Planning for the future seller success is one of many responsibilities of the sales ops superhero, from capacity planning and territory distribution to incentives and compensation. With a variety of scattered tools, offline files, team input, and manual efforts being leveraged to finally bring together the many different puzzle pieces, how great would it be for everything to be readily available in the same place, all without compromise?
In this article, we will explore the importance of having a robust performance management process, from start to finish, as well as how independent Salesforce products come together to offer the ultimate unified experience.
From Plan to Paycheck
More often than not, siloed solutions end up failing operations. Be it because these can be too disconnected from the reality of the team’s work and needs, heavily reliant on manual input, or are simply inefficient and create more confusion than clarity, it should come as no surprise that there is still a significant gap to be filled.
To prevent these inefficiencies, which can significantly hinder productivity and constrain results, Salesforce aims to demystify every step by seamlessly centralizing all the bits and pieces within your CRM, all as an extension of the Sales Cloud native experience. Help your teams say goodbye to repetitive manual tasks, countless Excel spreadsheets, and siloed or outdated tools with an out-of-the-box Salesforce experience designed to optimize your organization’s key outcomes. Sales Performance Management incorporates four Salesforce products you may already be familiar with:
- It all starts with a great plan, and Sales Planning will help your team bring their strategy to life while collaborating with stakeholders, making territory adjustments, and assigning quotas.
- Personalizing guidance is no easy feat, but your teams can now rapidly tie seller activity to measurable milestones with Sales Programs via the easy-to-use drag-and-drop experience.
- Salesforce Maps enhances the seller’s experience while prioritizing visits on an interactive map – all to optimize the time spent en route while discovering new business opportunities.
- Take your compensation management tasks to new heights with Salesforce Spiff, a native experience that allows full transparency, endless customizations, and fast implementation of your comp plans.
What’s in It for Me?
As businesses evolve, different operational processes are spread across different teams, unified by the need to not only execute, but also review, adjust, measure, and share with sales leadership, management, and ultimately the reps that need to meet their goals.
From a RevOps and Sales Enablement perspective, the possibility of having a single place from which to complete all tasks will be a significant improvement compared to leveraging different tools with different considerations across dozens of tabs, emails, and local files. In addition, workload can be quantified, with effort and impact visible right from the get-go.
Sellers on the other hand will no longer need to chase updates or information via various channels; they will have a clear understanding of what is expected as they can see everything they need to do their job and meet revenue targets directly in Salesforce – all in an organized, user-friendly manner.
There are benefits for Salesforce professionals as well, as leveraging out-of-the-box functionality (when possible) is one of the most well-known best practices in the ecosystem. On top of that, technical teams do not have to spend build time on existing functionality, but rather work together with all the other personas to further tailor the experience for any additional business needs.
Sales Planning
Generally available since Summer ‘23, Sales Planning is a unique Salesforce product that can completely revamp the way your RevOps team and sales management collaborate to create business plans, define quotas, and refine territory allocation prior to presenting reps with the final decisions.
Regardless of whether or not you’re using Sales Territories (formerly Enterprise Territory Management) or Role Hierarchy, with Sales Planning you can start building out your strategy as soon as it’s installed.
While refining the plan, you can leverage even external data alongside CRM information to properly guide your buildout and surface any and all attributes you need to make informed decisions right within the platform. Standard or custom objects can be leveraged by Sales Planning, your team can define their own allocation metrics to track, and collaborators can keep making edits until they are happy with the result.
In-flight changes, record assignment, and rep target allocation have never been easier, with the option to define rules and create an automated equitable resource alignment process with clicks, not code.
If you are already familiar with Salesforce Maps Territory Planning–a key pillar inside Sales Planning–then you know that the assignment experience is an interactive map, as you can review the assignment, collaborate on adjustments and different scenarios, and properly allocate resources as needed. Additionally, you can review the different iterations of the program as needed, so the work will not be duplicated while offering transparency between team members.
With Sales Planning, collaboration is key. Salesforce facilitates multi-level approvals to account for any business units that vary in complexity and hierarchy setup. Once the plans are ready and agreed, they can be published swiftly to Sales Cloud for reps to start taking action and working towards their goals.
Sales Programs
Provide interactive resources and additional guidance, and track progress directly in the seller’s flow of work without them having to look outside Salesforce. Enablement is a key component of any process, and selling is no different. Align Sales Programs with revenue goals right from the get-go, and empower program managers to spin new programs in just a few clicks with a drag-and-drop intuitive interface and readily available templates.
Regardless of where your content is stored, whether it’s example Voice or Video calls from Salesforce if you’re using Einstein Conversation Insights, or external links from your CMS, or even YouTube or other tools, anything and everything can be made available to users within the Guidance Center as soon as they are enrolled into a Program.
Furthermore, with automatically generated Reports and Dashboards, program managers can easily track engagement, progress, and performance in next to no time. Salesforce Sales Programs can measure the impact and related revenue, and help sales leadership teams make data-driven decisions when it comes to setting targets and ensuring the success of their sales teams.
Salesforce Maps
From optimizing the time reps spend in the field to reviewing key account data on an interactive map, Salesforce Maps can enhance sales teams’ overall experience when prioritizing the next steps to drive revenue within their territory. After years of ongoing improvements, with Summer ‘24 Salesforce Maps is getting a significant update in terms of looks and performance with a new framework that will allow users to plot more data, make use of ArcGIS online layers, and take swifter action on the insights available.
At its core, this product offers a robust experience for sellers and managers to quickly review the records in their territories based on geographical location, while empowering them to take educated business decisions with location intelligence data at their fingertips. Additionally, the view can be customized as needed to easily overlay CRM data with third-party information relevant to your company’s industry and goals, including weather events that could derail your plans or help territory-based research and prospecting.
To add to the list, bespoke schedules can be created weeks in advance for the entire team based on different criteria such as priority, proximity to a rep’s location, or even potential prospects. Through the use of historical traffic, multi-point route optimization is also possible in no time or trouble, to ensure the maximum return on investment for your business.
Salesforce Spiff
The most recent Salesforce acquisition, Spiff, is ready to help your organization scale incentive compensation across all your commissionable employees and set up a reliable, fast, and audit-ready process.
This new addition to the Sales Cloud suite has the potential to supercharge your seller commissioning process through added transparency. It does so by offering reps the ability to easily review their progress against targets and commission statements, while driving operational excellence throughout all those tasks happening behind the scenes – tasks such as intricate calculations, as well as building and executing different variations of comp plans leveraging up-to-date CRM data or data from other external sources.
Regardless of the complexity of your process or team structure, Salesforce Spiff can adapt to specific needs through a flexible setup and visibly increased data accuracy. Alongside the powerful Commission Estimator that offers sellers the visibility they need to be motivated and achieve their revenue targets, Spiff can act as a single pane of glass for all your company’s commissioning needs in just a matter of days.
Summary
When it comes to selling in Salesforce, building, measuring, and successfully maintaining scalable operational sales processes has never been easier, for both end users and RevOps teams alike. Having all the necessary tools and data in one single place can make the entire planning process a breeze.
Whether it’s through detailed planning capabilities, targeted enablement, increased productivity, or commission management, Salesforce Sales Performance Management really could bridge the gaps between a great seller experience, operational excellence, and your company’s revenue goals.