Building a Salesforce-Powered Front Office: A Quick-Start Guide

© Rashed A. Chowdhury 2021

R. A. ChowdhuryBuilding a Salesforce-Powered Front Officehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-6676-2_1

1. Lead to Cash: Front Office Process Tower

Rashed A. Chowdhury¹  

(1)

Marietta, GA, USA

This chapter starts with an overview of the Front Office process tower and typical activities for each of those towers. We will discuss various concepts related to Front Office processes and tools consideration to support those processes. By the end of this chapter, you will have learned the fundamentals of an integrated Front Office powered by various solutions and modules from the Salesforce ecosystem. The following topics will be covered in this chapter:

Front Office process tower

Lead generation

Tools for Lead generation

Marketing automation

Tools for marketing automation

Sales management

Tools for sales management

Configure Price Quote (CPQ)

Tools for CPQ

Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM)

Tools for CLM

Order fulfillment

Customer service

Revenue management

External-Facing Customer and Lead Interaction

The Front Office is where revenue is directly generated for your company, so ensuring you have a fair process for it is essential. As with anything, developing a strategy is key to success, as shown in Figure 1-1. Whether you are a new business or an existing one, get to know your market and develop a business strategy around it. Analyze the current market, gather business intelligence, and investigate marketing programs such as Partnership Growth Program or SPIFF, where salespeople are immediately rewarded through bonuses for sales.

Figure 1-1

Front Office process tower

With your business strategy developed, it is time to delve into marketing. To make sales in the first place, customers need to know you are an option. Get the word out there through a marketing campaign. Advertise your business through the Web, TV, or radio, attend trade shows, launch email campaigns, and send direct mail to potential consumers. Once the word is out, Sales Development Representatives (SDRs) should work to organize potential Leads for the sales team.

Sales are next in the Front Office Process. Use the Leads which marketing has created and convert them into sales. Configure Price Quote software, or CPQ, may be used to generate accurate quotes for potential customers in real time for a salesperson to have a quote readily available to convert a Lead.

When a sale has been made, track that order using your Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software. This will help the Front Office Process by allowing salespeople to look at existing orders when maintaining clients or converting new Leads.

Now that you have had an overview of the Front Office Process Tower, you will find more details on each area within the tower in the following chapters.

Lead Generation

Lead generation is the process of converting someone from being a stranger to being someone interested in your company and the products and services you provide. There are many ways you can generate Leads across different platforms (see Figure 1-2). Good web content and marketing campaigns are two such ways. Keep your website up to date with quality content to attract new Leads. Marketing campaigns should direct people to your website or sales representatives, so having engaging content when they make it that far is essential. The landing page of your website is the page to which prospects are first brought when they visit your site for a specific product or service, so make sure that page is well done.

Emails are also an essential tool in Lead generation. You can use email templates to save time writing a lot of emails by hand, but be sure those templates may be personalized for each client. Drip and nurture campaigns can each be used to help generate Leads. Drip campaigns are emails sent out at set intervals. They are useful for keeping your company fresh in the minds of prospects or Leads. Nurture campaigns involve emails sent based on Lead behavior. They are typically used with people who have already become Leads to help send them further along the sales path.

Figure 1-2

Lead to cash – digital transformation blueprint

Physical events may also be used to gather Leads. Trade shows are a great way to make new connections. Have a tablet or laptop at your booth where visitors can sign up with their email after viewing whatever it is you have to offer. Offering a drawing for a free product or service can entice people to sign up for your email list. Or perhaps you might host face-to-face VIP meetings with influential people who may be interested in your products. Such discussions are another critical place to have a tablet or laptop available so that you can get people’s contact information.

Tools for Lead Generation

There are quite a few useful Lead generation tools you can use that are a part of Salesforce. One such tool is Pardot Marketing Automation , which can be used to build landing pages and create forms. It can also manage social media postings and provide insights to see how your marketing efforts are going. Pardot can track visitors to your website with cookies. Information such as what parts of the site they visit or what content they interact with can be saved, and when they become reasonable prospects, that information is automatically appended to their record. This information can also help you decide how to market to each customer. Typical key performance indicators (KPIs) to consider in the Lead stage are as follows:

Lead by status (Open, Contacted, Qualified, Converted)

Lead conversation rate

Converted Lead by week, month, and quarter

The top sales rep (Sales Development Representative, SDR)

It is necessary to calculate the return on investment (ROI) on a marketing campaign and quantify opportunity influence from campaign activities to understand marketing effectiveness. It is also essential to track the conversion rate of the Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) to Sales Qualified Lead (SQL) and then benchmark them against an industry vertical to outline improvement opportunities (see Figure 1-3).

Figure 1-3

Lead lifecycle and stages

It is recommended to create a vital closed-loop follow-up process so that Leads don’t disappear or be displaced. Also, it is a common practice to establish a Lead qualification process for the entire organization, especially for the sales team, to make sure all sales reps use the same consistent methodology as Miller Heiman, MEDDIC, and so on.

