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.

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.

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).

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).

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.

Sales Management

There are several different areas you need to keep in mind when managing your sales. These are your contacts, activities, opportunity pipeline, and territories.

Contact management is vital for keeping your contacts organized and ensuring you can easily make deals using accessible data. It’s essential to keep all of the data you can about your contacts, including communication history, contact information (of course), and their relationships with members of your company. Keep this data in your CRM system, so it is easily accessible, and ensure the data is kept up to date. This allows multiple members of the sales team to work together on more complex deals, and everyone works with the same information.

Managing your activities (events and tasks) is easier than ever with tools like Salesforce. Activities include tasks such as weekly meetings, phone calls, and practically anything which needs to be done with a date. By ensuring your tasks are tracked, you’ll have an easy view in Salesforce of what needs to be done and at what time.

Activities are often tied to opportunities, and managing those is essential as well. Opportunity pipeline management is all about tracking, organizing, and managing all your business opportunities. With software like Salesforce, this is very easy to do. Your opportunities should have any data related to them tracked. For example, an opportunity might have a specific contact or task associated with it. Make sure that the relationship is represented within Salesforce.

A sales territory is a grouping of accounts that belongs to a specific sales representative to whom they support and sell. These accounts are separated based on offset characteristics. For example, a salesperson may get a territory based on the postal codes of accounts or their revenue. Set up different rules to fit your organization and the needs of your sales team. Territories may also be broken up into hierarchies. For example, the top level of a geographical territory could be the world, which then gets broken down into regions, countries, and states/provinces.

Salesforce Sales Cloud CRM ORG provides a single place for updating all the deal-related information and enabling rep to close deals faster. Also, tracking opportunity milestones and recording customer interactions, meetings, tasks, and all notes in the opportunity level make an agent more efficient and make the organization more collaborative. Sales leaders can easily analyze the sales pipeline to quickly identify the highest value opportunity and remove any impediments within the sales cycle (See Figure 1-5).

Lost opportunity goes back into the remarketing funnel to further engage the prospects by reevaluating customer needs and timing to position the right product at the right price when onboard a new customer. Salesforce provides your entire company a 360-degree view of your customers and facilitates collaboration across the organization as a whole, thus transforming into a customer-centric organization.

Tracking accounts, activities, opportunities, and territories are all current records. But managing the future is also essential. That’s where forecast and forecast management come in. A sales forecast is simply an estimate of an expected future revenue, and, yes, Salesforce can help you there too. Use these forecasts to plan your sales cycle and to set goals. You can adjust your sales forecast goals by months. Many businesses have meager sales in January, as compared to later months. Also, some corporations make most of their sales during a particular season; it could be summer or in the fall before the holidays. This forecast model lets you compare your actual revenue at different points to the forecast, so you can see how well you’re doing.

With all this data, you will have a 360-degree view of your customers in Salesforce. This means all your information is consolidated, and you will have a unified view of your customer. With this, you can tailor your customer’s experience on a case-by-case basis and better personalize your sale. This information can then be used to predict your customer’s behavior and improve their satisfaction.

Tools for Sales Management

Salesforce should be your primary tool for managing sales and customers that can handle accounts, activities, opportunities, territories, forecasting, and more. It provides you with a 360-degree customer view.

Another useful tool you may wish to consider is Informatica Cloud Customer 360. This ties into Salesforce and is a Master Data Management (MDM) tool that keeps your data regulated, deduplicated, and up to date to ensure the 360-degree customer view is maintained. Customer 360 for Salesforce has several features, including eradicating duplicate, inaccurate, and incomplete account, person, and contact records. It provides clean, trusted data and a real-time view into the quality and completeness of your Salesforce data through a user-friendly interface. This tool will verify the client’s email, phone, and address information and track it in real time. It will eliminate duplicate clients based on matching information, so your sales team is not annoying the client with multiple emails or phone calls.

Customer 360 also automatically detects and corrects erroneous data found in your Salesforce organization. The Customer 360 tool ties everything up for your team into an excellent Salesforce-wrapped package. It is a Master Data Management tool that keeps your data regulated, eliminates duplicate copies of repeat data (often time refers as deduplicated), and up to date to ensure the 360-degree customer view is maintained. This tool will help you manage your customer’s information efficiently so you and your team can spend more time selling.

