Salesforce Certified Sales Cloud Consultant – Industry Knowledge

1. Factors that influence sales metrics, KPIs, and business challenges.

Now, before we begin, let me tell you that the course covers a lot of theoretical topics as well, like sales metrics, implementation strategies, and various other best practises that are followed around the world by the Sales Cloud consultants. And these are very theoretical topics, and you might find yourself exhausted by all of this theoretical bombardment. But all of these topics and all of this knowledge are very, very useful for any sales cloud consultant, both in terms of the job profile and in terms of examination guidelines as well.

So make sure that you pay thorough attention to all of these theoretical topics, as these are the standards that are followed and that are expected to be known by all the sales cloud consultants. So let’s start with the factors that influence sales metrics, KPIs, and business challenges. Now, as a consultant, you are required to present to your client and your end users the best practises that are followed in the salesforce, like the best metrics and dashboards, or the reports that should be followed, created, or looked at by the users and the management to get the most out of the salesforce. Now, for example, there are many dashboards and reports that can give you real-time insights into the activities of the field sales team.

If you’re a salesforce administrator, you’re aware that activities can play a significant role in analyzing your data and the engagement that your sales team has with your clients. For example, just by looking at a dashboard, you’ll be able to see how many times your sales representatives have spoken to customers, what the outcomes of those conversations were, and how that helped you get business from these clients. Then all this data will allow you to customise and manage each member of your sales team to maximise productivity, as every individual comes with their own characteristics. And you will be able to find out which role suits which individual the best.

There are other metrics and dashboards as well, which enable you to track and summarise large sets of data in a useful way. For example, you can use a whole opportunity data dump. So opportunity is basically an object in your salesforce that tracks your sales data. And a large number of opportunities can give you loads of insight. For example, it can show you the pipeline and funnel quality of your sales data. Now, what is it that motivates your sales reps the most? Now, usually, sales representatives are motivated by hitting targets. So every sales rep has an individual target, and that’s what basically drives them to do sales. Aside from the number of opportunities won, there are other metrics that can help you determine a sales representative’s overall performance. For example, how much cash collection has been done by the sales rep? What is the margin of profitability that your individual sales reps are contributing to the company as?

It’s very important to just focus on achieving your targets. It’s very important to really break it down to what a salesperson can control on a day-to-day basis. An accurate and real-time metric can be used to creatively motivate and track the individual activities of a sales team. For example, how long it takes a sales representative to sell a specific product to a client based on their location. All of these metrics can give you loads of information for your future planning as well. To increase sales, the marketing team needs to team up. As marketing Data delivers a huge amount of insight, which can be used to identify the demand that your industry has and enable your sales team to focus on those prospects that will deliver the best results. Marketing insights will assist you in determining the market gap, and as a sales representative, you will be able to pitch a product to a client that will assist them in filling that gap. So this is a question for you: what types of metrics should sales leaders measure? But often they don’t. Now, we talked about the opportunity data and the client engagement, but what other important metrics should we look at in terms of sales?

So taking a look at the lost customers and lost opportunities and understanding why those customers are leaving us is very important, as it will give you an idea of what you are doing wrong and at what point in time they are leaving. For example, in a sales opportunity with multiple sales stages, you can simply look at the number of deals lost from which sales stage to get an idea of which sales stage your organisation should focus on and strengthen. Analyzing sales trends is very important, as it will give you an idea of what trends you are experiencing and, coupled with other matrixes like winning and losing trends over a particular location, a country, or a particular product as well, will give you loads of insights. You can then plan accordingly for your future targets. Now, there are some opportunities where we don’t get a definitive yes or no from a client, and these opportunities, these sales, then become dormant in your salesforce.org.

Now, it’s very important for a sales team to gather the missing knowledge here to close these deals, and you can measure these dormant opportunities by simply using the age of an opportunity, and you’ll be able to see what kinds of deals and what customers are usually making your opportunities dormant. Now, these are some of the essential dashboards that most sales organisations use, which are pretty standard and will give you almost all the kind of data that you would need. For instance, opportunities, pipelines, and dashboards. This will now give you access to data that is not yet closed but will be in the future. So you’ll be able to see how much business can be expected out of these opportunities. Then we have the marketing dashboard, which measures the campaign effectiveness, return on investment, and lead generation. So a simple dashboard on leads and campaigns can help you achieve that. Then we have customer support reports and dashboards where we can create a report on a case object to see how many cases are being closed per day, per week, or monthly activity conversion rates.

