Win More Deals Faster By Design

Savvy industry leaders are transforming their business by first transforming their sales organizations—the lifeblood of their companies. For most, that means integrating a CRM solution, like Salesforce, to collect information about customers and potential buyers as they move through the lifecycle.

But, while many CRMs are extremely powerful, the standard interfaces and experiences aren’t always the most intuitive. Compounding the problem is the addition of new data sources through M&A or inter-departmental convergence. This makes it difficult to pull together all of the accumulated information about a customer—their current tech stack, what problems they have, what content they’ve viewed—into a 360-degree view sales teams can use to make an informed approach.

Legacy enterprises benefit from having an established name in the marketplace. But disruptors have the benefit of starting from scratch with their sales organization and sales technology stack. But enterprises don’t have to settle for inefficient processes or technology hampered by legacy systems if they can just improve in four key areas.

1

Sales has a transparency problem

Until we understand how salespeople work, we can’t give them the tools they really need.

Organizations are investing in technologies to foster collaboration and ensure everyone has the information and tools needed to succeed, no matter where they work.

But, while most teams—accounting, marketing, HR—operate with a certain level of autonomy, there is still a high level of visibility and accountability around how they spend their time. In contrast, every member of the sales team works differently. They have their own preferences for communicating, a schedule for talking with customers versus doing “paperwork,” and a unique perspective on using technology in the sales process. That’s why it’s important for sales tools to fit a salesperson’s needs and not the other way around. If sales won’t use the expensive, customized CRM system, then it’s more of a liability than a benefit.

Getting the technology stack right starts with an understanding of what sales needs and wants.

That’s why it’s important for sales tools to fit a salesperson’s needs and not the other way around.

If sales won’t use the expensive, customized CRM system, then it’s more of a liability than a benefit. Getting the technology stack right starts with an understanding of what sales needs and wants.

2

Poorly designed tools frustrate salespeople and hamper adoption.

When sales tools are inconsistently designed, or poorly integrated with other systems, adoption plummets. The result: incomplete pipeline data that impacts every part of the business.

Before you can know where you’re going, you have to know where you are. To make more meaningful, strategic business decisions now and in the future, sales leadership needs access to real-time, quality data about sales opportunities. With accurate and up-to-date information on current, potential, and even missed opportunities, and an understanding of how and where salespeople spend their time, leadership can quickly identify what’s working and what’s not.

Properly implemented sales technologies share three main commonalities in successful organizations. They are:

Designed for the end-user with a consistent user experience (UX).
Fully integrated with each other and with the entire marketing stack.
Consistently adopted across the organization.

Without these three things, leaders will make decisions on everything from strategic direction to daily workflow processes based on incomplete or inaccurately represented data.

Of the three “must-haves” mentioned here, adoption is the most critical. Even poorly implemented sales tools can yield helpful information if the data collection is done consistently. A Forrester report on salesperson-centric software found that industry leaders judge whether or not to invest in sales tools by analyzing adoption rates of the tool at companies similar to their own.1

When the tools sales uses are designed with their habits, preferences, and needs in mind, adoption will naturally follow.

3

Each of these customers is not like the rest.

When sales doesn’t understand the customers’ needs or where the customer is in the buying cycle, every call is a cold call.

Almost without exception, business environments today are full of legacy vendors and disruptive startups alike, all after the same budgets from the same contacts within companies. To a buyer, vendor websites and vendor marketing materials can all look very similar. So, it’s in the details of the sales process where deals are made or lost.

For conversations with prospects, sales teams need to know more than just contact information and at which tradeshow the prospect stopped by the booth. They need to know what the prospect’s existing tech stack looks like, what kinds of problems they’re encountering, and even what content on your website they’ve already viewed.

When working with existing customers, where the probability of selling new products and services is as much as 50% greater than selling to new customers, there’s no substitute for timely and relevant data. What does their tech stack look like? What products and services are they using now and what additional products have you already discussed with them? What’s their budget cycle, and when do they normally make buying decisions? All of this is critical information to have on hand when a buyer is ready to open a dialog and a sales call from your competitor is just a chatbot away.

