4 min readAs markets become more competitive, it is becoming harder to recruit and keep sales professionals, resulting in constant workforce fluctuation. Growing investments in training and onboarding of new salespeople, and the associated challenges with scaling and automating these processes are just a tip of the iceberg. Therefore, having an efficient onboarding program armed with a powerful sales stack becomes imperative, helping companies minimize employee turnover rates in the commercial team, and drive sales.
As a trusted market leader, Salesforce provides all the necessary tools which, when properly implemented, help companies streamline onboarding processes and bring new sales professionals up to speed. Let’s consider some common cases where Salesforce technology can help with the onboarding process:
Address communication and knowledge access issues
Newly hired sales professionals often experience difficulties with sharing, accessing, and analyzing large amounts of unstructured and unverified information. This ultimately affects their performance and slows down the entire onboarding procedure as more time is spent on ad-hoc tasks rather than focusing on prospects or closing deals.
Salesforce enables companies to build a single destination for all sales professionals where they can centralize resources and access essential data. To provide better visibility into this process and target more specific audiences, Salesforce recommends using Chatter, a flexible and easy-to-use enterprise collaboration tool. With the help of Chatter, sales professionals can create dedicated groups to connect and securely share related materials and knowledge — all in real-time. Regardless of location, sales professionals can easily track critical updates, collaborate on sales opportunities and campaigns, and ultimately, close more deals.
Eliminate poor understanding and facilitation of processes
Ensuring your newly-hired sales professionals have access to essential data and communication channels is a great start. However, meeting the required conditions and successfully closing deals during the adaptation period can become a real challenge without proper process understanding and automation.
With Salesforce, sales professionals have access to the best practices and automation tools to guide them through complexities. With the help of the Salesforce Path feature, sales professionals can learn the correct steps required throughout a sales cycle, access the validation rules, and receive policy reminders to keep the sales process moving. By following these simple steps, sales professionals minimize errors at each stage of the sales lifecycle, from qualifying a lead to successfully closing the deal, and gain better process control.
When it comes to a higher level of complexity and product configuration, new sales professionals often experience difficulties in producing accurate and timely pricing. They get overwhelmed by the myriad of product catalogs, configuration settings, and bundling options.
In this scenario, Salesforce CPQ can help the sales team easily generate error-free quotes, streamline cross-sell and upsell processes, and boost overall productivity. This sophisticated and easy to use quoting tool can accommodate most pricing use cases, thanks to the advanced rules engine, visual product configuration, automated quoting, and guided selling features. Combined with the AI-powered tool Einstein, CPQ can help to improve your team’s sales productivity even more.
Bring clarity to unclear expectations and lack of mentoring
Another common onboarding issue is a lack of transparency between new sales professionals and their managers on mutual team expectations. Clear communication at each milestone and a complete visibility of the progress of new sales professionals are fundamental so that correct training and development can be provided in order for them to succeed.
Salesforce allows managers to have the use of field history tracking, reports, and dashboards to gain better visibility of new employees, analyze their performance, and track changes made to each opportunity. Managers can identify areas requiring involvement (e.g. postponed close dates) and provide extra guidance where needed. Moreover, managers can identify negative tendencies and take the necessary corrective actions to streamline the entire sales cycle process.
Afterword
By introducing these Salesforce features, companies can accelerate the onboarding process and ensure each new sales employee has direct access to the relevant knowledge, materials, and the automation tools to focus on closing deals.
Unsure where to begin? Let our experienced advisors help you overcome onboarding challenges and prepare your business for success.
As a trusted Salesforce implementation partner, SoftServe helps clients determine the right mix of products and features to realize their business transformation and automation. Our Salesforce Excellence Center provides expert guidance and implementation support for various business needs – from process evaluation and re-engineering, to new solution implementation, enhancement, and systems integration.