Preparing for Salesforce
Patrick Crosbie
How to define your Salesforce requirements

No two Salesforce implementations are the same. Each of our clients has unique processes and requirements and it's our job as Salesforce consultants in Dubai to design and built CRM platforms that reflect those bespoke requirements. The first step in working with Tenacre is to define the scope of work for the Salesforce project.

This process can be difficult for many of our clients, so we've written this article to provide assistance. Remember that your Tenacre consultant will walk you through each of these steps, you won't have to undertake any of these activities by yourself.

How to define your Salesforce requirements
Preparing for Salesforce
Patrick Crosbie
Taking your sales processes to the next level ...

84% of b2b customer inquiries fail to convert. Why? 

A report by the Aberdeen Group tells us that 84% of inquiries that businesses receives will not convert to a sale. These inquiries are usually expensive, you've paid out marketing budget for Google Adwords, Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter campaigns. 

So what's the problem and how can you fix this? 

Taking your sales processes to the next level with marketing automation
Sales Management
Patrick Crosbie
Creating value for the sales leaders with ...

For companies in Dubai and the GCC region, succeeding in sales and sales management is can be dependent on the tools and technologies that are used. Many of our clients relied on spreadsheets or basic CRM platforms before making the decision to upgrade their CRM to Salesforce with the help of Tenacre consultants.

Once the decision has been made to move to Salesforce, what are the benefits that you can expect?

Creating value for the sales leaders with Salesforce CRM
Preparing for Salesforce
Patrick Crosbie
Salesforce implementation - Essential ...

A Salesforce project can often seem daunting, particularly if you haven't been involved in one before. Depending on the degree of change that Salesforce will bring to your company, the key to getting the CRM up and running is to prepare thoroughly. While each project that we work on is unique, there are common themes that the team at Tenacre has identified that could help you prepare better before the project kicks off.

Salesforce implementation - Essential preparation

Sales Management

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Sales Management - Key performance metrics from your CRM

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Sales Management - Key performance metrics from your CRM

Many of our clients are SME businesses where there isn’t a dedicated sales manager or person with sole responsibility for leading and managing the day to day sales activities. As we set up Salesforce CRM in these organisations it’s common to see our customers struggle with moving from their old position of having little information on sales and sales activity, to have so much data that they don’t understand how to make use of it. 

Here are some key metrics that should be the starting point for most organisations. If you can get to grips with these reports, you can then add more metrics that are specific to your company or sales challenges. These reports can easily be created in your Salesforce CRM.

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How to run a data-based sales meeting with Salesforce

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How to run a data-based sales meeting with Salesforce

Managing sales meetings as a Salesforce company means that how you run these meetings will be different to how other sales managers (that don’t have real-time information at their fingertips in the CRM) run theirs. With so much data in the CRM, this article explores the specific ways that you can leverage this data for more effective meetings and more profitable sales.

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The dramatic impact on sales when response times to inquiries are shortened.

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The dramatic impact on sales when response times to inquiries are shortened.

According to this Harvard Business Review article, the average time it takes for companies to respond to an online submitted inquiry is 42 hours. The article goes on to say that leads that are followed up in less than one hour are seven times more likely to qualify than if they followed up in one to two hours.

The bottom line is that speed matters in sales.

As a Salesforce customer there are numerous specific things that you can do to have your inbound leads responded to in less than 60 minutes.

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How to make 'Lead Nurturing' work for your sales team

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How to make 'Lead Nurturing' work for your sales team

We're doing a lot of work with Pardot (the Salesforce marketing automation software) at the moment. We think Pardot is a fantastic solution, but I'm not going to talk about it (much) in this article. Instead, I want to talk about the piece of our sales and marketing efforts that most of us ignore, the middle of the sales funnel. I think that if companies here in Dubai concentrate a little more effort in nurturing the middle of the funnel sales opportunities that they can enjoy a 10% to 20% increase in revenue within three months. The Pardot marketing automation application provides all the tools needed to convert this unrealised pipeline.

Why's this so interesting? Well, let's consider the two ends of the sales funnel that we all tend to pay most attention to, the top end where the inbound marketing effort creates new leads and inquiries, and the bottom end where the sales team are working hard to convert the opportunities into closed sales.

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Salesforce Engage - Bringing marketing automation to the sales team

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Salesforce Engage - Bringing marketing automation to the sales team

Salesforce Engage fixes the problem is how to enable your sales team to quickly and easily deploy marketing campaigns that directly help them to close new business. With Salesforce Engage, a salesperson can load a new prospect into the CRM, and then activate a multi-step email marketing campaign right from their iPhone.

Creating value for the sales leaders with Salesforce CRM

Creating value for the sales leaders with Salesforce CRM

For companies in Dubai and the GCC region, succeeding in sales and sales management is can be dependent on the tools and technologies that are used. Many of our clients relied on spreadsheets or basic CRM platforms before making the decision to upgrade their CRM to Salesforce with the help of Tenacre consultants.

Once the decision has been made to move to Salesforce, what are the benefits that you can expect?

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Learning from lost deals with Salesforce CRM

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Learning from lost deals with Salesforce CRM

The only thing that's worse than losing a deal, is losing a deal and not learning anything from it. For sales professionals lost deals are a part of the job, and for the most part, we take it in our stride. From a business perspective, there's still a lot of value in these deals that need to be captured and evaluated. Some of the best sales-orientated companies that we have worked with take a rigorous approach to capturing and categorising each deal that they don't win. When Tenacre implements Salesforce CRM Dubai, we always add a feature that requires the salesperson to add more information to the record when they are closing an Opportunity as 'Closed Lost'. This information isn't to drag the sales staff over the coals, but to ensure that each of our clients are capturing and evaluating this valuable information.

