportunities: Categorization that allows you to track potential deals from first contact through completion. You can upload contracts and SOWs, make notes and track invoices within opportunities.

Revenue Operations: The function of overseeing revenue activities, technology, communications, and strategic planning. Generally, this team manages the sales and marketing technology stack.

Sales and Marketing Funnel: This visual representation maps the journey from lead/prospect to customer and what stage those prospects are currently in.

Sales Cloud: A cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) system that maintains sales, marketing, and customer support efforts. It allows companies to be more efficient in their sales and marketing efforts and brings transparency regarding company activities to the team.

Sales Operations: The function of overseeing sales activities, technology, communications, and strategic planning for the sales team. Generally, this team owns the sales technology stack.

Service Cloud: A cloud-based Salesforce product that allows an organization to offer service activities to its customers while providing the company with a 360-degree view of customer, service, and support activities.

Statement of Work: This document outlines the scope of work to be completed for a contract with a breakdown and description of each piece, the hours allotted for completion, and the project’s total cost.

Systems/Applications/Products (SAP) Form: This is a Marketing Cloud-specific form to submit information to set up a domain and reply mail management.

Trigger (Apex Trigger): A piece of Apex code that initiates actions when records are changed or created within Salesforce.

RevOps Acronyms

API: Application Program Interface

ARR: Annual Recurring Revenue

CPQ: Configure Price Quote

CRM: Customer Relationship Management

CQC: Certified Qualified Consultant

DML: Database Manipulation Language

KPI: Key Performance Indicators

MPH: Managed Package Hours

MSH: Managed Service Hours

SaaS: Software as a Service

SAP: Systems/Applications/Products

SEO: Search Engine Optimization

SFDC: Salesforce dot com

SFMC: Salesforce Marketing Cloud

SMB: Small and Medium Businesses

SOW: Statement of WorkRevOps

About Revenue Ops LLC

We are an experienced team of sales, marketing, and customer success professionals committed to helping clients maximize revenue. In a nutshell, we help organizations streamline workflows so they can make data-driven decisions. We apply our deep knowledge of CRM systems like Salesforce and sales enablement tools like Salesloft to optimize sales potential by stimulating and tracking customer interactions.

Learn how we can help you implement a strategy to improve revenue operations and maximize your growth.

CPQ for Manufacturing

Are you a manufacturing company whose quote generation process is painfully slow? Are your sales representatives generating quotes that are missing key product details or are priced incorrectly? Do all of the estimates generated by your sales team look different?

Every sales process is unique. Depending on the sector and product offering, getting to a closed deal will take different journeys. But one thing tends to be consistent, quote generation. Your prospective client needs physical evidence of the details of this relationship. And timeliness is not discretionary; clients expect it. In the manufacturing field, quickly creating a customized quote is a big hurdle – price book changes, discount approvals from a manager, client edits, etc. If this sounds too familiar, a Configure, Price, Quote, or CPQ solution may be just what you’re looking for.

In manufacturing, quotes can become quite complex as different products are needed to meet the clients’ specifications. Some items should be bundled or have specific options that can be selected, impacting the price. How can your sales reps remember all of those different options? Read on to learn how to speed up, streamline, and automate your sales workflows with CPQ for manufacturing.

What is CPQ?

Let’s start with the basics – CPQ is a sales software tool that enables teams to generate accurate quotes for orders quickly. This application usually runs in tandem with or is native to your customer relationship management (CRM) system, which facilitates a seamless transfer of all relevant information. Also, since it’s programmed ahead of time with your company’s rules and quoting policies, reps can effortlessly build accurate quotes in no time. So where before the sales team might make costly errors and spend valuable hours producing bids, a CPQ application solves this problem. Sounds pretty good, right?

A good CPQ program will also help generate consistent-looking quotes at the click of a button. For example, do you have collateral that must be attached to every offer your reps send? Then, you can automatically attach those assets to all relevant quotes from your sales agents. This automation ensures that you’re always sending the proper documents to your prospective customers.

