5 native Salesforce Lightning features that boost your Sales team’s productivity
Insufficient user adoption is one of the most common reasons a Salesforce project fails, especially when it comes to your Sales team. As the core revenue-driving engine, your Sales team should have a highly customized platform that delivers features that makes a sale rep’s life more comfortable and their daily work more efficient. There are many tools and features that you can use and innovate on to leverage your Salesforce for the Sales team. Here are my top 5 favourite simple Salesforce Lightning features to boost your sales team’s productivity.
1. “Guidance for Success” in the Path
Along with the visualized steps of a business process, you can provide your Sales reps customized guidance for success and highlight key fields for each step to boost productivity to another level.
The key fields can help your sales reps quickly address the most critical information in each step without scrolling up and down. The success for guidance is the perfect place to provide best practices, tips, and links to your playbook or company policy information to your end-users. For example, suppose your org has many required fields or automative processes where some fields must have particular input. In that case, you can either place those fields to the “key fields” or mention them in the “Success for Guidance” area to avoid errors and flow exceptions at the time of saving the record. This feature doesn’t only help your sales reps to do the right thing at the right time but also saves them tons of time to fix the error back and forth.
2. Utilize “Set Component Visibility” on the Lightning page
Showing the right information at the right time can help your Sales reps head in the right direction and make the right move. Instead of dumping all the information to your reps on a record page, you can control when a component appears on a lightning record page by adding filter conditions and logic to its properties in Lightning App Builder.
For example, you can add some customized rich content to your page based on the record’s field value. They could be warning messages for some incomplete fields or links to some resources based on some given information, such as industry or competitors.
You can also add some actions and recommendations to your page when certain conditions are met. Those can be actions, flows, or strategies. By grouping them, your sales reps can have a clear view of what should be done at a specific time of a deal.
In the example above, the warning message will show up to remind your sales reps to link a campaign to certain types of deals. It also provides some links to external competitor analysis resources based on the competitor information on the record. Actions and Recommendations are also showing up dynamically based on the stage and field input on the record.
3. Enable “Account Team” for collaboration and record sharing
When your OWD is set to “Private” or “Public Read” for the account object and its related records, your reps will often ask the admin to help them share the records with other team members. But this type of request could potentially negatively impact the collaboration and closing of the deals if delayed. One way to avoid this situation is to allow the account owner to define the account team members and provide them access to its related opportunities and cases as needed. Admins only need to audit the existing access regularly or upon request. If you’re not sure how to audit “who sees what,” make sure to check out my other article on this topic here.
When your Sales reps often work with a specific group of people, they even can set up their default team members and add them with only one click.
Besides the benefits mentioned above, as of the winter ’20 release, many upgrades on this feature became available. Now “Account team member” is a first-class object to be used and customized. Admins can also use Data Loader to perform a bulk import. You can also automate your Account Team Creation in process builder.
4. Enable Einstein Opportunity Scoring
This previously paid feature became free as of 22nd April 2020. However, in my opinion, this feature might not be the perfect choice for every org. It uses artificial intelligence to assess your past opportunities and their attributes to calculate your future opportunities and assign each of them a number between 1–99 that indicates the likelihood of winning. That being said, the orgs with very little data from the past or very little quality data from the past might not receive accurate predictions.
The best way to use this feature is to have the calculated numbers shown in the opportunity list views and let them help your sales reps prioritize deals and quick spot pipeline at risk and root causes.
The scores will dynamically change as the inputs on your record change. Einstein will also re-assess your org’s data and adjust the prediction model accordingly every ten days. If you want to learn more about this and have this set up in your org, make sure to check out this official implementation document.
5. Embed Report Chart in Salesforce Records
Sales reps often spend a lot of time jumping between different reports and dashboards to determine the specific important matrix to help them manage accounts. The amount of time spent searching for that information wasted a lot of their energy to perform strategic planning. Thanks to lightning capability, now we can have those visualized representations embed into account, opportunity, and contact record pages to provide our sales reps more manageable and quicker access.
For example, in my above example, I embed a bar chart to summarize the deals in this particular account in each different stage. When sales rep opens the account record, they will have a more comprehensive view of the customer.
Besides the features mentioned above, what are your favourite native features that help sales reps boost their productivity?
