When it comes to growing a business, faster is better and thanks to automated sales and marketing tools, this is easier than ever before, with Salesforce being a fan favorite among businesses of all sizes.

Whether you’re new to Salesforce and the idea of using sales funnels or you want to learn how to optimize your existing funnels, there are some essential best practices you need to know about.

Why You Should Be Using Salesforce Funnels

There are a number of ways your business can benefit from effective Salesforce funnel management to boost conversions.

• A better understanding of the sales journey. By utilizing a sales funnel in Salesforce, your marketing team can gain a better understanding of the customer’s purchasing journey at every stage. With this data, you’re able to create and deliver marketing messages that are relevant at the right times.
• Avoid wasted time. When you’re able to bypass low-quality leads early on, you can save time and effort during your marketing and sales processes, leaving you to focus on leads that are more likely to convert.
• Stronger marketing and sales alignment. When you’re dealing with high lead volumes, it’s not always easy for your sales team to get back to every customer right away. However, by incorporating Salesforce sales funnels into your processes, customers can receive essential information in a timely manner without salespeople having to personally intervene every time.

Even though you can use Salesforce templates to save time, it still helps to understand the best practices for using them effectively.

1. Get clear on your sales process. To make the most of your sales funnel in Salesforce, it’s important to define your processes and how they fit into the Salesforce sales funnel stages. Doing so will ensure consistency throughout the sales journey and provide your marketing team with clarity.
2. Manage your leads. By implementing effective lead management practices using the Salesforce Lead object function, you can better track, capture, and nurture your leads. The platform also has lead assignment rules, lead queues, and scoring models that you can use to make this process easier.
3. Closely track opportunities. Salesforce’s Opportunity object allows you to track and manage deals as they move through your sales funnel. It’s also important to update your Opportunity records with information such as closing dates, deal size, and closing probability on a regular basis.
4. Automate routine tasks. The workflows and processes functions in Salesforce can help you streamline your sales process by automating routine tasks that tend to take up a lot of time. Workflow rules can help you automate lead and opportunity updates, trigger actions, and send email notifications to relevant team members.
5. Utilize reporting functionality. The Salesforce funnel dashboard is designed to make reporting and funnel optimization a breeze. Businesses have the ability to create customized Salesforce funnel reports and dashboards that show real-time data, including pipeline value, conversion rates, and overall sales performance.
6. Integrate Salesforce with your marketing tools. Turn your marketing and sales processes into a unified, well-oiled machine by integrating Salesforce with your automated marketing tools. This way, your campaigns can be linked to your sales efforts, ensuring effective lead nurturing.
7. Encourage communication and collaboration. A sales team that knows how to communicate is a productive one. The Salesforce Chatter feature allows teams to share important information and files, keeping everyone aligned at all times.
8. Optimize regularly. When you regularly analyze the performance of your Salesforce lead funnels, you can adapt and find new ways to move customers through the sales journey a lot quicker. Salesforce’s AppExchange has a number of tools and apps that can assist with this.

Measuring the Success of a Salesforce Funnel

Keeping an eye on key performance indicators at the various Salesforce sales funnel stages is key to using this platform effectively. Here are the metrics you should focus on:

• Conversion rates. One of the first key metrics to keep track of is the conversion rates between different Salesforce funnel stages. This will help your team understand how effective your funnels are at converting prospects into paying customers.
• Pipeline value. Another metric you can add to your Salesforce funnel dashboard is pipeline value, which tells you the total value of all opportunities in your pipeline.
• Deal size. When you know your average deal size, you can better understand the value of the opportunities in your lead funnel in Salesforce. It also makes it easier to identify trends and focus on high-value opportunities.
• Sales velocity. If you want to gain insights into the speed and efficiency of your sales process, sales velocity will tell you how long it takes on average for a lead to move through your funnel from start to finish.
• Customer acquisition cost (CAC). Salesforce can tell you how much it’s costing you to acquire new customers, which includes sales, marketing, and operational expenses, indicating how efficient your sales funnels are.
• Customer lifetime value (CLV). Along with CAC, you can also discover the estimated value of a customer throughout their relationship with your business, another indicator of the sustainability of your Salesforce sales funnel.
• Customer churn rate. This metric tracks the rate at which customers stop purchasing your products or using your services. Businesses should aim for a low churn rate.
• Win rate. To calculate the percentage of opportunities that your sales team manages to close, you need to look at the win rate.
• Lead generation. Lastly, you want to monitor your lead generation metrics to ascertain how effective your efforts are. Some of the most important lead generation metrics include conversion rates, website traffic, and the number of qualified leads generated.

In Closing

When used correctly, Salesforce sales funnels can be a powerful tool, helping your business meet critical objectives and boost your bottom line in the quickest and most efficient way possible. And if you’re new to the platform, utilizing pre-built Salesforce templates is a good start.