Sales and Marketing Alignment Requires More than Just Salesforce

Why Does It Matter?

You will lose.

Here's an all too familiar scenario ...

You are two months in on the current quarter. You have several proven campaigns running, and your team has been executing on various events to help juice sales for this quarter. You are feeling pretty good about things.

Then THAT email appears in your inbox. 

Based on the current pipeline and close rates, the sales team doesn't believe they will make this quarter's number. They look to YOU to solve the problem.

You pop open Salesforce and start digging in on current pipeline, lead sources, and follow-up. You find that important deals have stalled, high-value leads aren't being followed up on, and that things have generally started to head south.

You dig in even deeper and realize that critical data is missing, the process is slipping, and now you need to kick off an unexpected project where you and your team try to piece the necessary data together to make sense of what is happening. 

You reach out to AEs, SDRs, and members of your demand gen. team. After a week of digging, you finally get the data you need...but now you have three weeks left in the quarter...ugh.

It's not when things are going great that people care, it's when they go south that the pressure is on, and that's when data and transparency matter most!

This is NOT uncommon. We've all had to deal with:

• Lack of proper follow-up
• Broken processes
• Absence of data when it matters most 
• Reactive systems and procedures in place
• Ushering resources to deal with this PAIN manually
• Complicated root cause analysis since everyone collaborates everywhere

Why Does It happen?

Carrot vs Stick

The sales team needs a reason to update systems like Salesforce outside of management's requirement to do so. The sales team needs to have this data input result in actions and outputs from other team members that help them sell and close deals.

Lack of Process Alignment or Understanding

Your teams have to jump from system to system to keep the data up to date, and in some cases, need to remember new and/or changing processes continually.

Lack of Transparency across Teams 

Your teams struggle with visibility of data and updates across groups. Hand-offs are made, and the outcomes are unclear. If you are an ABM focused organization, updates around key accounts are hard to find, and the team struggles to maintain collaboration over time. 

It’s Just too Painful to Keep Salesforce Up to Date

Updating Salesforce can be seen as an unnatural act for sales. Salespeople have to break their normal cycle to jump into a separate and overcomplicated app to keep things up to date.

How Do You Fix It?

The new competitive advantage is here. 

It combines collaboration, community, and workflow into one seamless experience that is Microsoft Teams and Slack native. Woobot brings all these things together and seamlessly ties them into Salesforce. 

If an opportunity is not getting followed up on in a timely basis, Woobot can deliver a data-rich notification in Microsoft Teams to drive action.

Proactive vs Reactive

Woobot allows you to stay in front of the important things that are happening across your teams. You can get a notification on any data points that are trending outside of your specific requirements. For example, if a particular type of lead is not getting followed up on in a timely basis, you can deliver a data-rich notification on that event, anywhere in Microsoft Teams and Slack, so you can take immediate action to remediate the situation.

As organizations begin to realize the value of going all in on collaboration, those that miss this opportunity will be stuck playing catch up, or be left behind.

Drive Your Playbook

Woobot can help you make sure that the process and plans that you worked so hard to implement are actually being followed. Using Woobot Smart Cards, you can make sure approvals and handoffs are happening in line with those processes. It also provides visibility into those actions across your organization.

Act in Real Time

Woobot Live Cards provide you with real-time information related to what is important to you. Want to stay on top of a specific deal? Pin a Live Card to your desired Slack channel and surround your team with the information they need to close the deal!

Set a Woobot Live Card, track its changes, and align your team in Slack to close the deal!

Bringing It All Together

Drive Salesforce with a Purpose

Enabling your users to access important Salesforce data natively in Microsoft Teams and Slack takes your rollout and adoption beyond simply connecting conversations to include the important data required to drive decision making as it happens.

By using Woobot, updating Salesforce becomes a natural outcome of enabling the conversations already happening. Plus, you'll also be supercharging your team's ability to stay in sync and on top of your business.

And that's what it's all about - making it easy for your teams to make decisions and avoid problems before they happen while driving actual productivity!

What’s Next?

It’s pretty simple.

We want to make working with enterprise data as easy as chatting in your favorite collaboration platform because it just makes sense.

Now it’s your turn to experience the magic!

Author: Kirk Crenshaw

Kirk is a profit- and results-oriented sales and marketing professional with international and domestic experience in successfully building and leading integrated marketing and sales operations for major corporations, as well as within Enterprise Software/OnDemand/Cloud start-ups.