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Jason Paquette is the Director of Sales Operations at IT Systems Management company, Kaseya. He has been using Salesforce for 6+ years. He started out using it on the sales side, but when his company upgraded to Enterprise Edition he took over the responsibility for implementing the EE features as well as managing his companies Salesforce instance. Kaseya, is rapidly growing and Jason is always looking for ways to automate or steamline common activities. So in addition to his AppExchange app picks he has some cool tips on customization.
When I started using SFDC 6+ years ago, there were only 20 people in the company. Today there are almost 500 with half of them having full SFDC Sales Cloud licenses and the other half being on Chatter Free. With such a rapidly growing company, we look for opportunities to automate or streamline the time we spend on common activities so we can spend more time driving value and growth. The apps below aren’t an exhaustive list of everything we’re using, but they do serve to illustrate what we’ve been able to automate.
There are several apps out there now for helping manage duplicates. We found that Ringlead was the easiest to use since they manage the matching criteria for me. The app we previously used required me to manage my own matching criteria, including all conceivable iterations, e.g. Step 1: Match by Email Address; Step 2: Match by Email Domain + First Name + Last Name + Company Name; etc. Ringlead now manages all the layers of matching criteria for me! It even handles all the variations of “fuzzy” matches, like Rob, Robert, and Bob may be the same, Acme Inc, Acme Corp, and Acme may be the same, etc.
We started using Marketo a few years ago but initially we only used it as an email blast tool. A couple years ago we committed ourselves to learning how to maximize our value from it and implemented full Lead Scoring and multi-step Lead Nurturing. Marketo Sales Insight gives our Reps visibility to what Campaigns their Leads/Contacts are a part of, if they’re opening or clicking through the emails, what activities they performed to receive their Lead Score, etc. We can even setup email campaigns that Reps can drop their Leads/Contacts into at their discretion instead of using Mass Email.
Cloud9 Sales Forecasting and Pipeline Management
Cloud9 is our Forecasting system that ties into SFDC and our Opportunity Pipeline. Most importantly to us, it gives us very quick and very easy visibility into how things have changed in our pipeline. E.g. instead of looking at a pipeline last week that had $4M in it that today only has $3M in it and wondering where the $1M went, now we can very easily see which specific deals we won or lost, which deals were pushed out, how many Opps were added, and any other changes that contributed to the Net $1M change. Because it does snapshots of our data, we can track changes over time, all from a dynamic dashboard that updates as we drill in or change focus or criteria.
Realizing a full-featured “Sales Playbook” was going to be a bit outside of our budget, we stumbled across Sales Coach, a great little app for creating a mini-playbook. We use it to create a quick reference card for each Opportunity Stage including definitions, questions to ask the prospect, questions the rep should be able to answer about the deal at this point, and steps to take to move the deal to the next stage. It is easier to reference in real-time for a deal than our Sales Documentation, and the best part: It’s free!
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In addition to the apps above, we also have a few custom objects we use as repositories like a Competitors database, and Product Battlecards. These objects allow us to put all information in one place, including fields on the records for summary, talking points, SWOT, etc, as well as related lists for Related Content, Attachments/Google Docs, and links to other resources like recorded webinars and training courses in our LMS. Each of these records has their own Chatter feed as well and we use Dataloader to make sure everyone follows each record so no one misses any of the discussion if they forget to click “Follow” when we announce them. We’ve also created our own “Engagements” object for our Professional Services team to manage their consulting/education projects which replaced our short-lived use of OpenAir.
Learning to build out custom objects was a little intimidating at first, but once you get the hang of it, it really is as easy as creating fields and page layouts on any of the standard objects, so don’t be afraid to give it a try sometime!
