Tag: Salesforce

3 Ways John used Salesforce Partner DemandFarm to Grow his Key Accounts

If you are managing Strategic Accounts using Salesforce within any sales organization, this one is for you! Salesforce partner DemandFarm’s data-driven and scalable practices helps you increase revenue from your key accounts. Sales teams now get support in terms of insights, best practices, and timely nudges. This has helped them experience a boost of at least 20% in their productivity with focus on the key aspects of account growth. If you are highly reliant on sales data being in spreadsheets and presentations, unable to coordinate between global teams, and are missing trends in the B2B buying processes, then the Account Planner is your go-to fix. DemandFarm’s Account Planner can help you: Enhance digital account management practices Get an instant, real-time view of your progress Use contextual insights to rapidly grow your accounts Download this E-book to learn how DemandFarm can enable you with Actionable Sales Insights to transform your digital selling today!

Build Strategic Account Plans in Salesforce with DemandFarm

What is Strategic Account Planning in Salesforce? Strategic accounts are the lifeline of every organization which brings substantial profit through repeat business for several years. Strategic account planning is the process of building robust plans to offer proactive management for these strategic accounts to help them in achieving business goals. In this blog, you will also understand the importance of Account Planning within your Salesforce CRM. 56.5% of Organizations don’t take advantage of account planning tools to grow their strategic accounts. Though Account planning takes much effort and time, organizations can benefit from addressing the level of complexity and competition which is increasingly common in sales today. Above all, a good key account planning strategy will invariably lead to great account plans for all strategic accounts. Hence, Effective key account management must be an ongoing process and not just a one-year event which can reduce the complexity and save time. Key Benefits of Strategic Account Planning Better Win rate (75%) Increased understanding of customers’ business (72%) Shorter sales cycles (58%) Better customer loyalty (55%) Increased deal size (49%) Better executive access (47%) Identify non-competitive deals (27%) Case Study: Healthcare Industry Company Boosts Strategic Account Revenue by 30% Account Planning in Salesforce ‘Account Planning is more strategic than tactical’ Over the decades the account planning process has become stale and ineffective. There are two primary reasons Firstly, account planning methodologies have become too complex and theoretical. Most importantly, the account planning templates thrust down to the account managers are just a checkbox item filled once before the year and forgotten. It’s not that Account Planning is only tactical. Perhaps it’s more strategic now. Moreover, the strategy is in thinking of a better solution for the customer that they haven’t thought about. Earlier the strategy was supplying to the customer’s defined strategy. So how do we solve this? You can solve this by enabling Account planning in Salesforce CRM. Salesforce is one of the most popular customer relationship management tools in the world. It helps the sales team to automate their daily tasks and provides them with valuable insights into customers. Sales Account Planning is one of the most important sales tasks that is mostly executed outside of CRM. The complexity increases, because there are a lot of third-party integrations necessary. To optimize this, the sales team must be empowered with key account management software to execute account planning inside the CRM.   What is the Process of Account Planning in Salesforce? The components of the strategic account planning process could be: There is a lot of user-created data that already exist in Salesforce – Contacts, Opportunities … Salesforce has plenty of tools to pull intelligence around accounts, contacts from social networks, and the internet. Also pull in data from other relevant systems – outlook/google calendar, CPQ, etc. These sources already have built connectors to Salesforce. That provides account teams with a deeper understanding of their account – landscape, whitespaces, and financials. Configure simpler Salesforce Account Planning templates Check out DemandFarm’s Key Account Management & Salesforce Native Account Planning Software on Salesforce Appexchange What does Salesforce Account Planning look like? Account teams have visual maps of their accounts in terms of landscape (products versus buying centers), a Salesforce Org chart with a heat map, and financials including existing deals, active opportunities, and forecasts. Armed with this data and insights build account plans easily inside Salesforce. You can track and review your accounts live with Salesforce account planning. Collaborate with all stakeholders across your organization to drive growth. 6 Reasons why you should opt for 100% native Salesforce app for your account planning: Simpler to use: 100% Native Salesforce Apps are always simpler to use leading to quick training & onboarding cycle & high adoption rates Real-time analysis: All of your data is updated in real-time and is always 100% accurate and 100% up-to-date Secure: Native apps comply to all the organizational security settings established within your Salesforce Data Protection: No security risk since data never goes outside your Salesforce CRM Lightning Fast: 100% native app also means that your reports will run faster and save you time Skip Sync Issues:  No syncing issues like that can make you lose valuable data or create inconsistencies While making account plans in Salesforce always ask for account management tools that are 100% native to Salesforce. Essential Features of Account Planning Software within Salesforce 1. Data Analysis and Tracking Keeping track of your Sales Account Plan is the key to effective account planning. A good Key Account Management software will allow you to create plans with milestones and timelines. It should also help you check your progress against your goals and provide you with timely alerts so that you can make proactive changes. A visual pipeline with the different deal stages and with each stage divided into tasks is ideal. It’s also important to have industry analysis tools that keep you informed on industry trends and market forces. Similarly, customer relationship analysis is a must-have in any strategic account planning template software as it’s the key to understanding the customer. Customer strategy maps (to assess your customer’s short-term and long-term strategy), stakeholder assessments, and competitor assessments are all essential tracking tools that should be a part of your KAM software. 2. Visualization to Represent Key Analyses Given the variety and complexity of stakeholders that need to be tracked and analyzed, information overload is a real possibility. Given that the human brain is much more receptive to visual data, your strategic account software should enable the visual representation of complex data. This will help managers make faster strategic decisions. A bird’s eye view of strategic account management helps to identify opportunities and quickly present value-added solutions to the client. 3. Data Consolidation Without strategic account software, most of your data will likely be all over the place in different formats, from Word docs to PPTs to spreadsheets. It’s important to have consolidated on one platform so that everyone can access data in a consistent format and be

