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CRM Helps Leaders Get Buy In

CRM Helps Leaders Get Buy In

CRM, WhiteRock Value

 

CRM And Teamwork – How Teams Buy-In to Your Business Model?

 

I believe when the members or an organization have completely bought into the vision and mission of the organization.  That means that employees, customers, prospective new customers, board members, vendors, and all the families related to these key roles of any organization have a stake and claim to delivering the vision and mission.  Thus, even small companies can unify around quite a few people to succeed.

Let me share my three critical ingredients to achieving buy-in from everybody involved.

1. Alignment

To me, this means moving the conversations with your team from what they are doing and how they will do it to why they are doing what they do. What’s the difference maker here?

For me, it begins the journey of thinking about the vision and mission from other viewpoints.  Thinking about the White Rock mission not just from my view, the leader, but from those on our team, their families, our vendor support, our customers, and more.  When we start looking at why we do what we do from the eyes of others, we are better at the doing because we deliver empathetically.  This drives authentic behaviors that drive great feelings from within.  Thus, enthusiasm grows from within all and is shared.

2. Clarity

This is the hard part too. For your mission and vision to be clear it needs to have these qualities in the DNA:

    • It must be believable – everyone must see this as possible
    • It must be fully inclusive – everyone must see how vital they are
    • It must be reinforced – everyone must know where to go to see the vision and mission actions
    • It must be transparent – everyone must have access to where the vision and mission are taking place
    • It must be practical – everyone must see the vision and mission as healthy to all involved
    • It must be people-centric – everyone must know that the vision and mission are larger than any one person but smaller than the team – give them the confidence to achieve
    • It must have purpose – if I don’t live it why would I expect those on my team to live it; be exemplary
    • It must be visible – I’ll end this article on how to do this – keep on reading

3. Challenge

Challenge yourself as the leader and let your team challenge you too. Challenge them in the same healthy manner.

So, back to 2.  There is no better system where the vision and mission should live than your CRM system.  This is where your stakeholders are anyway.  So, make your CRM demonstrate the vision and mission.  If you follow the principles that I have developed over the last 15 years around what constitutes a great CRM system, strategy, and policy, then having a place like your CRM for your team to witness the accomplishments of the organization’s vision and mission will provide the transparency and authentic culture growth you desire.

 

 

Top 5 Salesforce Tips: How To Get The Most Leverage From Your CRM

Top 5 Salesforce Tips: How To Get The Most Leverage From Your CRM

CRM, Salesforce, WhiteRock Value

Optimize SalesforceSalesforce has become the go-to customer relationship management (CRM) tool for businesses of all shapes and sizes. With its extensive features and capabilities, when optimized, Salesforce can definitely be a game-changer when it comes to managing customer relationships and driving business growth.

However, to truly get the most out of the CRM platform, it’s essential to understand and implement effective strategies. Many times, this can be a daunting task. Information overload, if you will.

The good news is that in this article, we’ll go over the top 5 Salesforce tips that will be able to help you get the most juice from your CRM and accelerate your business to new heights.

Tip #1: Integrate & Utilize AppExchange for Additional Functionality:

Salesforce’s AppExchange is a huge marketplace of third-party apps and integrations that can extend the capabilities of your CRM. For my iPhone users, think of this as the “App Store,” but for your Salesforce.

  • Explore the AppExchange to find solutions that address specific business needs that would help further optimize your CRM for you or your team, such as project management, marketing automation, or analytics.

Whether you’re looking for industry-specific solutions or specialized tools, AppExchange offers a wide range of options to enhance your Salesforce experience and drive business growth.

Tip #2: Customize Salesforce to Your Unique Business Needs:

One of the greatest advantages of Salesforce is its flexibility and customization options.

  • Tailor the platform to fit your unique processes, workflows, and methodology.
  • Utilize custom objects, fields, and layouts to make sure Salesforce aligns perfectly with your organization’s requirements.

By customizing Salesforce, you can streamline operations, increase efficiency, and enhance user adoption.