Are you interested in reducing the time it takes to send a document for an electronic signature? And, when a document is signed, how is it uploaded to your CRM? Your CPQ instance can also integrate with many eSignature tools, and the integration can automatically upload documents to the appropriate CRM records. So your sales reps don’t have to spend time on those manual tasks.

Where does RevOps come in?

So you decided you’re interested in CPQ software, but what about implementation? CPQ implementations are generally complex, so you should bring in a Revenue Operations (RevOps) consultant like Revenue Ops LLC to lead the next phase. This team should not only have vast experience leading implementations but be able to equip your business with the skills to take advantage of a CPQ solution as soon as possible. When working with Revenue Ops LLC, excellent communication and trusted experience are two things you can count on. Our specialists will take care of all the technical setup and ensure you’re comfortable with the software.

Get Started

If you’re interested in streamlining and automating your sales process or would like to discuss CPQ for manufacturing, or any industry, we’re happy to help! Contact us today.

Your Revenue Operations Model Isn’t Your Sales Operations Model

Your Revenue Operations Model Isn't Your Sales Operations Model

It goes without saying that sales operations is valuable to business growth. A team whose sole goal is to increase the efficiency of your sales process should directly lead to an increase in revenue. But is simply focusing on this one department enough? Are you missing valuable components that affect the bottom line? Here is where the revenue operations model, or RevOps, comes into the picture. Since the explosion of RevOps in the last few years, we want to explain what it is and how it can help your company.

What is RevOps?

Revenue operations involves more than just your sales team. It’s consistently optimizing your sales, marketing, and customer success teams for growth. Think of it as the hub that aligns these important departments to drive full-funnel accountability and maximize revenue.

How Does RevOps Apply to my Business?

The RevOps model is so crucial because the business environment is rapidly changing. Departments must remove cross-functional silos to survive and thrive in this world. Information, ideas, and processes must flow among teams as seamlessly as possible. A good starting point for adopting a RevOps model is identifying disconnected systems and then brainstorming how to resolve them to create seamless and effective workflows.

RevOps Journey

We covered the basics, but the fun begins with optimization and growth. How you proceed with RevOps depends on your team’s pain points. For example, if you know that information doesn’t flow smoothly from one functional unit to another, that probably impedes revenue growth. Then, you can implement a few different strategic tactics to pave the path. Here are a few courses of action we might consider.

Salesforce Implementation

The Salesforce customer relationship management (CRM) is a robust platform that can transform your business by organizing your data and automating mundane tasks. First, however, you need to set it up properly. Then, a team of RevOps experts who have experience with advanced Salesforce features and utilities can help you get up and running quickly.

Marketing Automation

Improving lead quality will allow your sales team to do what it does best – close deals. Automating simple tasks like data collection improves accuracy and saves time. For example, you could integrate a web form to capture essential customer information instead of relying on the sales representative to record those details. And you could take it a step further by nurturing leads and contacts via segmentation and regular email distributions based on that contact data.

Customer Experience Redesign

Do your customers only reach out when they have a problem? If so, we should change that. A RevOps consultant can help you design and activate an education series that engages your clients to share feedback and keep them in the know.

Managed Services

These maneuvers are just the tip of the iceberg. Of course, other options are available depending on your requirements and objectives. So, it would help if you considered ongoing RevOps support. Fortunately, Revenue Operations LLC offers managed services arrangements whereby you can turn to us ad hoc for continued support and optimization. We can do everything from Salesforce administration to marketing content design.

Ready for the RevOps Model?

Hopefully, we’ve shed some light on the benefits and importance of the Revenue Operations model. The sales team is one of the groups directly responsible for maximizing revenue. Therefore, implementing a holistic approach provides efficient results.

Schedule some time to talk with us if anything has piqued your interest or if you have questions about how to implement these tactics into your business. We’re here to help!

