Let’s say you’re the new CRO in a $50M B2B SaaS company and, among other messes you have to clean up, Salesforce is an absolute trainwreck.

• You can’t get the visibility you need into the business
• Sales reps complain they can’t find their accounts or leads easily
• Marketing complains no one follows up on leads

You know you need to clean up Salesforce, get all the right accounts and contacts in there, sync it to your prospecting tool, email, maybe your backend database, and just clean up the mess. But is this going to help you hit your number?

No!

After working with thousands of companies on this problem over more than a decade, I can tell you that so many of them fall into this trap. They clean up the same mess every 2-3 years, with zero impact on their ability to actually hit revenue targets.

Here’s another option: using Salesforce to drive real revenue.

Start with the Goal

Simple question. If you could do only one thing, what would it be? Improve net revenue retention or new business acquisition?

From there, drill down even further. Is there more opportunity to improve your renewal rates or expansion sales? Do you expect more revenue from more pipeline or closing more of the pipeline you’re already generating?

Let’s get REALLY specific on the goal so that we can narrow in on the process. For the purpose of this newsletter, let’s say our primary goal is to generate more new business by generating more pipeline from outbound prospecting, specifically working our target accounts better.

Design the Process

This is where things usually fall off. As a new CRO, you’re busy ramping up, assessing your team, hiring new people, etc. It’s tempting to offload this on your Salesforce Admin, your Chief of Staff, your controller (I’ve seen it all).

We just need to clean up our database so that our reps have the right accounts and contacts to call. This will enable them to call the right people and generate more new business pipeline, right? Right? Oh, I wish it were that easy.

How do we define the “right” people in the “right” accounts? Did we spend time analyzing our best customers and clearly defining our ICP and Buyer Personas? Did we get as detailed as possible about it? Narrowing our focus to a very tight set of criteria? Or did we just list a handful of industries and a revenue or headcount range and call it a day?

What will our reps say in their emails, LinkedIn DMs, and calls when prospecting to these accounts? What information do they need in order to research these accounts and contacts? Do we have messaging that resonates with these people, that shares problems they’re facing and solutions to those problems?

“Cleaning up the data” means nothing when we don’t know what “clean” looks like. This is a problem that starts at the process level, where your Salesforce Admin doesn’t have the authority or insight to operate.

If you recognize this problem in your organization but don’t know where to get help with it, send us a message – this is our specialty!

Measure What Matters

Okay, you’re a couple months into the new CRO role and you’ve delegated this Salesforce cleanup project. It’s getting done, correctly or not. Here’s the next place this falls apart: metrics.

Once we have our magical database, what will we be measuring? Prospecting activity?

If each rep logs 20, 50, 100 activities per day, will that tell us whether or not they are on track? If they create a bunch of opportunities in Salesforce, will that provide confidence we will hit our number? Again, in my experience, it’s usually not enough.

Pipeline is a fantastic thing to measure IF we have clear qualification criteria and can have real confidence this pipeline will:

• Close at a +25% Close Rate (ideally higher)
• Close for our target Average Sales Price
• Within our normal Sales Cycle

If all three of these conditions aren’t met, the pipe gen numbers just fool us into thinking we’re on track when we’re not.

It also takes time to generate pipeline and if a rep isn’t doing it, or isn’t doing it right, it can take a LOT of time to fix it. We need better leading indicators – and activity isn’t it.

If we have a carefully curated target account list, how many of those accounts have been hit? How many times? And to which contacts and personas? How many converted to an initial meeting? How many were “engaged” in the sense that they not only met with us, but have an active interest (albeit short of a qualified sales opportunity)?

In our own Salesforce at USC, we track Account Stage just like Opportunity Stage so we can see which accounts have been covered and how they’re progressing through the funnel prior to reaching the Opportunity stage.

Driving Adoption

If our sales team doesn’t actually adopt the process and start feeding our reports with the right metrics (meaning, doing the things that drive revenue) then it’s all a waste of time.

What specific reports will management use to get visibility into our progress? How often will you, as the CRO, look at these reports? How often will your sales management and ops teams look at them? What is the daily management process to drive the sales team to adopt this sales process?

When I was an AE at Salesforce we had one single team dashboard we looked at about 50 times per day. This is not an exaggeration. It tracked everything from our call activity to meetings, to leads not followed up with, to pipe gen, to closed won deals.

On top of this, management was constantly on us to do the right things. If we weren’t managing our pipeline well we’d get pinged about it and learn our mistakes quickly. If we weren’t covering our Tier 1 accounts, we’d get questions about it. If we were too scared to call on executives and just calling junior people, we’d get coaching on it.

Why? Because these are the things that made the difference between top performers and people that ended up on a PIP. Reps didn’t last long if they didn’t do these things, though I can’t remember anyone not doing it. You get enough feedback, especially from Day #1, and you just do it. It’s your job. Simple as that.

For some reason, though, many CROs and revenue leaders feel this is too much work – or it’s beneath them. They’d rather focus on hiring and closing deals.

Well… let me ask a simple question. Do you want Salesforce to be a glorified rolodex that leaves you managing your team like the Glengarry Glen Ross days? Going around the horn, asking each rep for a play-by-play, and trying to jump in and close deals? Or do you want to build a repeatable, predictable, scalable revenue engine?