Why Salesforce Lead Object Is Essential for Success in Sales and Marketing

A successful marketing strategy is, by default, useless unless potential clients bite the bait you’ve used to lure them in. Those who have bitten the bait, but have not yet been reeled in are what you would call “leads.” Leads are the building blocks of what could possibly be an actual sales opportunity. But countless of times, certain leads fall short of being converted into “contacts,” those clients who you’ve successfully reeled in.

To create a concrete separation between your “contacts” and your “leads,” here are a couple of tips. On one hand, your relationship with “leads” usually ends as soon as they get a hold of your marketing promotions. Another characteristic common with “leads” is that they can easily be worked by sales development reps. On the other hand, “contacts” are more associated with opportunities, accounts, and revenues.

Fortunately, Salesforce, the SaaS-focused CRM, has got you covered with the filtration of “leads” and “contacts.” The CRM does this through a special feature within its system known as the “Lead Object.” The Salesforce lead object allows for the proper espousing of best practices. By delineating leads from contacts, agents are guided on which clients they are to send certain marketing advancements (i.e. emails, SMS, or voicemails).

How Does Salesforce Lead Object Support Sales and Marketing

Before getting into why you, as an agent or as a company owner, should use the lead object, let us clear out why some unfortunately opt to do without it.

• Companies often get overwhelmed with the thought of exerting extra effort in separating leads and contacts. Honestly, this is nothing a quick dialogue between the sales and marketing teams can’t settle.
• Companies from other industries tend to think that the system only fits the B2B business model. But come to think of it, most industries out there come up with their own marketing plans to invite in potential clients, also known as leads.
• The only probably exception would be those businesses with a small to no sales team (i.e. eCommerce companies). Often times, these types focus their marketing efforts into creating only a limited yet loyal clientele.

Now, as a responsible and committed leader of your company, here are compelling reasons as to why you need to grab a hold of your pipeline. These are the things that will help you have the reins over your whole sales process, and not the other way around.

• Salesforce objects allows both sales and marketing teams to aid their agents against confusing old contacts from newly converted ones.
• The Salesforce lead status assists sales managers in evaluating their team by making aspects of the pipeline (i.e. reps efforts in converting leads into contacts) visible.
• Salesforce leads are easily distinguishable through the lead status Salesforce provides. This equips your marketing team with the ability to efficiently publish their ROI information.

Weigh both the benefits of the lead object, and the painstaking tasks you manually maneuver through without it. Stop wasting valuable time and start the quicker route to transforming your leads into contacts.

Your Competitive Advantage With Salesforce Lead Object

As time takes its course, we have accepted the fact that the traditional method of face-to-face selling is a rather endangered way of doing business. The lead object takes complete advantage of this, and has made online transactions easier for both agent and client.

• It gives eases the profiling of leads by providing you codes for each who have filled out your online forms.
• Leads are assigned an agent depending on their location compatibility among other criteria.
• Agents are equipped with the lead’s profile which guides them in formulating interview questions that are in context to the client’s field.

What You Should Be Doing to Optimize Your Salesforce Lead Object

• Make sure that you are actually using it. Companies usually have it, but never seem to get their desired results since they misuse it. Some never even use it at all. Ensure that all agents are using this tool they’ve been equipped with. Always create a Salesforce campaign object for every marketing effort you come up with.
• Organize your system by segregating leads and contacts into standard “types.” This makes it easier for you to scan through your pool of clients, or potential ones. Also, doing so will allow agents the luxury to not have to constantly create a new “type” for every campaign. Tracking your prospects and opportunities with lead object should be easy, make it so for you.
• Easily peruse through lead and contact responses. As this CRM function’s lead statuses come with remarks to easily track lead status, your part is to make sure you automate it using web-to-lead forms.

Which Industries Benefit From Salesforce Lead Object?

The common notion that only B2B business models benefit from the Salesforce lead object has been debunked. As long as your business has marketing strategies driven to create a pool of prospects, then you are very much qualified to field in the aid of the lead object. To give you a better look on how this Salesforce feature benefits your industry, here are some examples:

1. Retail

Retail is a very customer-centric industry, and Salesforce is right with you through every step of the way. From marketing to sales—and even until after-sales support service—the CRM assists you in providing both leads and contacts with unparalleled attention.

2. Financial Services

Investing money, big or small, is probably one of the riskiest decisions one could ever make in life. Hard-earned cash is hard-earned cash, so people working within the financial services sector need to earn the complete trust of their clients. Salesforce allows you to understand your clientele on a personal level by systematically grouping their data.