The dashboard is very useful once again, as you can see how many times a sales representative has scheduled a meeting before winning or creating an opportunity. This can be a benchmark for your organisation as to how many activities it usually takes for your sales reps to close an opportunity. As I previously stated, the sales trends graph can be very useful because it allows you to see trends in your opportunity data as well as in the behaviour of your customers. Key deal pipeline: these are the opportunity deals that are very large in size and very strategically important for your organization, and keeping track of these deals separately is not a bad idea at all. Then we have the deal velocity, which tells us how much business is closing day by day versus last month and the month before. So basically, a month-on-month comparison of your sales data Then we have historical trends, which are the same but more generalized, where you can see all of your data in salesforce.org, be it on opportunities or on cases. You can see all of these in our historical reports.

2. KPI’s to Use

Now let’s talk about some of the most commonly used key performance indicators. That is a set of KPIs that you can use and track for your sales reps. So key performance indicators such as lead response time, rate of contact, sales follow-up, email, social media usage, marketing collateral, and opportunity to win ratio are some of the most commonly used KPIs that the organisers use across the globe to measure the success of your sales reps and the company’s performance and engagement with the customers. So, for example, lead response times are really important metrics that you can track with salesforce, because when it comes to lead response speed, it is essential to increasing the winning probability of your opportunities coming from the lead.

Because, as the data suggests, a lead response time is critical because no potential customer wants to be left hanging after expressing interest in your product or service. And basically, there is no substitute for a personal phone call by an actual sales representative. And to measure this, you’ll need to track inbound and outbound phone calls within your salesforce and look at how quickly your team on average responds. With a few exceptions, try to ensure that your sales team responds within 1 hour. So lead response time is very crucial for your sales team because less lead response time will result in higher sales. The second is the rate of contact. So basically every good sales manager or sales rep wants to make sure that outbound call volume is very high because, as a sales manager, you hope to look at every lead record that has been worked over time and see that multiple leads and calls have been logged against it. So these data and metrics can assist you in gathering the information you require to determine the rate of contact and the level of engagement for your existing customers.

Also, the sales follow-up email is very effective because reps try to bring something to the conversation that will reinterest and reengage the customers, which often requires links to content or some product description or anything that can be later viewed by the customer at his own convenience. So an email’s content can be a promotion, a new price, any new information, or any discount that’s been going on for some products, which can really help you switch or sell to your existing or new accounts.

So social media usage is, needless to say, one of the most important key performance indicators because every sales rep likes to use LinkedIn and because there is a direct correlation between reps who are social media enthusiasts and revenue as a direct result of the channel because many salespeople gather their leads and opportunities from LinkedIn itself. As a result, it is critical that your sales representatives continuously gather information and data from LinkedIn or other social media websites. Also, the right marketing content that you can provide to your customers is very important because a very good picture or wallpaper or very nicely wrapped information about your product or any discount sent to your customers can be a great way to engage the conversation for any new opportunity or lead. Then we have the opportunity-to-win ratio, which is basically the number of wins your sales reps get after getting prospects to the opportunity stage.

This is an incredibly important metric because you may have sales reps on your team who are great at networking but not so great at closing deals. So if that is the case, then you need to help them either get better or move them into a different role or assign them a different account so that they can open new doors for your business.

So that’s why managing and tracking these KPIs is very important for each and every organization, because it helps them get really close to the actual process that’s been going on in the organization, which might be very difficult. To follow up because there are a number of sales representatives in each organisation, following them to every meeting and on every call and keeping an eye on the data and their activities is really a lot of hassle and might not yield you the best results. But having this data in your system and a way to visualise it into a dashboard or a meaningful report can really help you gather all the information that you need and all the processes—all the really important KPIs—you can track down with it.