Tip #3: Leverage Automation with Workflows & Processes:

Salesforce offers powerful automation tools like workflows and processes that can save you a tremendous amount of time, eliminate any manual tasks, and boost overall productivity.

  • Take advantage of these features to automate routine processes, such as lead assignment, opportunity updates, and email notifications.

By setting up advanced workflows, you can make sure that the right actions are triggered at the right time, allowing your team to focus on high-value tasks, strategic actions, and results.

Tip #4: Equip Your Sales Team with Sales Cloud:

Salesforce’s Sales Cloud is a highly intelligent solution designed to streamline your sales process.

  • Provide your sales team with the tools they need to thrive, such as lead and opportunity management, pipeline tracking, and collaboration features.
  • Customize the Sales Cloud dashboards and reports to gain valuable insights into sales performance and identify areas for improvement.

By equipping your team with Sales Cloud, you can enhance their efficiency, close deals faster, and drive revenue growth.

Tip #5: Enhance Customer Service with Service Cloud:

Exceptional customer service is crucial for business success, and Salesforce’s Service Cloud can help you deliver just that.

  • Use Service Cloud to centralize customer interactions, manage cases, and provide personalized support. Implement self-service portals and knowledge bases to empower customers to find solutions on their own.

Utilize WhiteRock’s Expertise & Get the Most From Salesforce

You are capable of leveraging Salesforce to its full potential, but you may need some external support to get it right. As your partner in all things Salesforce, WhiteRock is here to help. If you believe that further optimization may be needed for your team to be successful with Salesforce, that happens to be WhiteRock’s sweet spot. We want to set you up for success and see your team succeed on your CRM journey. 

At WhiteRock, we take the time to understand your needs and map out a plan to optimize the right solution. WhiteRock has the experience needed to help fine-tune your complex processes through highly accountable change process flows related to improvements in your CRM and related systems. Reach out to us at learnmore@whiterocktech.net or via the form below!

Speed Kills…In Sports AND CRM

Speed Kills…In Sports AND CRM

CRM, Salesforce, WhiteRock Value

 

Growing up playing sports, I always heard the line, “you can’t teach speed”.  That made sense to me.  No matter what level of conditioning an athlete has worked into, it doesn’t translate to faster when running.

This is not true when we relate speed to an organization.  There are five key elements around the concept of speed when I work with our customers developing their CRM strategy and systems.

First, I want to be clear on what speed is when I use the term as it relates to business and the CRM system.  I use speed to represent these components of a business:

  • How fast can you convert a prospect to a customer?
  • How fast can you make a decision that is data-driven?
  • How fast can you report your top metrics in your organization?
  • How fast can you change a process in your operations with accuracy?
  • How fast can you know and solve a customer problem?

If you don’t know the answers to these questions, then your CRM system is not doing what it should be doing for your people and your customers.

Let’s dial in here.  Don’t shy away from this concept.  Your customers will feel it if you do.

Here are the key concepts that drive the answers to the questions above.

  1. Inputs to the CRM system are consistent among your users AND these users don’t have to spend a lot of time thinking about what and how to record events and activity. If this is the case, then the information is going into the system the same no matter who is inputting it.  This drives reporting which drives decision making which drives speedy business.
  2. Timing of inputs is critical. I hear the statement a lot that says if events and activities aren’t in the CRM then they didn’t happen.  I would take this one step further by requiring our team to make their entries daily.  I don’t want to make a decision at the end of the day that doesn’t include that day’s business.    This drive speedy, accurate decisions.
  3. If you are not targeting the proper buyers, your CRM system will reflect that if 1 and 2 are true and adhered to. If you are targeting the right buyers, those that you have proven need you, then your speed to make the sale will be optimized.  Thus, if find a deal that is slipping or taking longer than your average number of days to make a sale, you need to quickly review the buyer persona for variances from your optimal buyer.  I’m not supporting not making the sale if it takes longer, I’m an advocate of knowing why the normal process is taking longer than it typically does.  So, know your sale’s cadence and keep it optimized by selling to the proper target.
  4. Follow your CRM’s documented sales process. This is so important.  Why would you go through the work to create a continuously evolving and improving sales process, update it, and train on it, then not follow it?  I see this a lot.  Look, you know what it takes to make a sale.  Whether the process is highly simple or highly complex, follow it.  Be consistent, so that when you are reviewing your sales pipeline, you can make quick decisions, coach your sales team consistently and quickly, and rapidly respond to your stakeholders in terms of forecasted revenue and future cash flow streams.

