Single most useful adoption feature/add on?
I have a specific use case for salesforce, we don’t sell software, we sell machines and our meetings are almost always in person, not calls. So automated call tracking which translates into stages and updates are somewhat less useful for us. Generally an example of how things would go as one of our channel partners might send through a spreadsheet or PowerPoint of updated pipeline, but we would want our own representative to rigorously check this and make their own judgements, then update a small number very high value opportunities. And for our direct employees, again they are working on site visiting the potential customer every day and making their own notes, then translate this into updates. unsurprisingly, there are a few issues here – one is at the pipeline hygiene is poor unless one of us in sales ops goes through it with them in great detail which is just not possible. another is that because our opportunities are high value and low volume, and have a really complex implementation – lots of compliance contracts, dates and times, et cetera – they simply aren’t complexity enough don’t do it often enough. Doing five or six of these a year would be really successful.
So there are two issues – one is pipeline hygiene and not having a good real time measure of the state of the pipe, the other is that our workflow especially for closing an opportunity is just wuite complex and they basically need to call us each time because they’re not in good enough practice, even though all of the aspects we’re asking to track are necessary for compliance, execution et cetera.
What are the tools, either native or third-party, which made the biggest difference in either of these things for you – bearing in mind the in person customer meeting context?