How to give your team a better Salesforce experience without leaving Salesforce

Salesforce is the juggernaut in the CRM space. The company is expected to pull in more than $21 billion in revenue this year alone. They serve more than 150,000 businesses. But all this success doesn’t mean the experience is flawless.

Just search Google or social media for “Salesforce experience”. You’ll find plenty of complaints, but as this Quora post from 2017 suggests, one reason Salesforce’s experience continues down this path is that the software is often sold through a top-down process.

This generally means that the Salesforce sales team is talking with executives at the companies they are trying to sell to. The executives have boxes that need to be checked, and Salesforce is more than happy to oblige them. Salesforce is also designed to be customizable. When you combine the incredible number of features and the almost limitless customizations available, Salesforce can become unwieldy for many teams.

But what do you do if your team is required to use Salesforce? Just suck it up? Until recently, that may have been the case, but with Laserfocus, you can layer on a beautiful, productive, and simple experience, without leaving Salesforce.

Connecting Laserfocus

Let’s take a look at how you can improve your overall Salesforce experience while also improving your team’s productivity. I’ll be using a test Salesforce account, which, to be honest, is already pretty scary to look at. Your account probably looks similar, but with significantly more data.

Now, how do I find my upcoming tasks? How do I get back to my dashboard? What’s the deal flow looking like? Many of you know the answers to these questions because you’ve learned over time how to navigate the interface. That doesn’t mean new employees will know how to find these things, and it doesn’t mean that you like navigating the interface.

Let’s fix that. Head on over to Laserfocus and sign up for an account. The process is easy because you’re signing up for an account using your existing Salesforce account. This means that in addition to signing up for Laserfocus, you are also linking it to your Salesforce data.

Once you sign in with Salesforce, your free trial will start, and your data will be imported. When the syncing process is complete, you’ll see a screen like this:

Each card on the screen is intentional. Each is clear. I know that I have 2 overdue tasks. I have 13 opportunities that are potentially worth over a million dollars. I now feel like I’m in the driver’s seat rather than Salesforce being in the driver’s seat. And yet, everything I do here syncs with Salesforce. Let’s see what this looks like in practice.

Updating Laserfocus AND Salesforce

We’ll use my two overdue tasks as an example. If I click on that card, I will see the following:

Now, before I do anything, let’s find these tasks in Salesforce. Back in the Salesforce UI, I have to find the dropdown that lets me switch between various views. If I select the “Tasks” view, I can see this:

So, we know that the tasks in Salesforce match the tasks in Laserfocus. What happens if I complete a task?

By clicking on an overdue task in Laserfocus, I get a detailed view. Here I realize that both of my overdue tasks are tied to the same customer. So, let’s pretend I give Barb a call. I note that call, and I complete the tasks.

Create a new follow-up.Here’s what Laserfocus looks like.

This is clean, efficient, and easy to understand. But if the rest of the company is using Salesforce, we need to make sure that anything my team does is properly reflected in Salesforce. Let’s take a look.

Back in Salesforce, if I click on the opportunity name in my task list, I can get to a detailed view. This view shows that, yes, everything I’ve done in Laserfocus is reflected in Salesforce:

Perfect! We know that all updates are synced back and forth. Now, we can dive into how to use Laserfocus to drive your day rather than letting your day drive you.

The Anti-Salesforce Experience

Time in a CRM should be minimal. You should be able to find your tasks, look up specific info, and be on your way. Ideally, your day should be spent talking with prospects, closing deals, and following up with big customers. Laserfocus helps you do exactly that.

Using my example dashboard, I can see my opportunities are stacking up. That’s all well and good, but I want to quickly find the best opportunities to follow up on today.

If I click on the Pipeline Review card from the overview page, I will be dropped into an easy-to-understand view of all my opportunities, displayed in table format. Even better, I can easily adjust the columns that are shown in this view. I don’t have to click through multiple layers of settings to make this change, I can simply click Edit Columns button on the top-right of the screen, and I can start adjusting my table view to fit my needs.

I want to find the highest potential value deals that have a close date within the last month. To do that, I’ll edit my table view to include the Expected Amount column:

Now, I can add a filter for the expected deal close date by clicking on the Filters button at the top-right. You’ll notice there are already some filters in place. I’m actually OK with those, so I’ll leave them alone. But I will click the plus button next to those filters so I can add an additional filter. I’m going to filter on Close Date:

This shows that I have two opportunities that I should be looking at. One of those opportunities has a much higher expected value than the other, so I know I should be focusing on that:

With just a couple of clicks, I’ve prioritized my day. Of course, in a fully built out sales pipeline, you will surely have more than two deals matching these criteria (or whatever criteria you set), and you can see how quickly being able to filter on specific information can allow you to work faster, and it can create more flexibility.

In a system where you have to set tasks based on a rigid system or framework, it becomes hard to deviate from those tasks, even if there is a smarter way to approach your prospect pipeline. Laserfocus cuts through the complexity and gives you the agility needed to close more deals.

Wrapping Up

You just learned how you can free yourself from the Salesforce experience without actually leaving Salesforce. This is especially powerful in organizations where you may have no choice but to use Salesforce or in organizations where some people truly love Salesforce but others don’t.

Laserfocus gives you all the power you need to speed up your workflow and close more deals while keeping the sales pipeline data in sync with Salesforce. If you’re ready to see this in action, sign up today!