In summary, speed does kill in sports.  In business, speed kills too.  But being slow and inaccurate kills faster.  So, speed up your team’s approach in your CRM now.  Don’t wait.  If you don’t know what to do, call me.  We will get you started on the training needed to speed up your performance for the benefit and value to your customer.

See more here, rockyourcrm.com, or call me, 501.777.8370.

 

 

Bring It Together With a Salesforce-ERP Integration

Bring It Together With a Salesforce-ERP Integration

CRM, Integration, Salesforce, WhiteRock Value

Salesforce ERP Integration

For a successful sales strategy and toolset, integrate your Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system with Salesforce. By bringing these two key business tools together, you extend the capabilities to optimize the business process flows that reflect how your business serves its customers and prospective customers.

Many companies navigate day-to-day work by leveraging both their CRM system and their ERP system separately. Below, you will find a few approaches bringing your two most powerful customer data tools together through a Salesforce-ERP integration and the associated benefits.

3 Approaches to Integrating

How your company chooses to approach integration efforts depends heavily on your needs, your technical expertise, and your IT budget. Let’s explore these 3 together.

1. Build Your Salesforce-ERP Integration From Scratch

If your organization has a deep technical understanding, you may choose to manually register your data from one system to the other. Keep in mind that building from scratch takes a lot of time, money and resources to be successful. If your organization finds the trade off of added control and customization worth it, this approach may be worth exploring.

With this approach, it never hurts to consult with a partner to consider the pros and cons of an investment in building this yourself. At WhiteRock, we can certainly tailor a solution for your needs, though we rarely face use cases that are so unique that they haven’t already been resolved in our current target customer market space.

2. Utilize a Connector

Salesforce offers purpose-built connectors that can directly connect your Salesforce account to another system like your ERP system. These are limited to the more popular ERP platforms like Oracle ERP and Microsoft Dynamic ERP. Therefore, your options for this approach may be limited based on your system.

In most cases, utilizing a connector will do the trick for the best price. However, there are a few limitations that we’ll want to discuss to ensure you are accomplishing what you hope to. When fewer endpoints are needed to sync and no future change is anticipated, then we will recommend this solution type.

3. Buy an ERP Integration Platform (iPaaS)

An integration platform as a service (iPaaS) is an application that helps connect your IT environment and manage your integrations. iPaaS solutions go beyond what connectors offer with the capability to build multiple integrations and have several use cases. These tools provide seamless integration, automatic data sharing, and error control with a wide range of features and prices to fit your needs. 

This approach is typically the best fit for our customers. Some of these tools can be pricey but the benefits of a cost effective solution will provide the most dynamic, customizable, and maintainable solution.

Benefits of Integrating

A Salesforce-ERP integration can bring major benefits to your organization. Better customer experience, simplified decision-making, increased efficiency, improved data quality and reduced risk of error are just a few improvements that you may notice after choosing to bring these systems together.

Provide a Better Customer Experience

There’s nothing quite like having a crystal clear overview of your customer’s journey. By integrating Salesforce with your ERP system, you will gain an accurate 360-degree view of customer data across your organization. This will allow your team to serve customers in a more personalized way thanks to access to reliable up-to-date information. Providing this single source of customer truth leads to improved customer satisfaction, allowing your customer to feel seen and heard. Bringing the accurate pricing power of your ERP system together with fast quoting capabilities of your Salesforce CRM also elevates your customer service.

Simplified Decision-Making

Enhance your decision-making process by integrating Salesforce with your ERP system. When you bring data from across your organization together, you access a true 360 view of your real-time business health. This level of visibility also serves to improve the internal decision making capabilities key to getting ahead of the competition.

