Good deals are rarely (ever?) the result of quick, one-off interactions.
It takes a coordinated process of touches and live connections to nurture prospects through your pipeline to a closed deal.
Every stage is important.
Move too quickly and you risk losing deals to competitors who do a better job of asking questions or building trust. Or you risk winning deals that sour or churn due to poorly set expectations.
Move too slowly, of course, and good opportunities can fall through the cracks to competitors or other budget-eating, time-occupying priorities.
Effective prospecting is an art built on delicate balance, and Salesforce can be a powerful tool for orchestrating your processes and maintaining that balance.
The key is to configure Salesforce for your sales outreach in a way that leverages its power for automation and systemization, without sacrificing the human element that earns lasting clients.
With that, here are seven ways to help crush your sales outreach in Salesforce dialer.
7 Salesforce Strategies to Use in Your Sales Outreach
1. Develop Your Cadence
A sales cadence is a sequence of engagements or follow-ups that sales reps adhere to when engaging with contacts.
By creating a predictable and consistent series of actions to perform, your team:
- Knows exactly what to do and which prospects or leads to focus on, on a given day
- Strikes the right balance of messaging and timing, so prospects get the attention they deserve
A cadence is helpful for your reps and their sales outreach because it sets clear expectations for their objectives. And focused sales reps can lead to more closed deals.
In Salesforce, you can create a unique Lead list view for each step in your sales cadence simply by filtering based on various criteria, such as lead source, date added, number of outreach attempts, days since last attempt, and lead status.
2. Create a Salesforce Home Page
Give your team a “home base” with a Salesforce Home Page that they’ll see when they log in to Salesforce.
This Home Page makes it easy for them to access their cadence, lists, reports, and anything else they should be keeping track of for their sales outreach—in one place.
You can even create a unique Home Page for each sales rep that serves as a landing page for their different lead lists. When a rep logs in, they’ll see a consolidated dashboard showing them exactly who needs to be called, emailed or followed up with today and where they are in the sales funnel.
3. Reinforce Solutions Over Sales
It’s time to ditch the desire to make a sale, and start focusing on problem solving.
Customers are more informed than they have ever been. They have ample resources at their disposal to evaluate options, read reviews, and make educated decisions.
In other words, the greatest value your team can provide is as a trusted ally.
From understanding pain points, asking smart qualification questions, and engaging in active listening, to personalizing demos and trials to meet unique needs, earn trust by showing a genuine desire to help your prospects succeed - even when that means being honest when your product isn’t a good fit.
That leaves more time to invest in higher-quality prospects, anyway.
Your sales cadence and messaging should reflect this goal, and it should color every interaction your sales reps have with prospects in their pipeline.
4. Automate, but with a Human Touch
Salesforce is known for allowing you to do virtually anything with your data, and automating just about any process.
But it’s important to remember that automation doesn't close deals. People do.
And that is why your automation should be designed to keep your sales team focused on conversations.
Using Flows in Salesforce to automatically trigger an email to a contact based on an action they performed is effective. But don't forget to drive updates to the contact’s record as well, so that you can build highly targeted lists for your team’s outreach.
For example, consider someone who makes a purchase. Automating a “thank you” email is smart. But why stop there?
Set up another automation that adds them to a View displaying Customers who purchased three or more days ago, but who haven’t received a phone call. Your team can call contacts on this list to assess their satisfaction, schedule onboarding, or recommend add-on products or services that might enhance value and increase your revenue.
5. Move from Task Lists to Contact Lists
Too many teams try to run sales outreach from their Salesforce Task List.
Seeing open and overdue tasks is certainly helpful in guiding daily to-do’s. Unfortunately, the filters here are limited to the Task Object. As a result, there’s no way to perform targeted outreach from a task list, which is exactly the kind of outreach sales reps should be engaged in.
Consider the difference between reaching out to:
- Brand new or cold leads
- Prospects who recently saw a demo
- Opportunities about to close
Each one of these requires different scripts, calls to action, email follow-ups, and even frames of mind.
Following one with the other isn't just inefficient, it’s mentally taxing.
By using Contact List Views, reps can take advantage of all of the details gathered each day related to specific contacts. From there, they can burn through smaller, targeted lists before shifting gears to another.
XL.net increased call volume by 40% using PhoneBurner's Salesforce dialer, which allowed them to use our power dialer software without ever leaving Salesforce.
The integration created a “lightning fast” process for their reps to log calls, drop voicemails and send emails - specifically suited to each list and call outcome - with a single click.
By automating workflows to shift focus to targeted live conversations, the XL.net team is happier and more successful.
6. Use the Right Fields
While CRM clutter is bad, reps need access to a lot of information for effective sales outreach.
It’s important to determine the right number of Fields to use in Salesforce so your team can gather the information needed to drive follow-ups and move deals forward.
Many teams make the mistake of burying important details of a conversation in a Note or a Call Activity.
While I am a huge fan of good note taking (and “future you” will always appreciate your detailed notes), burying certain information in a text block makes it hard to find and filter through in the future.
When the right Fields are available, this doesn’t happen. Plus, the data becomes readily available for reports, as well as for creating smart, targeted List Views as highlighted above.
Fields in Salesforce are different for every company. For example, at PhoneBurner we might collect team size, industry, and what CRM is used whereas a logistics company might track shipment weight and local versus interstate shipping.
Sit down with your team and think through what Fields you can implement that allow your reps to collect and access relevant information without overwhelming them.
You also need to ensure your team can easily find the Fields after you implement them. To help, create Page Layouts specific to each of your team members profiles, so the Fields they need are front and center when they are working with Leads, Prospects, or Contacts.
Doing this will make information gathering and documenting exponentially better, and will ensure the right questions are asked and the right insights are recorded.
7. Track Your Team
Accountability is good for all. You can’t address the gaps or celebrate the successes of your team if you don’t thoroughly track KPIs.
Salesforce offers customizable Reporting Dashboards to keep your most important metrics front and center. There’s a lot of data available, so take the time to identify the KPIs that really drive results.
After you’ve pulled the metrics, give your team access to the reports. It’ll help reinforce what matters most when gauging successful sales outreach, and it’ll keep them motivated to do a good job.
External tools like PhoneBurner can provide tremendous value when it comes to reporting as well.
Paul Baldovin of Cetera Financial refers to PhoneBurner - which powers his outreach inside of Salesforce - as his “total source of truth.” The reports allow management to easily dive into dial session data, including calls made, emails sent, talk time and other metrics that are otherwise challenging to assemble.
Master Your Sales Outreach with Salesforce
Salesforce is one of the most popular and powerful CRMs available for sales teams. And PhoneBurner's Salesforce dialer lets you use our power dialer software without ever leaving the CRM.
It offers tremendous opportunity to create and refine coordinated prospecting and sales outreach processes for your team. But vast customization and automation potential is both a strength and a challenge.
The tips above will help you create processes that not only preserve, but promote the personalized and human-centric outreach needed to close deals and help your company thrive.
Want to see what PhoneBurner for Salesforce can do for your team? Learn more today.