Configure Price Quote

Configure Price Quote (CPQ) is a sales tool used to generate a quote for an order automatically (Figure 1-6). You set rules within your CPQ software, considering several pieces of data such as quantities or discounts. This is very useful to your sales team as it allows them to generate a quote quickly when they need it, so they will not keep the Lead waiting. Salesforce itself can perform CPQ.

Price books are one of the enterprise activities which go into CPQ. Simply put, a price book is a list of all your products and their prices. To start with, you should have a price book that contains default prices for all your products. From there, if necessary, you may create custom price books for your different market segments to tailor your costs.

Quotes are generated to give your potential buyers information about their purchase, its price, what they will be receiving, any discounts they will receive, and any other terms or agreements. Create a template for your quotes to help maintain a stable, consistent company brand image. If your CPQ tool uses this template when generating your quotes, it will save your sales team time; they can then use it to sell more.

Contracts are another object in Salesforce, which can generate quotes for new contracts and renewals as with other opportunities. When it’s time for a customer’s contract to be renewed, your CPQ will automatically make a unique quote for you. It will consider any products being added to the contract, as well as price changes, simplifying the renewal process (See Figure 1-7).

Orders are created after your quote. They are used to track the products a customer has purchased. Quote data will automatically be placed into the Order object within Salesforce. Multiple orders may also be created from a single quote if necessary. By letting Salesforce automate this data entry, you ensure your orders are more accurate.

Tools for CPQ

Salesforce itself will be your bread and butter when dealing with CPQ. It contains Contract, Quote, and Order objects ready for you to use. Managing your Quotes and Orders in Salesforce is easy, and it automates much of the process for you. Apttus is another tool useful in this area available to be integrated within the Salesforce platform natively and streamline the Quote to Cash process (See Figure 1-8). From Opportunity to ERP, Apttus modules can further automate the Front Office processing including the quote, contract, and revenue. From rebate management to e-commerce solutions, Apptus platforms can bring additional values to contract lifecycle management (CLM). DocuSign is typically used to collect customer signatures and automatically add them to contract documents. You can get the DocuSign for Salesforce app from the Salesforce app exchange and integrate it into your Salesforce environment with ease. Informatica Cloud provides integration services and ETL (extract, transform and load) capabilities to Salesforce users. Informatica Cloud could be used to synchronize order details between Salesforce and your ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) solutions such as SAP.

Qvidian RFP platform automates creating proposals and request for proposal (RFP) responses. Qvidian fills in responses to RFPs for you or will give you suggestions to choose from, speeding up the process. It analyzes your projects and content to maximize productivity. It integrates with Salesforce as well, ensuring your data stays centralized. Qvidian also automates proposals for you using a centralized content repository. It supports proposal templates and can measure the performance of your content or team members.

Conga is another CPQ tool that works with Salesforce. It provides guided selling in the CPQ process. It utilizes drop-down menus where the user can select discovery questions and receive best-case product selections using its rule-based configuration engine. Finally, it streamlines and standardizes your pricing using tied pricing, automated approvals, and discount criteria.

Contract Lifecycle Management

Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) is aptly named. It is the process of managing your contract across all the points of its lifecycle, from when you are first planning it out to when the contract expires. Using some sort of CLM system is essential, especially when you manage many contacts at once.

Step 1 of CLM (See Figure 1-9) is ensuring all your contract data is in one place. You cannot manage a contract you do not know exists, so make sure wherever you keep your contracts is visible. Figure out your most essential data and track it. Track this data for all contracts – past, present, and future.

Next, streamline your contract creation process. Utilize templates to make sure you can create contracts quickly and accurately and following company guidelines. Tie in your organization’s different libraries, so contracts pull in data automatically when filling in your templates. Make the process of creating a contract easy for your user. Templates help with this and ensure to complete contracts in a few clicks.

The next stage of a contract is getting approval. Some less risky contracts may be preapproved automatically, but other contracts are going to need to go through an approval process. Send the contract to the appropriate department, whether that be Legal, Management, or some specialized team. Track these approvals, as well, in case of future audits and for compliance purposes.

