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Salesforce activity management

Written by Ana Canteli on September 27, 2019

The commercial process is one of the main phases of any business because it shows the economy of the organization: its purchases, sales, collections, logistics, inventory, and more. At first, the operation is simple; you close agreements and achieve goals. But over time, the workload increases, you start to be busier, and your business management gets complicated. How do you carry out the activity management of your sales team? Do you think you are losing sales opportunities? Are you deviating from the profile of your target? It is essential to have an information and control system that helps you manage the salesforce best practices to control the daily activity of the sales department. Fortunately, the word control is beginning to lose its negative connotations, at least for professionals in the sector. Do not forget that information is vital to making appropriate decisions, which is a strategic factor in the long term in a context as competitive as the current market.

Objectives of the sales management activity

The director of the commercial department must have a proactive profile since their role is continuously exposed to external factors. It is necessary to take technological innovation as an ally, for this reason, to conceive, implement and develop a business plan that helps them achieve a multitude of objectives, end to end, and all of them related. For this, OpenKM can be the ideal technological solution that helps them throughout the salesforce tasks.

• Define a global business plan in the organization: from the privacy policy to the cookies policy, through the production, logistics, or sales & distribution departments. The person in charge of the salesforce activity management must have the relations and influence of all the areas of the company that affect the work of the sales team in mind. The OpenKM software is 100% configurable; this makes the user adoption of the Salesforce platform very quick, customized to meet all the needs of every department of the organization.
• Promote efficiency in processes and operations: in OpenKM features such as automatic tasks, zone OCR, and the workflow engine allow the organization to automate business processes in the salesforce administration system. It handles the majority of administrative, routine, and low-value tasks; we must don't forget that vendors are not very fond of administrative work; while allowing for improved productivity of sales teams. On the other hand, the OpenKM sales manager provides transparent integration with any application that the company already has. This greatly facilitates the work of the staff of the entire organization, while amortizing the investment in the short term.
• Update the business model to the objectives and circumstances of the market: the technological solutions used by the company must be a tool that helps staff to meet their objectives and goals. It should facilitate contact with the client to assist in attracting new customers. Analyze the level of customer satisfaction to build loyalty, provide metrics and business reports about pending, in progress and completed events and tasks done by the sales team. All this can help to summarize the degree of compliance with the business plan. This is something that benefits not only your vendors but also sales managers to track their business activity. OpenKM design makes it possible for the organization not only to quickly and easily apply its procedures but also to promptly detect deviations or unexpected results; something that makes analysis and decision making much more manageable. Identify savings opportunities, detect points of improvement in the performance of your business sales teams, etc.

Benefits of commercial management control

One does not win by spending time with plans, strategies, and project management for trivialities, but rather to achieve objectives and goals at a strategic and global level. Here we cite only some of the benefits that are obtained from the implementation of a salesforce administration system in your business.

• Increase in sales and consolidation of profitability. Thanks to the task management system that your company can create with OpenKM, the sales director can analyze the global commercial activity and that of each sales manager individually. How does the salesforce calendar evolve? How does each team member contribute to the achievement of the project? Without prejudice to the applicable business intelligence approach, the OpenKM salesforce platform can be used to provide the metrics, statistics, and reports that the organization needs.
• Improve communication: both internal and external. The OpenKM system includes communication functionalities that serve as a basis for the company to quickly fulfill its tasks and events. Through the chat the team can hold conversations in real-time, add notes to the documents related to the commercial activity; relate them, or see if they are related to other relevant contents for making decisions, etc. Externally with OpenKM, we can create a customer service portal, where they will find all the information they need, in addition to managing their data entry. The KCenter platform gives total flexibility to the company that wishes to use this option.
• Improve and strengthen relationships with the most critical clients, without losing sight of the small and medium-sized client portfolios. Although big customers can be a challenge, they are also a significant source of income. Thanks to them, or with them, we can bring new products and services to the market, with the guarantee that in them we have a client that we have a good relationship with and is satisfied with us. OpenKM helps in covering all customers, taking into account the relevant information, describing the capabilities required and exchanges that have occurred throughout the business relationship, helping to find the most vital data.
• It dynamizes the entire organization. With OpenKM, the company can be in touch with its vendors, even if they are displaced on a business trip or at points of purchases away from the company's headquarters. New possibilities are also opened for other teams of the entity, such as teleworking since with OpenKM the staff can access all the enterprise content they need to work from anywhere. Multi-platform system access makes work possible from any location. This can help increase staff satisfaction, which can reconcile work with their personal life more easily.

Elements of a good salesforce activity management system

To fulfill the objectives of the business plan of the company, it should not only contemplate the goals of sales managers or project managers. It is ideal to have the following components to ensure effective tasks and events management:

Career plan

Commercial employees are usually ambitious and dynamic people. The process of selecting and training a vendor is not often an easy task. Therefore, when considering the fact of incorporating a new staff member, knowing that they also see us in their professional life in the long term is essential. The human resources department or the sales manager can use OpenKM to store information, documents or reports related to the commercial professional development in the organization, aligned with the growth plan of your business. Through the OpenKM tasks and events manager, individual or group meetings can be prepared, with some frequency that helps us maintain the motivation of the staff and team spirit.

Incentive plan

The objectives present in the business plan of the company must be correctly defined, must be ambitious to motivate the commercials, but at the same time achievable to avoid the frustration of the vendor, and be defined in the salesforce calendar. This approach should be accompanied by a series of incentives that encourage the commercial department as an active and integrated part of the progress of the business and increase their capabilities to stimulate them in their professional development.

Training and coaching

Intimately linked to the career plan, but depending on the corporate culture of the company, it can be included within the objectives of the organization or managed based on staff requests from mentoring programs to recycling courses, offering certifications and official degrees, etc. The possibilities are endless and new communication features of OpenKM together with the use of the task manager, and activity history can help us to make the salesforce activity more attractive.

Social Network Management

Today they are already a component of the business processes of any organization. The integration facilities presented by OpenKM software (SDK's in Java, PHP, and .NET together with the complete API of the system) allows our commercial force to efficiently manage the clients and stakeholders that prefer social networks as a communication source.

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