Salesforce Pardot can also be used to create campaigns. One thing to keep in mind is that a Pardot Campaign is different than a traditional marketing campaign. A Pardot Campaign is a grouping of prospects. Grouped prospects may then be tracked together, and you can report on them as well. For example, all prospects who complete a form may be grouped into a Pardot Campaign (see Figure 1-4).

Figure 1-4

Pardot integrates email, landing page, marketing events, social channel, and Google Cloud with Salesforce CRM and company website

Another commonly used tool/provider is the Salesforce Marketing Cloud. Although Pardot is more typically used for B2B marketing, Salesforce Marketing is usually used for B2C marketing. Salesforce Cloud is all about supporting the customer journey through email, social media, content, and advertising. It helps to guide a customer through their interactions with your company and keep them engaged.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud allows you to have a one-on-one relationship with your customers to personalize their experience. It gives you a 360-degree view of your customers, pulling in data from multiple sources to one place. All interactions with your customers are easy to see and are grouped for visibility.

Another valuable feature of Salesforce Marketing Cloud is called triggered events. The triggered events section of the Salesforce Cloud allows you to set up actions that take place based on the action a customer takes. For example, a confirmation email can be sent to a customer after they make a purchase. Another example is we miss you emails. These can be set up by the triggered event spurred by time passing since the customer’s last visit. Or you can send a we miss you email with a coupon or special offer. This type of email will keep your company in front of the customer. Most likely, when the customer sees this email, it will result in a sale from that customer. These events can also be set up to update one set of data when a different set of data changes.

Marketing Automation

Generating Leads is just one part of marketing automation. The business processes that go into marketing automation do have some overlap with Lead generation, but there are several unique processes. For instance, drip and nurture programs may be used to generate a Lead, but they are usually focused on someone who is already a leader.

Sales enablement is the process of helping your sales and marketing teams work together to maximize sales. It means getting marketing material and tools in the hands of your sales team to engage buyers better. Automating this process as best you can saves you time and improves sales. For example, interactions with customers may be input into Salesforce CRM and then automatically viewed throughout the sales pipeline. Information related to a deal can be pulled automatically through a Salesforce CRM app, saving the rep a lot of time. It can make sure that representatives are also following up with the customer in the stated or set timeline, so the customer doesn’t lose interest.

Closed-loop marketing is also made possible through technology. Closed-loop marketing is marketing that uses data from sales team reports, in which the sales team tells marketing what happened with the Leads they were given. That way, marketing can see which sources are the best or the worst. Using Salesforce to track a prospect through the sales process may help with closed-loop marketing. For instance, you place a cookie on a visitor to your website and see what actions they take. After they fill out a form, you add them as a Lead in Salesforce and carry that data over. Later on, if they are converted by your sales team, you can look back and see where they came from initially. The records of Lead conversion will take the guesswork away from wondering how you got new customers or how to increase new customers. You will have a history of what does and doesn’t work for your company.

Marketing automation is also used to improve customer retention. Using triggered events, you can automatically welcome new customers or subscribers with an email to give an excellent first impression. Use these emails to thank them when they sign up for different services. You can also automatically send out emails when events or promotions are coming up to offer discounts or other incentives to encourage early buyers. In general, you can keep in contact with a customer more easily through automated emails while at the same time increasing their loyalty.

Determining whether a Lead is qualified can also be done for you through marketing automation. As your visitor engages with your website and its content, their Lead score will change. If they fill out a form and you now have their contact information and name, their Lead score automatically increases. This allows you to easily filter out who needs to be nurtured and who is ready to send to the sales team.

Marketing automation ensures Leads get passed along to your Sales Development Representatives. They, in turn, do more work to qualify the Lead before passing it on to your sales team. Passing only truly ready Leads to your sales team allows your sales team to work more efficiently. Your marketing automation tool, SDRs, and sales team working together will improve your sales and conversion rates.

Salesforce Sales Cloud, Salesforce’s CRM platform, is integral to marketing automation. If you can’t find a specific process you need in the base application, it is easy to go to the AppExchange and to explore. The AppExchange is a marketplace for Salesforce apps, components, and consulting services. It is the gateway that connects your business to customers.

Tools for Marketing Automation

Like Lead generation, both Pardot and Salesforce Marketing Cloud may be used for marketing automation. They include many tools for qualifying and tracking Leads, such as automated emailing and automatic Lead qualification based on a set criterion.

Pardot scores and grades your Leads to make sure you are reaching out at the right time. It also supports closed-loop reporting, making it easy to track where your Leads are coming from and your target market.

Salesforce Engage is a Pardot Salesforce solution for marketing automation. Use it to create an Engage campaign to drive sales. Before kicking off your campaign with Engage, do some planning and research. Gather the requirements for your campaign. What milestones or criteria must be met to have the campaign be considered successful? Work with your team to figure that out in advance and begin the creation of your marketing material before starting your