Selling is an art, as well as a team sport, so making sure that your sales managers, business development reps, and account executives have everything they need within their flow of work is paramount for a streamlined user experience. This can lead to closing deals faster, without the hassle of navigating through multiple tabs and tools.
In this article, we will take a deep dive into how Salesforce Relationship Selling can take the buyer identification process and data entry, as well as enrichment, to the next level.
Ensure Your Team’s Efficiency
First and foremost, when working across multiple Accounts and Opportunities and with various different stakeholders, it would be great for sales and supporting teams to always have full context and accurate data in order to quickly start engaging the right person at the right time.
B2B selling is complex, typically involving about six to ten stakeholders. Gartner research shows 75% of B2B buyers prefer a rep-free experience, thus making any rep interaction critical, highly personalized, and contextual.
The Salesforce Relationship Selling offering brings to the table a group of functionalities which are sure to make both your sales teams and customers happier. With minimal manual steps required, reps can forget about administrative tasks and focus on what matters most – their customers and prospects.
Automatically Create Contacts
Data entry is unlikely to be a favorite task for Salesforce end users, especially when it can be automated. Salesforce Automatic Contact Creation solves this, removing the need for sellers to manually create new Contacts on the Accounts they are working on.
If you are using Einstein Activity Capture, you may already be familiar with this functionality as enabling this is a prerequisite for Contacts to be automatically created based on emails or meetings identified within the user’s inbox and calendar. Account matching is based on the email address, as well as the Account ownership and additional recipients – the Contact is related to the existing Account owned by the internal user having the conversation, but if any of the additional recipients also exist as a Contact, the match will have a higher confidence.
Additionally, Contacts don’t have to be automatically created immediately after the first interaction, as you can select the threshold of interactions to determine the creation. For example, Contacts can be created after up to three interactions, whether they are meetings or emails. The number of Contacts created over the last week will be displayed on the Seller Home in the dedicated Contact Suggestions widgets.
Out-of-the-Box Enrichment
Powered by a large language model and grounded with your sales-related activities (email activity for now, with others to be considered at a later time), the Automated Contact Enhancement logic brings key information directly to your CRM Contact records.
Three new fields are automatically added to the Contact Object when the feature is enabled: standardized Seniority Level, Department Group, and Buyer Attributes respectively. With the help of these new fields, which you will need to add to your layouts and list views, your team will know at any given time who their key stakeholders are, while being able to quickly identify any detractors or additional sponsors.
This is by no means a one-time exercise, as Contacts will keep being updated (as needed) when changes happen and as the relationship evolves. Note that Contacts created by the Automatic Contact Creation will be enriched only if they are part of a Relationship Map (more on this below).
In addition to the new fields, enrichment will be attempted on other standard fields too, such as Phone and Title. Also, emails are currently only considered if they are in English, with emails in other languages being skipped.
Visualize and Interact With Buying Committees
The Buyer Relationship Map is a game changer when it comes to visualizing Contacts related to an Account or to an Opportunity. Once enabled in Setup, the map can be accessed from an individual record’s action menu. If you haven’t already enabled Automated Contact Enhancement, now would be a great time to do so to test out the map, as Contacts need to have their Seniority Level and Department Group populated to be reflected on the map.
While the example above is a best-case scenario map for an Account with multiple stakeholders already grouped and identified, starting from scratch is by no means difficult or time-consuming at all. For example, if you have already added the View Relationship Map action on Opportunities, you can quickly navigate to a record of your choice, and start either completing missing information for existing Opportunity Contact Roles, or create new ones directly from the Map – all without having to switch back and forth.
As you may have already noticed, clicking on any Contact within the map brings up a side panel with more details. This includes the option to edit directly on this page, send an email to any previous collaborators from within your organization, or check any past activity.
It is also possible to see insights either across the entire map (if you check the side panel) or for each individual Contact within the Insights tab. These are automatically generated, and can highlight if one of the stakeholders is a detractor or if the map doesn’t have any Decision Maker.
As with editing the Contacts from the Opportunity above, you can complete the missing information from the Account Relationship Map by going through each Contact which has yet to have its mandatory attributes completed.
Actionable Insights in the Flow of Work
Having the new Relationship Map to navigate through from the Account is a great addition, however, sellers may be working on individual records or other views too – making the insights available wherever needed is key to a truly optimized experience. Insights will be surfaced directly where they matter, including Prospecting Center, Pipeline Inspection, Account and Opportunity pages, Account Plan, Agentforce Assist, and more.
Relationship Maps can be created for both Accounts and Opportunities, and reviewed using the “View Relationship Map” button.
Key relationship details and insights are seamlessly accessible through Pipeline Inspection, Prospecting Center, and Account Plan pages. This means that, regardless of the specific flow of work that your sales team follows, insights are bound to be found wherever they are needed most – all to facilitate swift action.
Summary
Relationship selling may not be a new concept, however, in the context of the readily available Salesforce products and features which make this concept a reality within your CRM, it can provide a fresh perspective of your established sales process. With the option to automatically create and enhance Contacts, tailor a comprehensive Relationship Map, and access relevant insights in the flow of work, the end-to-end seller experience can be significantly improved in a matter of minutes.
With all three features available in the Salesforce Enterprise Edition, you can sign up for a trial and test them out yourself!