Here's how why you should start evaluating each lost deal, and some tip's on how to start this process off.

60-seconds health check for your sales process

60-seconds health check for your sales process

As an owner of an SME, sometimes we don't have the time or headspace to stop and think about how we manage the sales process in our business. Very often we do things because that's the way we've always done it, right?

Take 60 seconds to think about how you manage sales in your business. Here's some ideas to get you thinking.

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Planning for long-term user adoption of new Salesforce systems.

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Planning for long-term user adoption of new Salesforce systems.

So you've made a decision to move forward with Salesforce! Congratulations on that, bringing the worlds #1 CRM into your business is a smart step that can lead to great outcomes with your sales, marketing or services. In the early stages of your project your main area of focus will undoubtedly be designing the system with your consultant, and making sure that the CRM is technically built out, bug-free and to your specifications. It's now time to also think about what happens after you go live with Salesforce.

How to you motivate the team to use it correctly over the long term? 

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Sales management tips with Salesforce CRM

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Sales management tips with Salesforce CRM

Sales management skills 

Running a small business means that you wear many hats - sales manager, marketing manager, agony aunt and motivator in chief (among many others). While some of these responsibilities can be managed on an ad-hoc basis, sales and revenue is the lifeblood of your company.

We suggest five ways that you can manage the sales process that will keep your sales machine churning out new sales on a monthly basis.

Salesforce: Are your sales team Farmers or Hunters?

Salesforce: Are your sales team Farmers or Hunters?

Managing ‘house’ accounts or bringing in brand new business – Two very different sales playbooks

Helping our clients to design a Salesforce CRM involves getting into the detail of how the sales teams are organised. The consultant from Tenacre needs to understand how the teams are structured and what the sales reps targets are. This information is a vital input to how we design your CRM. When it comes to optimising Salesforce and your sales plans for growth, one of the fundamental elements should be developing different plans for different target groups.

5 ways to use Salesforce to help drive sales

5 ways to use Salesforce to help drive sales

In an ideal world, your business will have perfect balance and performance right across the board; sales, marketing, finance, HR etc. In reality, most of us that own or manage an SME spend more time that we'd like running from one fire to the next to make sure the business keeps moving forward. We'd like to share how Salesforce CRM can help bring some organisation to the chaos.

Salesforce Dashboards displaying key sales data, closed deals, sales pipeline, and product sales

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Using Sales Forecasts in Salesforce CRM

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Using Sales Forecasts in Salesforce CRM

I refresh the 'Opportunity Pipeline' report in my Salesforce system at least twice per day. Like most business owners I am preoccupied with seeing if we're closing enough deals and creating enough new ones. We like to see what business we are winning, and what we need to close to turn a poor month into a good one, or better still, a good month into an excellent one.

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Defining sales process stages with Salesforce CRM

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Defining sales process stages with Salesforce CRM

Sales leaders like love having their key sales reports and dashboards displayed on their Salesforce homepage. Seeing their closed sales value, pipeline by stage and sales leader report gives you an instant understanding of the position your business is right now with regards to the revenue generation effort.

A question that we pose to our clients at the beginning of each project is, how do you define your sales opportunity stages? We find that each company is different, and each industry has characteristics that influence the definition of how we break up the key stages of the sales process. We'll take a look at some of the most common formats that we have seen. Remember, one of the reasons that we are concerned about the sales process stages is to enable better sales and revenue forecasting.

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7 tips for more effective sales meetings

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7 tips for more effective sales meetings

Most of us have sales meetings on a regular basis, usually each week or month. Making this time with your sales (and marketing) team effective can result in much better sales performance, so it's worth considering how you are running these meetings and if you can shake things up a little.

Here are seven tips for more efficient sales meetings.

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How startups are using Salesforce

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How startups are using Salesforce

At Tenacre, we like startup businesses, and in Dubai there are thousands of you every month!

Its striking that there are so many startup business that contact us before the company starts trading to get their systems in place. This shows that entrepreneurs recognise the value of starting a business in a way that organises data, gives the sales team the best possible chance of succeeding, and brings the entire team together on a single platform.

So what does a startup business get from Salesforce, and why should they spend precious capital on a CRM?

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2016 sales & marketing planning starts now

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2016 sales & marketing planning starts now

How's 2016 going to work out for your business? The million dollar question for a lot of us. Here in Dubai a lot of people are looking at the continued depressed oil price and the sluggish property market, and have made the assumption that 2016 is going to be a year to roll your sleeves up and compete like hell. Anything less, and your business could be in trouble seems to be the common refrain among my circle of friends. If you're finishing off your 2016 plan, what's going to be the main theme for the year?

Assuming that nothing is going to come easy in 2016, here are some thoughts that might help with finishing off your business plan for the year.

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Sport360 newspaper choose Salesforce partner, Tenacre for CRM

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Sport360 newspaper choose Salesforce partner, Tenacre for CRM

Sport 360 newspaper has completed the implementation of Salesforce CRM platform to manage ad sales, client data and performance reporting. Tenacre had the great pleasure of being the implementation and training partner for this project, and having just completed the final training programme, we're looking forward to supporting the sales and management team in the months and years ahead.