Signs You Need a RevOps Team

Ben Doran, Revenue Operations Consultant

You know it when your company could use a boost. You don’t need a blog to tell you that. But deciding what to do next can be the tricky part. Here are a few examples of when a Revenue Operations (RevOps) consultant could be just what you need.

Missing Goals

The process of goal setting and achieving them could use some work.

Is your team struggling to hit critical benchmarks? Are the goals themselves too vague or not based on reality?

These are two essential questions that a RevOps team can help answer. First, assuming the company goals are achievable, it’s helpful to start mapping out all the departments and individuals who play a part in the process. Then, when that’s complete, a team of trained specialists can make procedural adjustments and technology recommendations that lead to desirable results. For example, the team might suggest a full-scale implementation of a sales enablement tool to boost lead conversion rates by 50%. Sounds good, right?

Finally, the second question about goal setting is more important than the process above. Smart, healthy, and challenging goals align a team and encourage extra effort. In addition, these benchmarks demand an accurate view of the current business environment and the technical know-how based on the company’s available data. Combined with an unbiased perspective, that can unlock a business’s ability to scale.

Salesforce Experience Gaps

Your custom relationship management (CRM) system is confusing, slow, and requires more work than it’s worth.

You spent a lot on Salesforce and have had big dreams since the beginning. The software was supposed to revolutionize how your sales team operated while ending the issue of losing essential data. Unfortunately, now it feels like you are stuck with a complicated system that isn’t meeting your expectations. If this resembles your current situation, utilizing an outside team of operation experts may be just what the doctor ordered.

Salesforce is a complex tool that can do some pretty impressive things, but it has to be adequately utilized. For example, you may need a series of flows that allow customers to be automatically onboarded. Or your Salesforce instance could use an integration with your marketing platform to maximize efficiency. All these examples and more are real possibilities that can change how you see your CRM.

Messy Data

Duplicates and other inaccurate data points are ruining everything!

Data is all the rage right now. It’s what the cool people are talking about for a good reason. It can shine a light on valuable insights and provide a clear direction for your business. But not all data is created equal. Duplicates and incorrect information can muddy the water causing real problems for reporting and analysis.

Messy data leads you to a dark place where you can’t trust your company’s metrics and aren’t sure what is actually going on! Working with experts to create a plan for how data enters your CRM and a monitoring system to ensure the info stays clean is beneficial. You’ll be glad you took our advice!

Download Infographic

Misaligned Teams

There is a disconnect between departments.

What do your sales, marketing, and customer success processes look like, and how are they intertwined? These two questions are not just something you glaze over once, but key stakeholders should establish clear lines of communication and evaluate their efficacy regularly. When a company is missing synergy between these departments and/or struggling with outdated procedures, the customers usually know, and internal frustration tends to be high. This lack of alignment can result in delays in customer onboarding, disconnections between marketing and sales efforts, an increase in churn, etc. The consequences are innumerable, so Revenue Ops LLC is here to help. Working with outside experts will allow your business to continue the day-to-day work while knowing improvement is happening. Plus, it provides a third-party voice of reason for situations when departments, i.e., customer success and sales, disagree.

RevOps boils down to optimizing your business for growth. It also presents an opportunity to recharge your team. The warning signs outlined above suggest there is room for improvement. If this applies to you or you have questions about how the Revenue Ops LLC team can help, schedule some time to talk with our experts.

Salesforce Best Practices

Salesforce Best Practices from Revenue Operations Professionals

Ben Doran, Revenue Operations Consultant

Having worked with Salesforce for several years, our team of revenue operations specialists has compiled a list of Salesforce best practices. We hope these simple but essential nuggets of wisdom will spare you unnecessary aggravation and set you up for automation and sales success.

Test and Retest

You may think that the simple “flow” you created is only going to affect an associated record, but are you sure? Salesforce instances are complex systems that weave together elements and applications. A well-thought-out change to the way something fires cannot only cause an unintended consequence but could cause delays in business activities or even trigger errant emails to customers. To avoid confusion, be sure to test your updates in a sandbox and within the current production environment upon launch.

