Process Definition & Mapping
To define your business process or processes, it's important to understand both key Salesforce CRM terms and how your basic processes work. That means defining what happens at each step-what inputs are needed, who does what, and how to measure the results.
When defining your process, it helps to follow these steps:
- Make sure you understand basic Salesforce CRM terms
- Identify the key characteristics of your process
- Review the default Salesforce CRM processes
- Define and come up with a visual overview of your own process
- Map that process to Salesforce CRM
Salesforce CRM Terminology
In defining your process, you'll need to know how it relates to these basic Salesforce CRM terms:
- Leads - A lead is any person who may be interested in your products or services; for example, someone you met at a conference or who filled out a form on your Web site is a lead.
- Opportunities - An opportunity is a possible deal you want to track. By adding opportunities in Salesforce CRM, you build a "pipeline" you can use for forecasting.
- Accounts - An account is any organization, individual, or company you want to track in Salesforce CRM. An account can include customers, competitors, and/or partners. Each account stores information such as names, addresses, and telephone numbers.
- Contacts - Contacts are all the individuals associated with the accounts you're tracking in Salesforce CRM. For each contact, you can store information such as phone numbers, titles, and roles in a deal.
What's a Typical Process?
For most businesses, a basic sales process includes gathering information for the following steps:
- Generating Leads- Where do Leadscome from? How do they get into Salesforce CRM? What happens next? What information do you want to measure about leads?
- Optimizing lead flow - How do you manage open leads? How do you check for duplicates? How do you work through leads? How do you measure conversion and top performers?
- Closing deals - How do you manage the sales funnel? How do you bring new customers into Salesforce CRM? How can you measure top deals, closed business by the month, and month-to-date trending?
Create Your Process Overview
The goal of this step is to come up with a visual overview of your process. You can use the default processes provided by salesforce.com as way to stimulate discussion. A good place to start is at the point when you have qualified a lead. Here's an example of a sales process.
Discuss the sample process with the project team and modify it to fit your organization. If you don't have a defined sales process, a CRM implementation is a good time to set one up.
To set up your own sales process:
- Start at the point where a lead is qualified as an opportunity.
- On a whiteboard, draw each step as you ideally want the information to flow.
- Tip: In the MySalesforce Workbook, complete the My Business Process Questionnaire and the My Business Process Diagram to document your process.
Map Your Process to Salesforce CRM
The next step is to map your ideal process to Salesforce CRM; in particular, to ensure that the names of your data match the names of the fields in Salesforce CRM. For example, you may currently call a customer "Company" while the corresponding field in Salesforce is "Account."
To start the mapping process, review the fields associated with the Opportunity process-which includes the fields for Leads, Accounts, Contacts, and Opportunities-and answer the following questions:
- Do you need all the fields? Review the fields and decide which can be removed.
- Do you need to rename standard fields so they make more sense; for example, to change "Company" to "Account"?
- Do you need new fields that are unique to your business?
- Tip: In the MySalesforce Workbook, review and complete the worksheets related to the Leads, Accounts, Contacts, and Opportunities fields. Use them to track the mapping of field names.
