What if you could amp up your sales process in two weeks and take it from 5-star to 6-star? When you combine your CRM with a Sales Engagement Platform (SEP), be ready for greatness.
We know that Salesforce is the market leader when it comes to CRM, and the recent article in Forbes supports this. With so many companies invested in them, their ever-present challenge is to innovate in ways that add value to the end user. People that use Salesforce CRM as part of their daily habit are looking for ways to improve their sales process and daily workflow.
Marc Benioff, Salesforce CEO, said: “in each and every case, [our customers are] working to understand and have a 360-degree view of their customer.”
How to use DealHub to get a better understanding of their end-customers in Salesforce is the challenge that many of our customers asked us to solve.
Understanding Your Current Salesforce CRM Limitations
It is crucial that your CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software gives you a clear understanding of your customer. Specifically:
- Who they are
- What they buy
- Why they buy it
When selling to other businesses, you will also need to know who is responsible for decision-making and which stakeholders will have an input in that decision. Best practice in many discovery conversations is to ask what their ‘buying process is’ so you can understand not only ‘who’ but also ‘how.’ There is more to know about understanding your customer needs that we often push to the side.
Salesforce as a CRM does an excellent job of logging and measuring the milestones in a Sales Process and allowing you to drill down from the total pipeline to individual Opportunities and Contacts. At a contact level you can see their activity history, but no rich insight into how they have experienced your communication touch points.
Recognizing Your Growth Opportunity
Sales Engagement Platform (SEP) is a new categorization of sales technology. The underlying aim is to measure buyer engagement throughout their journey. As each stage progresses closer to ‘closed won’ the value of that engagement becomes higher. You could also say that the value of the engagement insight becomes more valuable too. You can derive buyer knowledge from the content you have sent and how it has been received.
Strong buyer engagement is a by-product of personalizing your messaging and including relevant content that elevates their thinking. Essentially your Sales Process will now follow this flow:
Not only will your process be more efficient, but it will also be more successful – DealHub’s customers see up to 27% increase in win-rate over the industry competitors. This is because a purpose-built Sales Engagement Platform will always be more effective than silo software solutions that usually don’t speak to each other.
DealHub’s bi-directional integration with Salesforce means that the two systems are instantly able to enrich field information.
Knowing When to Optimize Your Sales Process
Most Sales Operations teams swing from one extreme to the other and fail to see the ‘right’ signals or create a purpose-built process. They start by responding to internal pains and complaints. When they become frequent or costly enough, they make a purchase and add it to their stack.
I can empathize with the reality that it’s difficult to know all the new sales technologies that are out there, as they are increasing at a rapid rate. So, thought-leaders and peer review sites help to a certain degree.
But, what you will see this year is an acquisition trend towards unification.
- Conga acquires Octiv – March 2018
- Seismic acquires Savo – May 2018
- Docusign acquires SpringCM – July 2018
These are pieces of the puzzle being added together, but what they are not is a purpose-built, end-to-end unification of the Deal stages. Only DealHub delivers this unique value!
By optimizing your sales technology stack into one complete Platform approach, you will achieve the following:
- Create a real-time view of each buyer
- Avoid an information silo
- Avoid duplication of spend
- Avoid duplication of effort – the cumbersome task of managing multiple systems and processes
- Get the technology working for you! (not the other way around)
- Build a process that is robust when scaling, and detailed enough to give you ongoing insight
Salesforce and Dealhub: Bridging the Gap
It’s not only us at DealHub that are saying it’s mission critical for you to intimately know your customer; Marc Benioff also supports our value statement for Salesforce users when he says, “…integration is mission-critical for our customers to gain that 360-degree view of their customer.”
The reason that Salesforce has a such a large AppExchange is the fact that they recognize both their core competency and their limitations.
DealHub is here to bridge the gap, complete the view of your customer, and give you a seamless platform experience within your sales process. The cost of not adopting this Platform approach is that you will become less competitive in the deal process at an increasing rate.
If any of these insights stood out for you, I’d love to hear from you. We’re here to help, so share your thoughts, learn from our industry experience, and hit your quotas.
Meet the author: Gideon Thomas on LinkedIn