Getting this level of information from customers and prospects and into your sales systems doesn’t just happen. It requires a digital strategy involving person-to-person relationships coupled with intelligent relationship management tools that turn interactions into actionable intelligence.

That doesn't happen by accident; it happens by design.

4

Mismatched buyer data collection and sales prospecting tools yield poor insights.

A great CRM alone doesn’t guarantee good results. Full buyer visibility and understanding requires a combination of CRM data and the insights and experience of salespeople to generate actionable data and increase efficiencies across the sales organization.

Business environments can change overnight. Last week’s data could already be out of date, and by the time sales can get on a customer’s calendar, weeks can go by. This means our solutions for collecting sales information and our methods of entering and retrieving it need to operate quickly and efficiently to maximize interactions, wherever and whenever they happen.

Gartner research shows that just 24% of companies believe their sales technology implementation is optimized.”

illustration of man holding ipad, with content floating above him.

Behind the scenes, CRMs need to track how your prospects found you, what content they viewed and when, and then create a 360° profile of those collective interactions for easy viewing, sharing, and updating.

On the front end, sales needs real-time information. Often, there’s little time to pull together data from numerous sources in an attempt to see an accurate picture of the customer. Information should be organized simply, attractively, with minimal click-throughs, and with maximum visuals.

Giving salespeople the tools and data they need to understand your buyers doesn’t just increase the likelihood of closing a deal; it frees up time to close more deals. When sales reps have all the relevant information about a customer or prospect at their fingertips, they spend less time qualifying leads, engaging with the wrong contacts, and preparing for sales calls. They spend more time building relationships with the people who need your products and who have the power to make a purchase decision. And according to a Forrester report on data quality, neglecting to manage your data properly impacts future revenues, erodes customer satisfaction, is detrimental to employee productivity, and can decrease your regulatory compliance.

Once we’ve increased our understanding of both our sales team and our customers, we can turn to our technology stack. Here again, our knowledge of both our salespeople’s habits and preferences, coupled with an understanding of what information we already have and what we still need, guides our sales transformation.

1 Bruno, John, Stephen Powers, Meredith Cain, and Peter Harrison. How To Improve Your Top Line With Salesperson-Centric Software. Rep. Forrester Research, 5 Oct. 2016. Web. 30 Mar. 2017.
2 Are ecommerce customer retention strategies working? 2016
https://www.clickz.com/are-ecommerce-customer-retention-strategies-improving/105454/
3 Top Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Sales Technologies, Gartner.com,
https://www.gartner.com/en/sales/insights/sales-technologies
4 Goetz, Michele, Kate Leggett, Josh Bernoff, Leslie Owens, Stephen Powers, Victoria Boutan, Deepti Datta, Abigail Komlenic, and Shaun McGovern. Fix The Data Problems That Destroy Your Customer Effectiveness. Rep. Forrester Research, 18 Feb. 2015. Web. 19 Jan. 2017.

With the release of Dynamic Forms, Salesforce has been moving away from its page layout editor. Dynamic Forms is a huge time-saver for admins and developers because it lets you drag individual fields onto your Lightning page and also manage them in a single place. Yet, today, that capability is only available for custom objects. It's not available in Experience Cloud or mobile either.
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What if you need to configure conditional visibility on fields for standard objects? Skuid can help.
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Conditionally render a column/field on the opportunity record based on an account record value

One of the most basic elements of great UX is showing only what the user needs to see in order to do their work. Conversely, surfacing items that users can’t do anything with only frustrates them.

With Skuid, you can set display logic based on record type to both suppress what users don’t need to see and also provide them with more options on a page. Display logic helps you determine what fields, buttons, sections, and actions are available to your users.

In our webinar on this topic, we showed a list detail page built using Skuid. The page displayed an interactive account list along with contextual KPIs; when you click an account from the list, the page updates the KPIs.

The page included key account details like account name, parent account ID, billing city, industry, and record type ID, and the record types were corporation, school, and special account.