Keep It Simple

Ideally, automation will take work off your plate, but if not implemented correctly, it can complicate workflows. Unfortunately, it’s more common than you’d think for teams desperately looking for efficiency to automate every step of a process and end up with a tangled web of error messages and internal questions. Instead of streamlining operations, you can end up in a messier place. Therefore, knowing the reason for the implementation and understanding how it will play out with other processes is helpful to consider before moving forward with a specific automation. By taking the time to map it out, you will be able to avoid business delays and likely have tangible insight into potential updates in the future.

Don’t Forget Data Quality

What are you doing about duplicates? How is data coming in and out of your platform? These fundamental questions need to be visited throughout the Salesforce ride. Having clean data means the reports you rely on are accurate and reliable. It lets your team pick up on trends and make accurate forecasts. So instead of blindly making decisions or depending on a feeling about your company’s health, you can be confident. That all starts with your data, so make sure everything adds up.

Designate a Salesforce Guru

Your Salesforce instance is not expected to be a set-it-and-forget-it application. Your system will undoubtedly require updates, user activation, and minor tweaks here and there. In addition, ongoing training and support for your internal team will go a long way in ensuring user adoption and acceptance. Therefore, we strongly recommend that an individual is selected to be responsible for all things Salesforce. This person should be able to maneuver throughout your implementation comfortably. They should also be aware of the bottlenecks in your operations. Ideally, your guru is familiar with flows, a valuable tool for automating elaborate workflows. If you plan to have more than fifty users and/or expect to integrate with other applications, consider working with a certified Salesforce administrator. The manager can be an internal or external resource, like Revenue Ops LLC.

Know Your Emergency Contact

Who are you going to call if your Salesforce implementation experiences functional issues? What happens when everything stops working? Not to be overly dramatic, but it’s valuable to know who to call when everything hits the fan. This contact is usually beyond the Salesforce admin. They likely have an extensive technical background and are intimately familiar with your specific instance. It may be the team that first implemented everything or a Salesforce developer you trust. Having someone available in a time of need is beneficial for your business.

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Adopting these Salesforce best practices may seem overboard, but it can mean the difference between success and failure. Salesforce is an excellent growth tool, but we must use it correctly.

Revenue Ops LLC offers a variety of services, from full-scale Salesforce implementations to on-call support in times of trouble. Let’s schedule some time to talk if you have questions or want to learn more about what we do.

Lead Quality

What are you doing about lead quality?

Lead quality is an essential factor in your sales and marketing initiatives. High-quality leads are most likely familiar with your products or services and therefore are likely to convert to customers.

It’s time to prepare for 2023. To ensure that your sales team is set up for success, we need to fill the pipeline with high-quality leads. What is the best way to do this?

So, you can increase your effectiveness and push more leads to close by:

Improving lead quality
Optimizing the sales and marketing funnels
Tracking important KPIs
Knowing your tools
Staying in touch with your prospects.

Driving quality traffic to your website starts with knowing who your customers are and what motivates them. Yet, sometimes our customers are not who we think they are. We might learn new or unusual things about our potential customers when we analyze web traffic behavior, online and offline inquiries, blog engagement, etc.

Making data-driven decisions involves applying what we learn from our data and optimizing opportunities. For example, if particular lead magnets convert prospects quickly or generate more revenue than others, we should focus on those assets. Or, if we notice a pattern of users leaving the website on a specific page or at a certain point on a form, we should look into the issue. Something may be broken on the page, or if any of the form fields require sensitive information, that might make users pause.

Revenue Ops LLC is here to help you maximize your revenue. Our team of experts can help you analyze your current tech landscape, build an ideal system to align your sales, marketing, and customer service teams, and then train them on how to use it efficiently. Contact us today to schedule a discovery call to set your team up for success in 2023!