How the Best Sales Teams Use Salesforce: 3 Trends
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We asked 1,500 Salesforce customers how they are using the platform; where their pain points lie, optimization hacks, and the most popular features. Apttus and Bluewolf reviewed key findings, best practices, and shared how one company doubled the amount of sales proposals in just 60 days. In this slide deck, learn: - It's all about employee experience: Learn why sales systems must be designed with the rep in mind. -Extracting long-term value: Sales teams need a flexible platform that can handle shifting business needs and growth. - Why data is your real customer — and your biggest obstacle.
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How the Best Sales Teams Use Salesforce: 3 Trends
- 1. One Column – White BackgroundHow The Best Sales Teams Use Salesforce 3 Trends
- 2. Today’s speakers Raymond Juarez Director, Apttus Practice Bluewolf Kent Perkocha Chief Customer Officer Apttus
- 3. • Employee experience matters. This year, companies are taking notice. • Frequent innovation is the new standard. • Data is the biggest obstacle. Period.
- 7. Employee Experience Matters • What was the technology gap? • What was the employee experience prior to QTC emergence? • How is Salesforce turning from Chore to Choice?
- 10. 29% E-Commerce 41% Quotes & Orders 45% Contract Management Extracting Long-Term Value
- 11. “Streamlining CPQ processes is top of mind for CROs…but it’s only a partial victory for any CFO or CIO
- 12. Poll Question 2: How many applications is your organization using?
- 13. Extracting long-term value Broader platform strategy
- 14. “Data is your real customer, and your biggest obstacle.
- 16. Data in Action Company Profile Industry: Pharmaceuticals 2015 Revenue: $135.9B Employees: 16,500
- 17. • Employee experience matters. This year, companies are taking notice. • Frequent innovation is the new standard. • Data is the biggest obstacle. Period.
- 18. Q&A
Editor's Notes
- ROSS Welcome and good morning or good afternoon. I’m Ross Warnlof, Marketing Manager with Bluewolf. This is the webcast, How the Best Sales Teams Use Salesforce Before we start there are a few quick logistics I’d like to get out of the way: First, this webcast will be recorded All registrants and everyone on the line will receive the recording and slide deck, 24 hours after the call Also, anytime during this session, please feel free to submit questions via the text box on your bottom left, we’ll be doing a Q&A at the end.
- ROSS Today we’re going to hear from two speakers: Raymond Juarez, Apttus Practice Director at Bluewolf. Raymond brings over 15 years of leadership and business advisory to Fortune 500 companies spanning the US, EMEA, Asia-Pac markets, focusing on We’ll also be joined by.. Kent Perkocha, Chief Customer Officer at Apttus. Kent co-founded Apttus 9 years ago. He has been instrumental in advising customers on maximizing value from their Apttus solutions and is recognized as an industry leader in Quote-to-Cash.
- Ross
- Raymond Here’s what we know today: Creating a premium customer experience is essential for sustaining loyalty. What we found most compelling was that employees expect their companies to practice what they preach so, if they are constrained by existing tools or systems that inhibit creating this memorable experience with their customer, employee enthusiasm suffers. Leading organizations are taking notice and 1/3 named an employee-facing initiative as one of their top 3 objectives in 2016. So let’s look at where sales teams are spending most of their time:
- RAYMOND 70% of Salesforce users have to enter the same data into multiple systems, including systems outside of Salesforce in order to do their jobs in terms of supporting their sales cycles. data integrity, reporting, SO it was no surprise to data mgmt was the most painstaking. [learn 62% say there’s a part of their job that would be easier if they were able to complete it in Salesforce.]