Some parts of the contract can pull in clauses from a clause library. A clause library contains preapproved sections of text to be placed into future contracts. Using a clause library saves time by contributing prewritten frequently used clauses. Your legal team does not have to spend time approving these clauses after the first time.

The contract will then be negotiated. The chances are that the first revision is not going to be the accepted one. Ensure all differences between revisions are highlighted and flagged. Redlining is an integral part of the negotiation process. Both parties involved with the contract mark the contract with their additions, deletions, or changes. When redlining, do your research beforehand and communicate with the other party. Make sure your changes are well reasoned out and are well communicated.

Ensure your sales playbooks assist with contract negotiations by including strategies. After your negotiations have been finalized, it is time to sign off. Everyone relevant must sign the contract before it is safely stored. Also, make sure it is not edited before copies get sent out. Check all changes with your legal team to make sure the contract is still approved.

Finally, all your existing contracts need to be easy to access and analyze. Automation is useful. You do not want your company to forget about a contractual obligation because the contract is in a filing cabinet and has been forgotten, which could lead to financial and legal issues that could have been avoided.

Order Fulfillment

After a customer has placed an order with you, the next process is getting the purchased items into their hands. This is the order fulfillment process. As an example, an order is created. Information from the order is entered into different systems throughout your organization – such as accounting – as well as outside your organization, such as notifying the customer the order has been placed. The warehouse receives this information as well, and the items are gathered and shipped to the customer with an order notification. Managing this process, the logistics that are involved, and the planning for future demand are the key.

Salesforce supports order management right out of the box. Quote information is automatically placed into orders for ease of management. Whenever you use any order fulfillment tool, try to ensure it integrates with Salesforce (or whatever order management software you choose) to confirm your entire order lifecycle (See Figure 1-10) is visible and easier to manage.

Part of managing order fulfillment well means planning for future demand. This process is called demand forecasting. Using historical customer data, you make estimations about future direction. Use modern technology to automate this process as much as you can to optimize your inventory, budget better, and respond to an ever-changing market.

The process of getting your items to your customer safely and efficiently, called logistics, is another concern. Intelligently group your products in your warehouse to speed up the time it takes to move them. If an item is frequently ordered, it should be easily accessible. Automate the process wherever you can, such as scanning inbound and outbound goods as they enter or exit your warehouse to keep your information up to date.

Customer Service

So, you have gotten the Leads, converted them into sales, and completed your orders. But the sales cycle does not end there. Customers may have issues or needs which need to be addressed after the sale has been made. This is where good customer service comes in. And the first step to achieving that is to have good case management.

Case management is the process of managing your communications and issues customers have across all your channels (See Figure 1-11). Use case management software to make this process as pain-free as possible. In today’s world, customers will reach out to you in a few different ways, including multiple social media platforms, email, contact forms, phone calls, and in person. All these cases should be viewable from one location, typically a cloud-based platform.

Grouping your cases is not the end, however. Have a knowledge base with Frequently Asked Questions and solutions to problems that crop up a lot. Let your customers solve their problems before they ever need to create a case with you. If cases do occur, ensure your management software can keep them organized and filterable. For example, support representatives may need to organize cases by high priority or subject.

Consider cross-selling and upselling as well. Selling to a customer who has already purchased from you (or will be purchasing from you) is a great way to improve their loyalty and gain more revenue. Cross-selling involves selling additional items that are related to a customer’s purchase. Make sure the extra things go well together and that they provide good value to the customer.

Upselling is like cross-selling in that it seeks to increase sales revenue from a specific customer. However, instead of offering similar products, the strategy is to provide an upgraded or improved version of the original product. Again, you should ensure the actual value is being provided to the customer. No one wants to feel like a sleazy car salesman who is trying to sell them a luxury car they do not need. Research your customer’s needs and recommend additional products or services which match them. Not only does this increase revenue, but if the customer feels like they genuinely received better value than they initially expected out of the purchase, it improves customer loyalty as well.

