Obtaining the desired revenue outcomes can prove challenging at times for any organization, with customer expectations evolving and product offerings changing to address various market needs almost overnight. Making sure that your teams are up to speed with all the updates and that they have the resources they need readily available becomes crucial to their productivity and success.
Let’s take a closer look at how sales programs can easily mitigate any of your team’s productivity gaps while allowing you full control over the content, assignment, and next steps.
Why Sales Programs?
Traditional sales programs or strategic sales initiatives are often ineffective because they are disconnected from a seller’s day-to-day experience, and not directly aligned to sales and revenue objectives. Additionally, scattered programs also imply difficulty in tracking and making sure the content is consumed by the right people at the right time.
This product unifies resources and best practices for sellers, and most importantly it includes actionable milestones tied to their selling process to help sellers progress toward their goals.
Salesforce’s Sales Programs are front and center where sellers are working in a simple side panel experience. For sales and enablement leaders, it’s easy to create, manage, and deliver programs quickly in a drag-and-drop interface – no admin required!
Customized Experience Within the CRM
While sales programs may be a new experience for both you and your users, let’s not forget that they also come with the advantages of being built on the Salesforce platform – customization capabilities, enhanced user experience, and native reporting.
Create Tailored Programs
Readily available templates make the creation of programs a breeze, especially as you and your team are getting started! Whether you’re building a program for an Account Executive, BDR, or even a Customer Success Manager, there is a template to cater to any of your initial use cases, which you can preview before choosing.
These templates contain placeholder items that you can rename, edit, reorder, or remove to accommodate your program. The other option is, of course, to build your very own program from scratch.
The experience may already look quite familiar to admins as it is built on top of the Lightning App Builder, so navigating it should be a breeze. Considering how intuitive both the builder itself and the items are, users who will manage and maintain the programs are surely going to enjoy it as well.
Every item type can be added one or multiple times as needed, and each will require a few additional attributes to finalize its setup within the program. Milestones, for example, will also need an Enablement Measure and Target, on top of the Title, Description, and the Day it should be due by, which the other items need as well.
Video or Voice recordings, on the other hand, will need a link to a video or audio file. It’s easy to include any type of content, whether native from your Salesforce CMS, or via URL links to any other repositories or tools you are using.
Once you’ve explored all options and you’re happy with the program, it can be saved and published directly from the builder.
The Enablement Measure used for the Milestone item or the Outcome is a Salesforce record, and some of them, such as the Number of Deals Closed, are automatically created once Enablement is turned on. You can review the full list of prebuilt measures here.
The purpose of these measures is to help you determine what you’d like to track as part of a program, in order to mark the incremental goals in the sales process or the final Outcome as completed.
If the prebuilt measures do not represent what your teams would like to track, you can edit them or create new ones. These can be as specific as you need them to be since you can use any standard or custom objects from your org, select the user field that the attribution should be based on, and narrow down the results with filters, filter logic, or even related objects. As long as the records exist in Salesforce, anything can be included!
Guidance in the Flow of Work
Prior to your users seeing their new and improved experience, they have to be assigned to the program you have just created and published. If during the creation you choose to allow self-enrollment, they can enroll themselves, but it is a better idea to assign all users who should get started right from the get-go with the Assign Users button on the Enablement Program.
This is something that the business users in charge of the programs will be able to do as well, and also turn on the self-enrollment if needed.
Alternatively, you can work closely with your enablement team and help them automate the program assignment with a simple Salesforce Flow and the out-of-the-box Assign Enablement Program action. While the Flow can be just for one program at the beginning, as the implementation evolves, so should the assignment automation to include Decision Elements to sort and assign one or multiple programs based on the user criteria of your choice.
Once users are assigned, it’s showtime! They will receive an in-app notification as well as an email letting them know they have been successfully enrolled in a program. The exercises and milestones can be accessed through the Guidance Center under the Trailblazer icon found at the top of every Salesforce page – this means that regardless of what they are up to in Salesforce, the guidance for success, training resources, and progression tracking will be right there.
The entirety of the program will be available to scroll through, so it’s the seller’s choice when they go through the resources and best practices prior to the due date. The final outcome will always be visible at the top, alongside the overall progress. Both written and video content, for example, can be delivered inline while milestones will be automatically updated or completed based on the actions the user takes in Salesforce.
This way, not only can sellers wave goodbye to navigating through multiple tabs or manually logging activity, but they can also benefit from the latest information in no time!
Monitor Results With Salesforce Reports and Dashboards
“How did my sales program perform?” is a question that is sure to be asked after a while, and Salesforce made sure that the answer is right at your team’s fingertips! After being published, every sales program gets an automatically generated dashboard and underlying reports to track all relevant metrics, from overall to individual milestone progress to keyword mention breakdowns if you are using Einstein Conversation Insights.
The dashboard can be accessed with a click of a button, directly from an individual program record. While users won’t have to worry about building the dashboard or reports themselves, the out-of-the-box one can be cloned and changes can be made as needed just like you would on any other dashboard.
Going back to the actual dashboard widgets, they provide valuable insights that can prompt the program owner to make adjustments accordingly or highlight any challenges in reps meeting their goals or contributing to the company’s revenue goals in the desired way.
For example, if most of the team struggles to complete a certain milestone, such as creating new opportunities, perhaps the target should be revised, or more training could be provided. Ultimately, the program can be revised to change the behavior expected from the sellers through more focused exercises and milestones.
Setup Effort and Considerations
The Enablement Settings page is available in the Salesforce Setup. Before making a purchasing decision for a full license, you can try Enablement for free, with a limited number of sales programs and users, to familiarize yourself with the look, feel, and customization capabilities.
All setup steps are highlighted on this page in sequence, enabling you to get started in just a few minutes. Afterward, it’s all about building the programs, tailoring metrics, and getting users started!
As you start discovering the product, make sure to review the considerations and limits so that you can make the best decisions for your organization when it comes to the implementation strategy. For example, you can have up to 300 programs created – published or unpublished – but a maximum of 100 measures.
Summary
Overall, sales programs can be a game-changer for any teams using Salesforce – be it sales, support, or not customer-facing at all – as long as the need to relate to business outcomes is there. Building the end-to-end enablement process according to your company’s strategy and steps directly on the Salesforce platform has never been easier and is sure to make a significant difference across the board.
Whether it’s addressing rep performance through coaching, analyzing the impact these programs have on deal closure, or even ensuring that a specific array of next steps is followed, sales programs are here to make all of this an immediate possibility.