- RAYMOND The Standard story Industry context SIC is a Fiserv co, heavily regulated but with many high-valued touch points with their customers. In terms of employee experience: speed and simplicity with their brokers and strategic partners was essential to staying competitive in the insurance industry. SIC wanted to manage their complete customer lifecycle using Salesforce. All of our customer facing teams do their jobs using Salesforce. Our opportunity was to provide pricing through contract approval with Apttus plus Salesforce was to provide the entire pricing through contract approval through Salesforce & Apttus, demonstrating the power of these two technologies. And it was a huge win, almost instant adoption when we implemented. Proposal times decreased from 1-2 days to 3 hours Describe the old experience from a salesperson’s perspective in as much detail as you are comfortable doing From pricing through contract approval Describe the current experience from a salesperson’s perspective in as much detail as you are comfortable doing From pricing through contract approval RESULTs were huge The Standard cut time to quote to 30mins and proposals took hours, not days. Proposal activity doubled in the first 60 days of using the new quoting tool. TRANSITION: Are there other FiServ RAYMOND + KENT, banter KENT Challenges: internally developed CPQ engine that was extremely outdated Lacked approval workflow and robust tracking features Needed their quoting tool to be infrastructure for all customer facing interactions Benefits: Reduction of quote generation time from 3 days to less than 1 day Ability to track quotes and upsell opportunities Advanced rules-based selling support workflow to support Single source of truth for quote for all users
- KENT “The Standard isn’t the only example of companies seeing success on the platform. 59% of users say it’s easier to use Salesforce today than it was 12 months ago… Q: What is the Technology gap that others have experienced? “What people are seeing in the marketplace were too many disparate systems, low adoption rates, and revenue leakage as a result.” Q: What was the employee experience prior to QTC emergence? “Employees were experiencing a lot of Manual processes and re-entry of information into different systems, which resulted in low productivity and inefficiency.” Q: How is Salesforce turning from Chore to Choice? “Native applications are extending the value of the Salesforce platform and solving business needs. There are thousands of applications available on the AppExchange that provide additional functionality to Salesforce. Apttus provides a number of application that are built on Salesforce to automate the Quote to Cash process. As a result of streamlining these processes, our customers are seeing improved employee experience and efficiency, improved adoption, and a better customer experience.”
- KENT
- KENT “So how does this translate into long-term value? Apttus clients are extending a previous QTC footprint with additional Apttus tools. Most of our customers started with Contract Management and expanded their footprint with our other applications, such as CPQ, Revenue Management and E-Commerce. As we’ve seen in the report, companies are investing more in extending the value of Salesforce than ever before. 64% of Salesforce customers are planning to increase their Salesforce budgets in the coming year. Some of the key focuses areas for 2016 are: 29% increase in E-Commerce 41% increase in Quotes & Orders 45% increase in Contract Management
- KENT
- RAYMOND How does QTC fit in with your entire sales stack? “While streamlining CPQ processes is top of mind for CROs, it is only a partial victory for any CFO or CIO. Leading organizations are approaching their platforms holistically, maximizing the information across multiple toolsets; marketing automation, quote-to-cash, and analytics. This cross-platform strategy is allowing companies to keep pace with rising customer expectations—and providing salespeople with more time for what they do best, to sell.”
- RAYMOND
- RAYMOND So despite rising capabilities and initiatives with [SaaS tools], the number of apps should be rationalized. And rather than focus on any single product, we are inspired about how quote to cash optimizes things like eCommerce and unlocks innovative digital communities using CPQ, marketing automation, and analytics tools working in concert. Stat #1 Extracting long-term value is derived from a coherent / holistic approach – “sum of the parts” – leverage the platform and a strategy that creates synergy otherwise do not realize power/potential platform TRANSITION?
- RAYMOND Data is your biggest obstacle, period. Nearly half of all Salesforce customers have problems reconciling data from different sources, including other orgs and legacy data systems—it’s the top barrier to delivering business insights with Salesforce. However, the most innovative IT professionals manage data by liberating it with open APIs, automating data exchanges with market-leading tools, and cleansing data at every opportunity. [Alternate] Nearly half of all Salesforce customers still have problems reconciling data from different sources, including other orgs—it is the top barrier to deriving business insights from Salesforce data. To gain a master view of data beyond charts and dashboards, 68% of companies will be increasing their investments in analytics in the coming year.
- Sales teams need useful data, immediately available. It makes them more valuable to customers and it helps drive adoption goals. Data issues come with various sizes and shapes but the end result is universal. For example, staring at bad data or are limited by technology or skillsets to address business needs. For example, general statements #1 & 2 #1 Standardize the right data #2 Integrate the right data, not the most data.
- RAYMOND Highlight the types of data challenges ecountered with CPQ solutions ABDC (anonymous, pharmaceutical Managing performance of Contracts outside of platform (CLM not QTC) Deconstructed third party tool, brought it into single platform Portfolio performance Bringing contract performance into salesforce, REAL-TIME (no longer reliant on third- party BI tool) Greater insight into concessions into negotiation cycle KENT Why data is your real customer, and your biggest obstacle Necessary deal information is streamlined through the quote to cash process Understand what has worked in the past for customers and provide the ability to predict for upsell/cross-sell QTCI Amerisource (large global pharmaceutical) – get benefits from incynthia Wendy , messaging? How are Apttus’ customers rectifying their data issues? All information is stored inside salesforce, uniform, accurate and secured. Common problems Room for manual errors Missed revenue Solutions and benefits Apttus QTC
- Ross