Enjoy Increased Efficiency

Another major benefit of integrating these two essential systems is an increase in team productivity stemming from ease of access to important customer and sales information. When your sales team can see inventory levels from your ERP system from within Salesforce for example, they get back that time previously spent switching systems. With all information from activity and sales history to credit limits brought together, team collaboration and communication across departments is greatly simplified. Less time is needed to search for accurate information when you have a single source of data truth to rely on. Integrating your systems provides you with an end-to-end view of business processes from order placement to delivery.

Improve Data Quality & Reduce Risk of Error

Speaking of your single source of data truth, the power of Salesforce allows you to automate data management tasks to ensure absolute accuracy. Manual data entry, especially when being conducted in two separate systems has a significantly greater chance of error. By integrating your systems, you open up a world of automation possibilities to make it even easier to keep your data clean and reliable. Reducing or eliminating errors can play a big-time role in helping your organization save money.

Are You Ready to Integrate?

As you consider your own integration journey and how the benefits could impact your business, be sure to consider whether a partner like WhiteRock could help make this a painless and worthwhile endeavor. No matter which approach you choose, we are here to help and have the experience with this process to ensure your integration goes smoothly and successfully.

Why WhiteRock?

With the right partner of Salesforce experts that you can trust and count on, your integration can be greatly simplified and you can feel confident in your new and improved single source of truth. We bring our knowledge of marketing and sales flows, digital transformation, and what “parts to order” for your business into this partnership. At WhiteRock, we take the time to understand your needs, and map out a plan to optimize the right solution. As your organization changes over time, you have us to keep your systems aligned. We support you and set you and your systems up for success. 

WhiteRock has the experience needed to help fine-tune your complex processes through highly accountable change process flows related to improvements in your CRM and related systems. Reach out to us at learnmore@whiterocktech.net or via the form below!

Culture Grower

Culture Grower

Accounting Seed, WhiteRock Value

 

Your CRM Is A Great Driver for Your People-Centric Culture

 

I hear this all the time, we have a great culture at our company or (fill in this blank) has been the catalyst to the culture in our organization.

When I hear this, I like to ask, how did your culture become so great and/or why (fill in the blank again with what you used above) did you start this and who started it, you or those within your company?  I ask this because this is an indicator of the authentic value.  It also gives me insight of where the motivation for the culture came from – was it leadership driven, employee driven, a mix, or something else?  For something like culture to be engrained into people on a team serving others, there has to be a secret sauce.  Something that doesn’t go away if the people change, leaders change, customers change.

To be a people-centric organization, there needs to be something sticky.  I use people-centric because every person related to the organization plays a role – employees, customers, prospects, vendors, board members, and family members to these people.  Frankly, I think the secret sauce, like most secret sauces, should be and can be something simple.  In our organization, we rely heavily on our CRM systems and the integrations so that we know everything about everybody all of the time.  Our business is people.  Our secret sauce is the data-driven environment manifested in our CRM system, strategy, and policies.

Why is this our secret sauce and is that weird?  Let me share three important elements related to our CRM practice, our people, and our culture.

  1. We don’t not share information within our company. Our whole team has insight to everything.  This includes EVERYTHING.  It was great one day when one of our engineers said that he loves working with us because regardless of whether work is going well or not, he knows also how well the day is going for others because he can see that days work activity and always find something to brighten a tough day.  That is culture.
  2. When a deal has begun or when a deal has landed, we ring the bell! Even before COVID, we have always worked as a company that is remote.  We have been conducting Zoom calls for years.  We have tried about all of the video conferencing platforms too.  When we are together, we talk about our opportunity wins and losses.  We talk about the day and we study our dashboards.  Even though we all have different roles, we know each of us depends on the other for success for all of these we serve.  No one has a bigger role than the other.  We all have critical roles to fill.
  3. There is a big difference in organizations where the leaders say, “we drive our culture because we have developed a great compensation plan” versus “our culture grew because/was created by (fill in the answer)”. The difference is one culture was driven and the other culture was grown.  I sincerely believe that the sustainability of a culture runs beyond any individual if it is grown.  To that, your CRM is the glue.  It’s the well for all of the information needed to do your job and do it well.  This is information used to shepherd your team, having confidence that others can suggest and lead while having access to the data needed to do this.