Alleviating Key Account Management pain with Salesforce

Alleviating Key Account Management pain with Salesforce How do you feel this time of the year with Yuletide and the New Year’s around the corner? “Mixed emotions.” If you are a Key Account Manager, I can perhaps understand your answer. It isn’t so much about the pressure of time than the complexity of doing key account management in perfect detail. DemandFarm, in its many posts, has dealt with the issue of complexity in key account management. Here is a short recap. The complexity stems from two broad factors: Strategic – Key account managers confront the tough job of thinking clearly and unambiguously on two business fronts. One, about the client’s business challenges or growth opportunities. Two, understanding one’s product and service offerings, to offer a credible solution to the client. Operational – On top of the strategic ambiguity, there is a long list of operational hassles account managers have to deal with. Account plans siloed across systems – many powerpoints, word documents, meeting minutes and emails. Ineffective activity management thanks to multiple excel sessions which becomes unwieldy quickly. Managing meetings with stakeholders both internal and external. Plus the added trouble of managing CRM applications across many devices. To address the above challenges and the complexity associated with it, businesses the world overturned to CRM applications, particularly Salesforce. For businesses, it was to instill a new way of working on Leads, Contacts, and Accounts. Well, almost !!! Everybody loves Salesforce The world’s favorite CRM should not sound like an exaggeration when it comes to Salesforce. “Salesforce is to businesses what the iPhone is to consumers,” said someone. This statement may sound too casual, but reflects the inherent power of the Salesforce.com CRM system. The latest Salesforce study from Bluewolf – an IBM global Salesforce consulting agency – is a strong testimony to the power of this CRM system. 86% of the surveyed 1800 Salesforce customers believe they can use Salesforce to drive innovation in their business. The survey goes on to highlight that 83% of the IT function believe the same. It is indeed noteworthy that Salesforce has been able to get vehement buy-in from one of the most challenging user segments, in this change management exercise. Such is the power of Salesforce. Salesforce faces challenges, nevertheless. The single biggest risk to a Salesforce implementation remains – Change Management. Because it is a new way of doing sales, business development, customer experience. Yes, it is about changing the culture, capturing data, maintaining activity logs, getting rid of spreadsheets, putting rigor into doing and documenting sales meetings. Yes, it is not easy. Organizations and teams who look beyond the ease, find the rewards. Salesforce Key Account Management Fundamentally, Salesforce isn’t built for Key Account Management. It is built for opportunity management. It keeps sales teams focused on what needs to be achieved. It does by providing them with a ready-to-access dashboard that documents every day how sales teams are going about their planned goals. Given the structural difference in how Salesforce is built, it does not ‘naturally’ address the necessities of key account management. Account management and sales leaders address this gap, through Salesforce customization requests and applications from the Salesforce App Exchange. A good bunch also learns to live with the inherent account management limitations of Salesforce. In most cases, DemandFarm finds that account management is done outside of Salesforce. Dgt27, a Salesforce consultant in NYC, assists businesses in doing account planning. These account plans reside in distributed documents – PowerPoint, Excel, notes, and Word documents. We are yet to fully understand why? If you are an account management professional and see this happen in your organization, I request you to document your perspective in the comments section. So how do strategic account management teams address limitations with Salesforce? 1) Strategic One – View of Key Accounts ‍This is a fundamental issue faced by many strategic account managers. The Salesforce system’s inability to present a single view of the overall account plan. Not all the reasons are directly related to Salesforce. Scattered & Siloed Data – During the planning process, account plans tend to get distributed. Multiple versions of the same file tend to exist, creating confusion and wasting precious key account manager time. Non-standard approach – Many variations exist in account plans thanks to the lack of a standard approach in capturing data and checking its quality. Account Planning outside Salesforce – It is ironical but true. All accounts data and information are within Salesforce, but all the planning actions happen outside of it. In many cases, the carefully drafted plans also remain outside of salesforce, thus unable to impact the accounts to the maximum. KAMs lack a central view of account plans. This compromises insights. Thus, resulting in improper forecasting and inefficient allocation of resources for maximum impact. Account structuring also takes a knock because of this issue causing ineffective account management initiatives. 2) Usability ‍User experience is an important driver to usage and adoption. A lack of ease of use is a deal-killer. It is not an issue that is discussed too often in the context of key account management. It is not difficult to figure out why this is important. Just look around. Every human on the earth is using cutting-edge web and mobile apps on the latest smartphones. Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Amazon shopping, LinkedIn and the list is endless. So, how would their expectations be about using digital applications? As good as it gets, right? Usability of Salesforce account planning is not cutting-edge, yet. Salesforce Lightning has been a welcome surprise, but there is more ground to be covered. The platform nature of Salesforce also contributes to ‘wanting’ usability. IT Teams and CIOs love Salesforce since its ‘platform’ nature allows them to make, break, make, break and remake. This customization flexibility comes at the cost of UI and UX, not something that IT teams prioritize during their development stages. The result is usually a compromise for the user. In this case, the key account managers. 3)