Let’s say you have reps focused on higher education. Because they have nothing with which to populate the parent account ID field on that page, they’ll find it confusing to see it at all. Yet, reps targeting corporations will need to use that field often.

Sellers have one of the toughest jobs out there. Skuid helps you personalize their Salesforce experience by hiding what’s irrelevant to them and showing only what they need to see

Edit multiple records types inline.

Record types can be used for many different things, from defining page layouts in Salesforce to defining processes. Because of this, one highly requested Salesforce feature is the ability to edit multiple record types inline within a single list view. You can’t do this out of the box yet, but that’s where Skuid can help.

We treat record types like any other reference field. That means you can easily pull record types into Skuid forms and tables, giving you more control to support how your users work.

In the webinar, we showed an account list page created using Skuid that displayed all our accounts, across all account record types (i.e., not confined to just one record type at a time).

In this example, we chose a dropdown field to display the record type, but you can choose any other type of field for display. As we edited the account list, depending on the record type we chose, the next dropdown would only display options relevant to that record type, respecting the dependent picklists configured in Salesforce.

Again, Skuid makes this possible because it sits on top of your data model and process automation in Salesforce. And this is one of the benefits of working within the Salesforce ecosystem: we can take advantage of its powerful data modeling capabilities and you can unleash that power with Skuid

On building “vanilla” custom Salesforce apps

It’s the idea that there’s some configuration and some tweaking, but let's stick as close as we can to vanilla. I think it's so important and Salesforce can allow that option as well, because it means that anything you're building, especially if you keep it reasonably vanilla with a little bit of raspberry sauce, it becomes a future-proof and scalable product that you can keep adding to as you iterate with your needs. So, yeah—vanilla is good.

Amanda Beard-Neilson

Salesforce MVP and London’s Calling co-organizer

Acentralized information hub is the solution to a disconnected view of your customer data.

To launch and evolve a solution at the speed of business today, you must be able to develop, deploy, and iterate (and repeat!) quickly and securely— particularly when dealing with sensitive customer and employee data.

To prevent deeper fragmentation in the sales organization, the solution must also be unified. Rather than configuring a dozen disparate systems or data sources to meet certain design and data standards, sales organizations need an easy to use, unified foundation across all of sales’ data libraries. And this hub needs a consistent and branded look and feel for ease of use and easy information sharing.

Thanks to advances and efficiencies in application development, industry leaders have new options for consolidating sales’ existing technology stack into a unified hub without sacrificing functionality or availability.

New no-code and low-code development approaches let IT leverage the data and security of existing sales software and bring it into one place, greatly diminishing data fragmentation, and doing so quickly and using far fewer IT resources both now and in the future. This isn’t a technology to replace your CRM implementation—only improve it—unifying both functionality and data, and offering everyone in the sales organization the custom apps and data dashboards they need, fast.

When new needs arise, admins and developers can quickly create scalable, custom, enterprise-grade applications that don’t contribute to technical debt or put proprietary company or customer data at risk.

By bringing all sales data into one user experience and designing app experiences around the unique needs of each role, organizations can excel at the key competencies that help them win deals: understanding customers and prospects, visualizing pipeline, and accelerating efficiency and productivity. And they can do it fast.

Request a demo

Success with Skuid

Traditional user experience customization costs far too much money and time and rarely yields results that satisfy everyone. Skuid provides a fundamentally new model for creating digital experiences, quickly, and with little to no new code required, offering a better ROI over traditional CRM customization efforts.

Here are a few examples of how creating a truly unified UI with a low-code platform helps companies save thousands of dollars a year, increase productivity and user adoption, and gain thousands of dollars in pipeline.

The time is now.

As business environments continue to change, organizations are under increasing pressure to deliver more value with the same or fewer resources and with far less predictable structure and data. Digital transformation, often an overwhelming proposition, is best approached in stages, concentrating efforts on one part of your company at a time. It makes sense to start with the part of the business that customers interact with personally, your sales organization.