3. Automotive

Cars are one of the rather bigger splurges people make, and for such they expect no less than the utmost attention from their dealer. Salesforce allows automotive companies to tweak their marketing and sales efforts to be able to connect with their clients better. This gives them a better understanding as to what questions to ask and which solutions to provide, for their clients to receive sterling customer service.

4. Telecommunications

When it comes to its sales and marketing efforts, the Telecommunications industry is heavily reliant on CRMs like Salesforce in streamlining these aspects of their business. Profiling clients through a CRM makes the process a whole lot simpler as you have all the vital details within arm’s reach.

5. Life Sciences

Even physicians who forge strong bonds with their patients require the aid of Salesforce. Their service needs to be available anytime and anywhere; and a CRM allows that by providing their patients with necessary information and solutions through any device.

Sales pipelines are called such for a reason. The whole process is an interconnection of various stages before leading to the bigger picture, which is the actual sale. And pipelines, often times, need a little cleaning to ensure the smooth flow of transactions. And that’s the main cause for the existence of Salesforce’s lead object. Having a hard time coursing through your sales funnel? Maybe it’s time for you to stop doing things the hard way, and allow the lead object to aid you with transforming that lead into a contact!

With many thanks to our friends of tenfold for cooperate with us in our blog. https://www.tenfold.com/

 

When Cost Cutting becomes cash losing

Dear Friends

Thanks a lot for reaching out.

Today I want to share wit you a couple thought about cost cutting on any size company.

The first, what is the meaning of the cost cut?, very simple, to optimize and make your operation work on a more lean basis, reducing all expenses that does not contribute to new USD coming up as cash.

The cost cut can have impact in any area of your company, from Finance, R&D up to the most undesirable HR. in line with this, some companies have strong policies on not touching HR until it is extremely necessary (I personally feel same thing).

As everything in this world, cost cut has a root cause, and this is a bad performance or a bad planning on either your expense capabilities or your income generation. Like my parents always told me “don’t spend more than what you have, or if you do, do it safely”.

Now, the reason of this post is to cautiously talk about what happens when cost cut affect directly the operation without being aware of it.

Reducing cost at Marketing, letting your operation without any kind of budget to do crucial activities, could eventually reduce your traffic to your business below the acceptable and therefore make you to lose clients and eventual income potential.

Reducing cost at machinery renewal and maintenance, could rapidly increase the depreciation of your machinery, and probably increase the cost at any emergency fixing activity.

reducing cost at Human resource (the mostly used by some companies), hits directly in many tangible and non tangible factors, like overload of workload on employees, reduction of ideal productivity point and increase of demotivation, among others.

The best way to reduce cost is to be more optimal with the actual cost structure you have, meaning that you should obtain more for the same, increasing operating profits and efficiency.

The above means a frozen status on your fixed cost, and by producing or selling more, to reduce the unitary fixed cost, increasing your margins.

Always be cautious on cost reduction, and alays start by the non operative assets, like Rentals, Hedging (in case you work with Exchange rates), or reduction of Overtime for employees without fire them.

Hope you don’t fall on this never in your corporate life, but if you do, judge well and take the best of the hard times, take the opportunity.

Best

 

 

 

 

4 Must Marketing Tips for Startups

Hi Everyone

It’s a pleasure we are growing day by day in our community, that is our intention, to share experiences which can be used for your benefit, or your business.

Well I am not here to offer another boring 10 tips guide, but offer you value….this time I will show you only 5, five small strategies to boost your marketing in your startup.

1.- Have a personality, Define yourself

Its easy to register a name for a company, its easy to create a webpage, and its easy to control ads and so on. Difficult part is to build an identity and to give a personality to your brand (Young, Tech, Fashion, Aggressive….)

After defining your brand identity, and defining what you will offer, second step is to match that offer with your demand. Who will be interested in your product? is there any competition you can bench on?, so defining your brand is imperative to have success in the business.

2.- Be everywhere

One of the first things you have to work on, is on the Awareness of your company…to be recognized and remembered. This is difficult and requires a lot of marketing efforts, but if you do it smartly and constantly, results will come.

First you have to be 360 degrees in the social media, keep an eye here, because this does not mean to shot information to whoever customer out there, find out your target based on first point and get into specialized communities, sharing your value, customers will be there.

Additionally, share the voice, make people be charmed with your value and to recommend your products, this is by far..the most effective marketing across any industry.

My advice: If you can not reach the “micromoments” of your customer in their cellphones, a big sales opportunity is fading away. Everybody has a Cellphone and the best is: everyone looks at it at least 15 to 20 times per day.

3.- Make your brand more Human and Social than just Virtual

People move and get inspired more by emotional factors rather than rational factors.

Support a social cause, get involved with this will give you strong benefits from a total business overview, like better employee engagement with the brand, greater recognition by your audience and the most important thing…you are selling beyond the final sale, you are approaching benefits to your own community.

