Salesforce can give companies and their sales teams serious competitive advantage, streamlining how they qualify leads and automating sales processes. Without the help of a pro, however, many companies struggle to use the platform to its full advantage.
Skilled Salesforce consultants can step in and help clients overcome limitations and unlock the CRM’s true potential, enhancing Salesforce’s out-of-the-box functionality.
From building custom apps to day-to-day maintenance, a Salesforce consultant can learn how your organization leverages the platform, then determine what upgrades and customizations can help you to be more productive across the board. Central to their role? Problem-solving and troubleshooting—and hearing out the unique challenges teams face and coming up with creative solutions to overcome them.
Here are 12 ways a consultant can help upgrade and manage your Salesforce integrations.
1. Migrating to Salesforce from other CRM platforms
Whether you’re setting up a CRM for the first time or migrating your data from an outdated, Excel-based system, getting up and running is a complex process that requires the help of a pro. For clients new to Salesforce, a consultant with the right expertise can fully orchestrate your migration from start to finish—something third-party integration partners can quote up to a six-figure fee to complete.
2. Customizing dashboards
To get exactly what you need from a Salesforce implementation, you have to customize your dashboard. The best customizations happen once an expert understands how the sales team is (or isn’t) using the platform. What are common frustrations or perceived limitations? Once a consultant understands pain points, they can customize the system to be more useful and user-friendly.
Note: Creating dashboards in Salesforce may be quite involved and require custom fields to accommodate the specific calculations and tools your team needs to qualify leads and close deals.
3. Periodically organizing data from sales reps
Some companies end up abandoning their Salesforce integrations when their data gets disorganized and unmanageable—something that can easily happen when numerous sales reps are logging in and entering records daily without consistency. It can be hard to enforce complete, consistent entries retroactively, so Salesforce consultants are able to periodically go in and audit records for a cleaner overall dataset.
4. Creating wizards for consistency and automation
To help head off some of that inconsistency, Salesforce pros can create custom wizards that guide reps through entries with simple fields and values. Because various reps may enter information from a sales call differently, certain processes can be created to keep values more uniform. Wizards can help to streamline the Salesforce quoting process, which typically requires multiple steps and isn’t always wired to guarantee consistency.
5. Tailoring reports
Reports are the best way to dig into your data, but out-of-the-box reports may not always deliver the insights you need. Good reports should always answer key questions for the people reading them—and a little polish and formatting never hurts. For example, a CEO might want a report to help with the annual plan, while an account exec might need a report to help plan the day’s calls. To do this, a consultant may create custom reports with calculations and values relevant to their roles.
6. Replacing outdated, manual Excel-based processes
Part of getting the most out of Salesforce entails leveraging the automation and tools that can replace the tedious processes of the past. The balanced business plan (BBP) tool within Salesforce can streamline prospecting processes a client may be manually handling. To build this highly intricate tool, which provides exponential value for the account planning and strategy teams, Salesforce developers will use Apex triggers, Salesforce’s Process Builder, and custom Visualforce pages. What used to be a largely Excel-based manual process can now be interactive with live Salesforce data.
7. Developing customized tools with enhanced functionality
Like many other cloud-based platforms, Salesforce offers customizations that take integrations to the next level. However, some of the really good apps can get expensive with monthly fees.
For example, say you need custom MEDDPICC qualification tools. An independent consultant can build a custom app solution without the costly monthly fees—for example, a dashboard that averages MEDDPICC’s color-coded system so that reps can visualize sales processes and gauge an opportunity’s potential at a glance.
8. Automating business processes
When it comes to automating key business processes, the Process Builder allows consultants to create processes that are automatically triggered by certain actions, saving everyone lots of time. For example, any time an account address is updated, a process can automate that update across all of that account’s contacts.
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9. Creating better ways for sales reps to collaborate
Using custom checklists and Chatter groups, Salesforce consultants can create collaboration checklists that allow reps in different territories to collaborate and see how each other is performing. A unified and targeted custom org chart can provide a global strategic picture for large accounts. Or, encourage transparency and competition among sales reps through gamification. Leaderboards can pull key metrics from the CRM and display them on a big screen in the middle of the office to show how each team member is doing and help reps set goals for their own performance. Leaderboards can be created using custom formulas and the Lightning Dashboard builder.
10. Integrating data with third-party systems
Harnessing valuable data is where the real strength of Salesforce lies, and many businesses miss out on huge opportunities to get more out of Salesforce data. Whether it’s for internal use or customer-facing, a Salesforce consultant can handle the programming you need to integrate with external data on demand or in real time. Popular third-party integrations can include Marketo, Hoopla, and Google 360, among other major platforms.
11. Upgrading to Lightning
Clients can stay compatible with Salesforce’s latest features by upgrading them to the more-advanced Lightning platform, with benefits like increased productivity and newer functionality. A developer can help switch your platform from Salesforce Classic to Lightning by retooling existing custom features and replacing outdated apps with new, Lightning-compatible responsive apps.
12. Branding Community Cloud integrations
Salesforce’s self-service support forum and collaboration hub, Community Cloud can dramatically reduce how many support tickets are filed. These communities are great ways to give your customers and partners access to key slices of your CRM data. But to make communities a seamless part of your existing online experience, you need a developer’s help to brand them and create customized layouts.
These are just a handful of ways Salesforce consultants can help improve CRM implementations. Knowing the platform inside and out enables an outside pro to creatively address nearly any challenge or requirement you have.