The customer service provided to a customer can be limited based on entitlements. The service-level agreements they may sign will tell them what service they should expect from you. For example, they may receive an entitlement (creatable in Salesforce), which gives them access to phone or web support. Keeping track of your entitlements through Salesforce ensures your customer gets the support to which they agreed, and you do not spend time and money on unnecessary support. To simplify, link your entitlements to something else in Salesforce, such as an account.

Through Salesforce, you can even include support steps for your agents to follow and apply to entitlements. This is known as an entitlement process. Through this, you can make a timeline with steps the support team needs to complete to resolve a support request.

Entitlement management also allows you to set up warranties for your customer’s products. A warranty is just another type of customer support agreement. Consequently, warranties fall under the entitlement management umbrella. Simple warranty entitlements may be created, but so can more complex ones involve real contracts.

Keep in mind that the modern customer wants to be able to research problems on their own before turning to contact support, so enable customers to have the ability to help themselves within your ecosystem. This can be done through a customer portal or a self-service portal. A self-service portal allows customers to view information such as their past orders or current order status and view support documentation. If they have a ticket open, they can view it here and check the status. Before even going through the process of opening a sales ticket, consumers can search for other cases that may be like their own. This saves your company time and money by enabling the customer to solve problems on their own.

Customer service portals can use the power of communities even further to empower self-service. Organizations are a place where users can ask questions and get answers from other users. Company agents may step in where necessary to answer questions, clear things up, or moderate.

Adding self-service to your customer support processes saves time and money and adds customer loyalty as they can solve their problems much faster than waiting for email or phone responses from the company during business hours.

Revenue Management

Revenue management (See Figure 1-12) is using analytics to help predict customer behavior and better price your products, as well as handle future demand. It is selling the right product to the right customer at the right time for the right price through the right channel. This is an often-used practice in hotels and airlines but can be equally applied to other businesses.

Using a hotel as an example, if they are selling a room for one night and it does not sell, they cannot ever sell the space for that night again. Therefore, they must use revenue management to ensure their pricing best matches the supply and demand of the market.

Revenue management also includes all the tasks which must be taken after a quote is made, a contract is signed, or an order is placed. Whenever any of these things happen, data is sent to different departments, such as Operations or Accounting. Operations need to know what items are being packed and where they are being shipped. Accounting needs to know about price details for invoicing. While both departments are doing their work, Finance is figuring out what revenue is currently available and when revenue is going to be received in the future.

Provisioning is a crucial accounting process that gives a more accurate balance for the year. A provision is a money set aside in the balance sheet for future uncertain but probable liabilities. As an example, a bad debt may be provisioned. The chance that a debt is not going to be paid may be estimated by using historical data from both your company and the industry. If it is high, a provision can be made to account for it using the expected expense.

Managing your billing is also a part of good revenue management. Billing management software makes it easy to integrate billing with the rest of your systems, such as generating invoices automatically from contract or quote data. Since all this data can be stored in the same place and read from different places, you will ensure other areas of your business are using accurate, up-to-date data.

Accounts receivable, the money owed to your organization for any goods or services you have supplied to customers, is also part of revenue management. It is vital to keeping track of specific data, such as how long it takes to receive money from accounts receivable or if any turn into bad debts. The more you know about accounts receivable, the better predictions you can make about cash flow and your budget.

Collections are the processes involved with getting money from a customer who is currently overdue on payments. Some examples include sending reminders of the outstanding balance through the mail, phone calls, or email or imposing late fees in addition to the reminder. Additional steps may be taken if the account remains overdue, such as stopping service or sending the account to a collection agency. Note that if the amount is small enough, your organization may find it costs more to collect it than to ignore it.

Summary

In this chapter, we have gone through various concepts related to Front Office processes and discussed tools consideration to support those processes. We started with the activities of a typical Front Office process tower that includes business development strategy, marketing campaign, and Marketing Qualified Leads, sales Leads, opportunity pipeline, and customer service automation. We also covered tools and concepts for Lead generation, marketing automation, sales management, Configure Price Quote (CPQ), Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM), order fulfillment, customer service functions, and revenue management. In the next chapter, we will go through the concept of Lead, Lead qualification process, Lead stage, what action to take in each stage of the Lead process, and detailing the Lead conversion process.