4.- Bottom up and flexible brand building

Many brands intend to be as much close to the customer as possible, but to be frank, when you want to communicate to them, many times is frustrating (delays in the answer, talking to a bot, repetitive answers without solution) to deal with them.

Make the customers tell you what is new, what you need to do, and how to transform yourself for the market.

Remember, customer voice is not important…it’s just ALL.

As a Start up, its very easy to deal with this, since sales volumes are not big (in most of the cases), so doing this activity you have 2 benefits mainly: Good source of loyalty and first chance to set up the course of your branding and customer experience through the way.

Is your Sales Planning allright?

As every business, we have to be aware of settling down all the expectations to the cold world of mathematics, which take us down to forcely plan our activities well and to forecast what our result would be.

Key factors is that our marketing and sales expense has to be well balanced through the whole year, and we can not simply spend it all in just one month, we have to be smart.

So, in order to make a good analysis on spending, sales funnel conversion and plan well what activities will my company do to achieve “X” sales targets, I would consider to review at least, the following topics:

a) Analyze well the traffic of your business store, even if its a web store, a blog, a physical store or any other. Once you analyze the traffic, clicks, views and so on, please make sure to analyze what competitors have (I would recommend for online commerce Compete, Quantcast, Alexa andGoogle Trends / Double Click Ad Planner), those are free of charge.

b) Once the competitive analysis is done, and analyzed hopefully per period, we have to set up what is our target, or where do we want to go, and based on this step up with some action plan to achieve this target. If seasonality shows that April or December are high in traffic for the industry, then lets plan some activity to catch up as much as possible, to not lose market share. Lets also focus on the Sales Funnel, we have to be also smart in being efficient in the process.

c) Once our target is set, and activities are planned, its time to break down the cost for each activity. Our expectations has to be clearly matching the financial reality as well, remember that every business has a long process of development so do not give up in the most difficult part, the beggining.

d) Does my sales plan depends on my pricing?, of course it does!!!. some advanced marketers would say you have to analyze in deep the competitive situation. I would say, lets always look at the customer needs, and the balance between the needs and your costs, together with the financial target you have. Initials businesses prices are mostly 0% price parity vs the competition, and if you want to penetrate the market strong, I would say -10%, but please be careful to deliver the demand since this might become good news (to have tons of demand), but not delivering is a death sentence.

e) Most important, FOLLOW UP THE BUSINESS. Not following up or just letting it drive by itself, will certainly drive it to a death sentence as well. We have to learn from the results trend and improve (This is what Japanese People called Kaizen) which means that  you learn day by day, and improve day by day to be better always than the day before.

Key points for today:

a) Sales planning based on facts and industry data

b) Customer orientation

c) Activity planning

d) Cost breakdown

e) Pricing and positioning definition

f) Follow up…Follow up…Follow up.

I wrote this in my Mac….

The Sales Funnel

For the ones that are initiating themselves into the sales management, it is important to understand what is called the sales pipeline, or the sales funnel.

Your business as any other, need to drive traffic, even if it’s a webpage, a store in the middle of the city or just a facebook page.

You can of course not assume that every customer that will enter the store, will automathically buy, instead, it is up to you to measure and have well captured your sales leads through the way.

Its always important to remember that if 10 customers enter your store, and only 1 buy, what is the reason of why the rest of the 9 did not?

Some of the most typical issues are:

a) Customer enter, but the product was not what they were looking for

b) Customer entered, but nobody could answer the questions about the product requirements the customer had.

c) Customer did gave his data to be contacted, but follow up was never made.

The above might seen very simple steps, but I can assure you that even in the most respected companies, they fail (for turnover of employees, lack of training and so on).

keep an eye on your sales process, measure well and initiate mitigation actions when needed, squeezing the pipeline is the key. Second option is to bring more traffic to your store, but what if we do both activities good?.

My top pick for this post: Sales and Marketing good ones.

    

Why International Work Experience Pays off more than the most prestigious MBA

During my whole career life, i have been talking with many coallegues and friends about what motivated myself for being a constant expat.

As you can see in my Resume, i took already this decision 2 times in less than a 10 year timeframe. At the first time, i moved from Chile to Tokyo-Japan, the totally opposite side of the globe, without knowing the language and neither the culture of the host country. The second (process in which i am inmersed now) in a more close place to home, but still very different in terms of culture and enviroment.

The question is, why to leave if you can have a good career path in your own country?

Answers are many, but the most important thing about making those movements is how do you want to build your career path, not only in the short but also in the long run.