Now you can design a unified user experience for sales, giving them the information they need quickly and beautifully without creating an endless cycle of maintenance updates and without impacting Salesforce admin and developer productivity.
Thousands of builders have used Skuid to create custom digital experiences for millions of users across dozens of countries, dramatically increasing adoption and innovation—up to 10 times faster. You can too.

Chapter 1

Transform the business, one piece at a time, starting with sales.

Chapter 2

Four challenges preventing enterprises from closing more deals

1

Sales has a transparency problem

Until we understand how salespeople work, we can’t give them the tools they really need.

That’s why it’s important for sales tools to fit a salesperson’s needs and not the other way around.

2

Poorly designed tools frustrate salespeople and hamper adoption.

When sales tools are inconsistently designed, or poorly integrated with other systems, adoption plummets. The result: incomplete pipeline data that impacts every part of the business.

Properly implemented sales technologies share three main commonalities in successful organizations. They are:

Without these three things, leaders will make decisions on everything from strategic direction to daily workflow processes based on incomplete or inaccurately represented data.

3

Each of these customers is not like the rest.

When sales doesn’t understand the customers’ needs or where the customer is in the buying cycle, every call is a cold call.

That doesn't happen by accident; it happens by design.

4

Mismatched buyer data collection and sales prospecting tools yield poor insights.

A great CRM alone doesn’t guarantee good results. Full buyer visibility and understanding requires a combination of CRM data and the insights and experience of salespeople to generate actionable data and increase efficiencies across the sales organization.

Behind the scenes, CRMs need to track how your prospects found you, what content they viewed and when, and then create a 360° profile of those collective interactions for easy viewing, sharing, and updating.

Chapter 3

Create a seamless sales stack and unified user experience.

Conditionally render a column/field on the opportunity record based on an account record value

Edit multiple records types inline.

On building “vanilla” custom Salesforce apps

Amanda Beard-Neilson

Chapter 4

How to design a unified sales solution

To launch and evolve a solution at the speed of business today, you must be able to develop, deploy, and iterate (and repeat!) quickly and securely— particularly when dealing with sensitive customer and employee data.

Success with Skuid

The time is now.

Chapter 1

Transform the business, one piece at a time, starting with sales.

1

Sales has a transparency problem

Until we understand how salespeople work, we can’t give them the tools they really need.

That’s why it’s important for sales tools to fit a salesperson’s needs and not the other way around.

2

Poorly designed tools frustrate salespeople and hamper adoption.

When sales tools are inconsistently designed, or poorly integrated with other systems, adoption plummets. The result: incomplete pipeline data that impacts every part of the business.

Properly implemented sales technologies share three main commonalities in successful organizations. They are:

Without these three things, leaders will make decisions on everything from strategic direction to daily workflow processes based on incomplete or inaccurately represented data.

3

Each of these customers is not like the rest.

When sales doesn’t understand the customers’ needs or where the customer is in the buying cycle, every call is a cold call.

That doesn't happen by accident; it happens by design.

4

Mismatched buyer data collection and sales prospecting tools yield poor insights.

A great CRM alone doesn’t guarantee good results. Full buyer visibility and understanding requires a combination of CRM data and the insights and experience of salespeople to generate actionable data and increase efficiencies across the sales organization.

Behind the scenes, CRMs need to track how your prospects found you, what content they viewed and when, and then create a 360° profile of those collective interactions for easy viewing, sharing, and updating.

Conditionally render a column/field on the opportunity record based on an account record value

Edit multiple records types inline.

On building “vanilla” custom Salesforce apps

Amanda Beard-Neilson

To launch and evolve a solution at the speed of business today, you must be able to develop, deploy, and iterate (and repeat!) quickly and securely— particularly when dealing with sensitive customer and employee data.

Success with Skuid

The time is now.

Join builders, makers, and app creators

To launch and evolve a solution at the speed of business today, you must be able to develop, deploy, and iterate (and repeat!) quickly and securely— particularly when dealing with sensitive customer and employee data.