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flevyblog
The Flevy Blog covers Business Strategies, Business Theories, & Business Stories.
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Editor's Note: Take a look at our featured best practice, Moving from Data to Insights (26-slide PowerPoint presentation). Insights are arguably the most important component of a management consulting project. Insights answer the critical question from clients--"so what?" An insight offers a new perspective on an existing issue, situation, or problem. This presentation defines and teaches how to recognize an [read more]
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Insightful data is what essentially drives sales for many businesses. We rely on information heavily to reach out to our customers as well as to plan our activities for the months and years to come. We are well prepared to invest extra cash in advanced CRMs to store and retrieve the data as needed. And we surely don’t want to waste a minute looking at massive data that’s nevertheless almost useless because it just doesn’t fit in with our sales patterns.
Every company has an approach of its own when it comes to attracting customers and making deals. There’s no solution in terms of data presentation that will meet everybody’s needs unless it comes at the cost of an overwhelming interface, which is a no-no as long as you respect your time. Salesforce is famous for its flexibility and customization potential. This article explores how you can achieve even more with a Salesforce plugin for Outlook.
Read below if you’re interested in finding out the following:
It’s no secret that Salesforce offers you a plethora of standard objects to choose from. These entities can store helpful data on pretty much everything or everyone you might be interested in, including the following:
Which of these to use and to what extent depends entirely on your processes. It’s not uncommon for smaller businesses to skip the leads part, although it’s been shown to inform some great decisions every once in a while. Again, the set of data you need to characterize each object should be determined by the procedures in place. Think of what you’d like to store after contacting a customer or potential customer. Identify the criteria you rely on to analyze your sales. This is the very information you need for your business to keep growing.
Salesforce is a great CMS because it lets you personalize its views. With Revenuegrid, it’s also possible from Outlook, which saves you a lot of time switching between the two windows. The product enables you to sync your email as well as calendar with Salesforce and introduces a sidebar from which you can access a number of fine-tuning instruments.
Most importantly, the synchronization is so smooth you can set up additional rules in either application after you’ve introduced a solution. This comes with a bonus that’s hard to overestimate, namely data capture automation.
Revenuegrid enables you to collect data automatically according to the rules for capture that you’ve set up. This comes in handy when the amount of information you gather gets so overwhelming it’s not enough to customize your presentation, and you start looking for ways to save the time you’ve been spending on it. For example, if you want certain data about a lead to be stored, you can manage it via your Outlook. In such cases, data is added to Salesforce based on your correspondence in the email client, meaning you don’t have to copy and paste it by hand.
From calendar events to customers’ contact details, the plugin will capture whatever you tell it to and process it so that you get clean and uniform data that’s easy to use.
Personalization is part and parcel of many business owners’ strategies these days. It lets you show your attitude without compromising the ease of CRM use. Try Revenuegrid as a plugin for Outlook to explore the joy of it.
You can download in-depth presentations on Data Analysis and 100s of management topics from the FlevyPro Library. FlevyPro is trusted and utilized by 1000s of management consultants and corporate executives.
For even more best practices available on Flevy, have a look at our top 100 lists:
These best practices are of the same as those leveraged by top-tier management consulting firms, like McKinsey, BCG, Bain, and Accenture. Improve the growth and efficiency of your organization by utilizing these best practice frameworks, templates, and tools. Most were developed by seasoned executives and consultants with over 20+ years of experience.
