2022 put sales leaders in a difficult position of navigating the ship into an uncertain path while their crew kept the operations and systems sailing. While it is part of business to show confidence, many business leaders were truly optimistic about the condition of affairs. That said, news of layoffs caused a distinct lack of trust between upper management at the organization's top and those who work closer to the operations level with salespeople and sales.
During the recovery phase, resilient leaders must motivate their teams to overcome the uncertainties in a recession. However, strong leadership requires even greater levels of loyalty, and trust fosters loyalty. We saw many leaders successfully navigate through the initial hectic unpredictable stages of the recovery phase, developing a sizeable bank of trust.
In the growth phase, organizations begin to shift their attention from crisis management to managing the transition back to a future state. What sales teams realized was the need for a different skill set for the project management office for recovery than for growth. Leadership shifted its emphasis from being solely reactive to planning forward on how to transform the business. The key lesson here is that leaders should grab the opportunity to motivate their staff by envisioning a wealthy future and accepting trust as the ship to sail there.
While the start of the pandemic was a challenging year for businesses worldwide, several leaders surveyed claimed their organizations came out of the pandemic with greater confidence. In Salesforce’s State of Sales report, there is a clear correlation in the study between those who reported greater financial success and those who had a stronger impression of their organizational flexibility. So what did we learn from Salesforce and Sales leaders in 2022?
There is no longer a struggle. It is now a year of expansion and it begins with tactical insights.
There has been so much uncertainty in recent years. If you spend all your time attempting to control everything, you won't have time to focus on what matters most to your business. Accept uncertainty rather than fighting it. Maintain your ideals as well. It is critical to hold on to what you truly believe in, no matter how much your circumstances change. When everything else is moving, this will be your anchor.
To achieve proper results, it has been observed that to properly understand and explore new ideas, new goods, and new platforms, you must occasionally pause, slow down, and re-evaluate your business. The importance of data in this discovery cannot be overstated. It lets us see what works and what doesn't in real time. What can we do to improve our outcome? That is an absolute home run. The war for talent is on. It would be best to approach your recruiting strategy as you approach your prospecting plan. Who is your ideal candidate? Is it a partner or a full-time salaried person? Determine the appropriate level of experience, budget and timeline.Then go after the best option for your business. Because your competitors are continually doing the same. Bring in your CRO, COO, and CEO to help make decisions. Nothing beats a C-level executive involvement.
To Empower Go-to-Market Teams with a Single Source of Truth.
Leaders must be deliberate if progress and change for diversity and inclusion in sales are to be made. Rather than simply hitting sales targets, focus and dedication on creating an environment where everyone may achieve. This will define the sales team, individual contributors', sales leaders, and the organization's success.
Every organization embarking on a sales transformation must invest in sales enablement. It all comes down to putting go-to-market plans into reality, collaborating inside the chief revenue officer's company and across product, finance, and HR teams to guarantee that clients receive value.
It's critical to have only one trustworthy source of information. Using technology like Remark, it could ensure that everyone had access to the knowledge they needed to succeed.
Moving Forward with Data Flexibility
Beyond retraining, sales directors had various resources to guide their sales teams to success. In the same way as always, they placed the needs of the customer first. Flexibility is essential, and leaders ranked it as their #1 strategy for success in the upcoming year. The foundation of well-informed decision-making was high quality and easily accessible data, which is also seen as essential. Fortunately for sales leaders, clients in the trenches agree with them about the strategies that will advance the company.
The process of merging data from various sources into a single, uniform perspective is known as data integration.
Data integration ensures your information is always up to date. When a data integration rule is activated, a tool like Salesforce can determine if any new data is available and compare it to current records. So as soon as a new record is saved, it is checked. Records are updated with fresh data based on the rule parameters. The data service, the object and field specifications, and the data integration rules can all be changed. A set of triggers and processing guidelines are also included in the rules for updated records.
Three common use cases for data-level integrations in Salesforce:
- From Salesforce to outside systems
- Systems outside of Salesforce
- From one Salesforce organization to another
Since we know that there are many more integration-related issues that Salesforce Architects must deal with, I’ll continue to post more blogs in the future covering these common integration issues (for example event-driven integration, efficient employee or customer-facing workflows using process integration and other issues).
Surprised with how leaders pivoted for recovery and growth? Was there anything else you saw? Personally, I can’t wait to see what leaders do in 2023.
This was part 2 of a 4-series blog on the State of Sales and Salesforce. If you haven’t read part 1 yet, the overview, read here.
By Anthony Trinh. Anthony is the Founder and Principal Salesforce Consultant at Efforceless.
About Efforceless
Efforceless helps business leaders scale their team. Founded only by seasoned current and former Shopify employees, we polished what is needed for a successful Salesforce implementation and as a result our clients have the smartest Salesforce team working for them at less the cost of one Salesforce hire. For more information about Efforceless’s Salesforce consulting services and solutions, visit: www.efforceless.com
About Salesforce
Salesforce, the global CRM leader, empowers companies of every size and industry to digitally transform and create a 360° view of their customers. For more information about Salesforce (NYSE: CRM), visit: www.salesforce.com