Just think about how would you survive in a negotiation with some Asian partners, if you do not know anything from their culture, they way of work, how they make decisions and so on, for sure you are with less than a 50% of chances to get a good deal for your local company, because you are in cultural lack of knowledge.

You may say “they are also in a lack of cultural knowledge”, but thats not true just looking at the numbers of Expat from every 1st world country to emerging countries.

So what is the first competitive advantage you have?, you have stronger negotiation skills with multicultural entities and partners, which of course not all of the job applicants have.

Do they teach you this in a MBA?, yes but real world is totally different.

Now, flexibility is really has to be seen on site. Have you even worked in an environment that you feel that is totally difficult that you can get adapt to?, if you get over it succesfully, sure you are increasing your flexibility skills.

Not all the business enviroments are nice and happy, and in most of the times there are strong difficulties that needs people with this skill well developed to overcome some nasty situations in cross functionals teams or multinational branch negotiations.

Again, does an MBA teach you this?, sure, but real life is another story.

I will never forget the born of my first child, the most beautiful thing a man can live. It was in Japan, in one of the best hospitals on the far east, but….I was in a totally different environment, without my family members (connected at Skype), with a Japanese Doctor explaining me things that barely could understand due to the nervous state i had. Finally all went excellent, and after the experience, i felt i have passed a good exam of adaptation.

Many soft skills like the ones i am explaining now are not teached in any business school, also they can not be found in any work experience in which the conditions are basically same for everybody.

If you want something different, do different, and this is exactly what executives look in a candidate, a rare mix of experience, flexibility and multicultural team dealing.

This skills can be found at any scale company (of course, the bigger..the best), and this will give you the rareness needed to have a long term differentiation against the crowded job applicants market.

All the best

At this time I would like to recommend this book, the paradox of choice

Neuromarketing in the 21st Century

In the last decade, we have been thinking on how shall we study our customer, making tons of studies, tons of polls, tons of whatever stat method in order to get a more clear view on how our customer reacts, feel, want and decide over a certain product category.

Now, with the fine tech advancing at giant steps ahead every year, marketing has to be aproached from new ways of thinking, new ideas of market development, and how to differentiate.

Recent papers and research, has been told about how the future will be, in terms of the customer knowledge, and this is Neuromarketing.

What is Neuromarketing?, its the study of the brain of our customers, and see how do they react, feel, remember and finally decide over a specific category. This seems very similar to the actual stat method from a result point of view, but now, its far more accurate, since we can basically understand, which stimulus can be given to our customers in order for them to react in certain ways.

It happens already, in many ways: Emotional campaigns are far more effective than a cold campaign just showing what the product is. This is the basic reason of why now marketing is oriented to the experience instead of selling just a product, because the experience is much more well received in the brain armony and also much more associated to real life experience, therefore, to the memory.

Now, the raise of this brain many meta analitic studies show us an important factor, that is very revolutionary: it can easily demonstrate the consistency on how the brain activates. For example, the pre front and the ventro medial region of the brain are now well recognized as the areas of the valuation from a customer to a certain “thing”, so its important to recognize the fact that this is already a reality, and how, as marketers, we can take advantage of the last gen imaging techniques, to understand better our customer behavior and cognitive process that lead them to decide A instead of B.

Welcome to the next gen of market research.

Have a great one!

Sebastian

Customer Knowledge

Hi

Probably this question might be very primitive and easy to answer… maybe.

The first thing i would say, is about how to consider marketing and sales strategy nowadays, and yes, things have changed a lot since, at least myself, finished my business school 7 years ago.

Marketing is now an experience, but not only a simple declaration and willingness, but also a personal and customized experience, creating a good moment in every single customer. How do we do that as Sales and Marketing reponsibles?

The answer to that question is not something that can be tell by the highest iQ person in a well respected Business School, it is actually much more simple, it is related to how much you know your strategy and your customer needs.

Wow!!, but that kind of thing sounds very literally taken from a book. In that case, i will make it very simple: It is knowing what you want and to who you want to approach.

Segmentation and objective is the key to know your marketing approach, communication channels, messages and so on.

What about Sales?, Sales process is not anymore related with just push. Now Sales is combining well your customer knowledge, product knowledge and a good soft skill, in order to achieve another aspect of the marketing, the loyalty and long term sustainability of your business process.

That is why nowadays many companies are taken very seriously the Sales Executive role, which today can be known as a consultative sales man.

In the Retail business (B2B), and the direct sales process (Sales man to Customer), there is always value to offer, so a consultant voice is highly needed.

Conclusion: Do not be to sticky to creating and creating and pushing to sell it, sometimes its better to hear, create value and produce a service which at the end will work as a pull process, erasing financial risks, adding work efficiency, cost reduction on marketing efforts and more operating result in your P&L.