I am a huge fan of growing your organization’s culture.  I know we are in the CRM business.  Even if we weren’t, CRM would still be a big factor in our culture because it is a people system.  People will come and go while your data about your people will be steadfast and increasingly important as time marches on.

I encourage you to check out these other resources from our website to know more about us and who we are.  Let me know if I can help you.

 

 

The Relationship Between CRM and Accounting Systems

The Relationship Between CRM and Accounting Systems

CRM, Integration, Salesforce, WhiteRock Value

 

How can a CRM system be beneficial to produce performance changes in your sales process without the accounting history of your accounts and contacts?  I strongly believe that it is not possible.  As Salesforce has evolved from a CRM platform to a platform to integrate all systems to your customers and prospective customers, the transformation of a common, simple view of all data in one place has never been more important.  Integrating accounting transaction history, credit limits, and other key data in the accounting system to the CRM account/contact view in Salesforce or any CRM drives a faster pace for decision making and simplicity.  On this topic, I want to share four examples of the value of integrating your CRM and accounting systems and then conclude with a suggestion for you to consider for your organization.

Example 1 – Knowing the “flight path” of your buyer’s journey to a sale promotes a healthy forecast for your whole organization

The days of flying by the seat of your pants in sales are ending and have evolved into a sales process that can be executed consistently by all sales team members.  The result is relevant sales activity is captured quickly, easily, and affordably by sales deal stages in a CRM system.  Over the last several years and peaking in 2020, the sales efforts must be quantified and organized for understanding and forecasting the predicted sales timing and dollar amount.  When this flow of work is consistently input by all sales team members, then revenue and cash flow will be known and can build a revenue forecast that can be relied upon.  When the sales team has this insight along with current customer sales history, credit limits, terms, and product/service lines used, the sales team will have all the valuable data needed to support their newest sales and find common characteristics to continue to guide their success.

Example 2 – Accrual vs Cash basis of sales opportunities

I mentioned in Example 1 how the days of flying by the seat of your pants in sales are obsolete.  What this means is working on your sales deals and not tracking the progress of that deal.  When this happens, a sale technically is only known when the deal closes.  From an accounting perspective, if you do not accrue expenses and only book when the expense is paid, this is the cash basis method.  Therefore, the same holds true in tracking deals in the CRM system.  If you are not tracking sales progress in the sales process, this is equal to a cash basis sales approach.  We do not have forecast or prediction capabilities until the sale is closed.  Organizations need to “accrue” their sales process just as the accounting system accrues expenses and other events that are recognized but paid or closed yet.

Example 3 – Valuing the importance of information in the CRM and accounting systems equally

One thing is for sure:  you cannot prepare a correct tax return for the organization without an exact and organized accounting system.  The same is true about the sales process:  if the sales activity is not organized by sales stage from learning about the prospect’s interest to the sale close, then there is not a reliable forecast of revenue and cash flow that can be used to capture the whole picture accurately of the business performance.

Example 4 – How and what to integrate between CRM and Accounting

If I have convinced you of the importance of integration, then the next step is how to integrate and what to integrate between your CRM and accounting systems.  First, how?  Depending on what CRM and accounting system is in place, there are dozens of solutions usually.  If your team does not have the experience and skillset for this, then there are many innovation and technology companies that can help.  Certainly, our firm can help.  Second, what?  This depends; but for sure at a minimum, you need insight into sales history, quotes, and other specific information like past due status, credit terms and credit limits are important.  All these components from accounting need to be displayed on the account view.

I will finish with this:  if you believe that integrating your CRM and accounting systems is valuable but you cannot achieve this without help, then call me.  And, if you do not believe this and don’t care to achieve this then I want to know why, so call me.  Having a solid integration between these two so systems will unify your information systems, enable faster decision making, and better experiences for all of your folks and your customers and future customers.