Good data is a constant battle. This is true for C-levels looking at metrics, sales leaders looking at performance and sales reps looking to close more deals. It falls, however, on sales operations to polish, buff and glean insight from this data.
Data will constantly become outdated, but what do you do when the information you need isn’t there to begin with?
The best way to be proactive about data is to enlist the sales team. They are living and breathing in Salesforce everyday, and will have the most accurate insights—if you set them up for success. Here are three steps to starting small and getting your sales team on board:
Step 1: Define the Process.
First, you need to define the process before you can recruit any champions. Figure out which fields in Salesforce you’ll need. For example, maybe you are assigning leads based on territory. In which case, zipcode, city, state, and country may be of high importance. In regards to adoption of the sales team – and the “hoops” that data entry can sometimes devolve to, I’d recommend keeping required fields to a minimum. This maximizes the chance of adoption by your team.
Step 2: Communicate Value.
Your sales reps have the unique ability to provide insights into their opportunities that, in aggregate, can be captured to make invaluable conclusions about your sales funnel and tweaks to your process. Let them know that. Demonstrate the end results of getting the data you need.
Step 3: Reinforce a Culture of Data.
A simple solution the sales ops manager can provide is a report. This report will make it clear what data is missing and who is responsible for the data (say, the person who created the record). Keep the report on a dashboard that is used regularly by the sales team. As the list builds, it’s a great way for sales reps to check themselves and go back to the records when they have time. This gets around the need for required fields, which will become incessant hurdles impeding their normal workflow in Salesforce. With the report being visible to the whole team, a little bit of peer pressure goes a long way to keep your name from populating on the report. If the neglected data report seems to be getting out of hand, consider bringing it to the attention of the team at the next sales meeting and rewarding those reps who are keeping their names off of it.
Doing the above to set your data foundations in your CRM is a powerful first step in enabling Account-Based Selling and and its counterpart Account-Based Marketing. Check out these 6 steps for starting small with ABM.
