A Beginner’s Guide on How to Use Salesforce

If you want to have a successful sales team, then there is one non-negotiable piece of software that you have to have in your tech stack: CRM. A CRM, or customer relationship management tool, is what maps out your customer’s journey throughout its interaction with your business. Salesforce is without competition the top dog in the CRM space. Knowing the method, though, is no easy task. Because of how powerful the platform is, it can also be daunting to set up.

In this article, we’re going to take a look at what using Salesforce looks like day-to-day. Read on for some great Salesforce tips targeted at beginners.

Set up the Back End Correctly

The first thing to do when you get a Salesforce instance is to set up the back end of it correctly. There are a lot of options within the Salesforce administrative side, so it’s important not to get lost in all of the nitty-gritty and instead to focus on the most important pieces of the setup.

The first thing that you’ll want to go through is user provisioning. This involves creating all of the necessary profiles for the users at your company that will be using the CRM.

Within the user provisioning pages, you’ll be able to enable some very granular permissions sets. This enables you to lock down the private data that you don’t want visible to all users see here.

Understand the Objects

There are many objects in Salesforce that store various record types. We’ll quickly go through the most important standard objects that you should know.

The first objects to note are the lead and contact objects. These are the objects that store information on the people that you interact with during the sales process. This will include information on sales activity, the prospect’s contact info, geographic data, and the like.

Another related object is the account object. This is where you can store information about companies that you are reaching out to if you are a B2B organization. You can also link contacts to accounts.

Last but not least, you have the opportunity object. This is the record that you will leverage to track a deal’s progress in your Salesforce instance. An opportunity houses information about the stage that a deal is in, estimated close date, and the like.

Bring in Systems to Action Salesforce

One other surprising benefit about Salesforce is the number of programs out there that plug into Salesforce. There are lots of different applications that will integrate with and extend the functionality of your Salesforce.

If you’re going to be bringing a lot of related systems in, make sure that you learn more about potentially hiring a Salesforce administrator to manage all of those systems.

How to Use Salesforce, Made Simple

There you have it! Equipped with this guide on how to use Salesforce, you should now have a far better idea of how to leverage CRM for the success of your sales organization.

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