Implementing “Zero-Touch” CRM with Salesforce

One of the major complaints from sales departments using Salesforce is that they spend too much time entering data rather than focusing on sales.

This is a valid concern as manual data entry leads to multiple problems: inefficiency, inaccurate or bad data, sales team frustration all the way up to tracking activities in Excel spreadsheets or other places outside the CRM (which defies the purpose of having one).

The ideal situation is what can be called a “zero-touch” CRM and boils down to:

• Minimizing manual touch points between sales reps and the CRM,
• Enabling effective reporting for managers at the same time.

The idea is to take away all the CRM logging & housekeeping tasks away from sales reps, so they can focus on what they do best: calling, mailing, meeting and eventually selling.

The following sections describe the four pillars of the “zero-touch” CRM.

E-mail integration

There are many ways to integrate email with Salesforce (see this post for details).

IT departments often settle for basic offerings such as free Salesforce Outlook plugin. While this is better than no integration at all, a commercial solution like Salesforce Inbox will make the sales team truly productive. Inbox supports Gmail and Outlook and has additional features like calendar synchronization, meetings booking and others.

Many third-party products (such as SmartCloud Connect) are available. They may be a better fit for your organization and often are favorably priced.

On-line meetings

Scheduling meetings from Gmail and Outlook is usually sufficient from productivity standpoint. It is also useful to synchronize calendars with Salesforce and integrate with on-line meetings’ to:

• Automatically track meetings as customer contact activities.
• Adding automation, i.e., send an automated meeting reminder to participants 24 hours ahead of start time.
• Combining with other plugins, e.g., using Salesforce Inbox to select meeting slot and once the meeting is accepted adding meeting details using Zoom.

Most on-line meeting providers (e.g., Zoom, GoToMeeting) offer free Salesforce extensions via AppExchange.

Call integration

Call integration depends on a particular voice provider and infrastructure setup. Since changing the voice provider is difficult, we recommend including CRM integration as part of provider evaluation to make sure that the following are possible:

• Logging inbound and outbound calls in the CRM,
• Logging calls made from/to a desk phone or VoIP client,
• Enabling dialing from the CRM (click to call),
• Displaying contact information when an inbound call is received (this functionality may come in handy for support teams too).

Fortunately, major service and infrastructure providers have apps for Salesforce integration (looking at Ring Central and Cisco is a good start).

Mobile access

Since a lot of sales activities happen on the road, it is important to roll out Salesforce Mobile App.

The Mobile App is not only useful for CRM data access, but also for call logging from mobile phones.

Reports

The integrations described so far (Emails, Meetings, Desktop and Mobile calls) cover most of all customer communication channels.

What this means, is that Salesforce queries like this:

SELECT 
   Id, ActivityDate, Owner.Name, Type, Subject, 
   Account.Name, Who.Name, DurationInMinutes 
FROM
   Event
WHERE
   ActivityDate=LAST_MONTH

include complete customer interaction information across all the channels.

This is a great starting point for creating cross-channel sales activity reports. Another benefit is that logging overhead on the reps is greatly reduced.

Taking it to the next level

Everything outlined so far can be considered basic functionality: making sure that every customer touch point is captured and reps’ time for CRM data entry is minimized. The following next steps can be taken:

• Adding advanced analytics using outreach.io, Einstein or similar tools.
• Improving efficiency of other activities that the reps are performing such as quoting automation (CPQ) or electronic order signatures.
• Adding more communication channels like Live Chat from the website or LinkedIn.

Conclusions

Implementing the four pillars of the “zero-touch” CRM (emails, meetings, calls and mobile app) is a quick win and should be a priority for most “green field” Salesforce implementations. With no development (only installation & configuration) they help to drive sales productivity and experience, providing a lot of information for management at the same time.

Nextian is a vendor of Quote-to-Cash (QTC) software for cloud and communications helping providers accelerate growth and increase customer lifetime value.

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