Increasing Inside Sales Productivity with Salesforce

Integrating a Telephony Solution

In this article, we’ll discuss how we achieved a successful Salesforce telephony integration for a large event management company.

Salesforce Telephony Integration

An event management company recently presented us with a challenge they were facing within their sales team. In general, their inside sales representatives were investing too much time capturing daily client-related activities such as calls, emails and follow-ups.

Further, most representatives would wait until the end of the day to log their activities, while others would try to make updates right after the call. These type of situations were causing users to:

  • Not log calls properly

  • Forget what the call was about in the first place

  • Not remembering the people they had already contacted

  • Schedule call backs/follow-ups

Capturing these activities are very important for the Sales Managers, as they provide metrics on what the sales users have been doing. Users generally have activity quotas to measure client engagement, such as number of calls made, emails sent, demos scheduled and follow ups created.

In this use case, it became apparent that automating the capturing of these activities would benefit the whole team. To address this concern, we provided a range of telephony solutions which could be integrated with our client’s Salesforce environment.

Smartbridge is a Salesforce Partner

Implementing a Telephony Solution

After comparing the applications available to conduct a Salesforce telephony integration, we settled on one that met the client’s requirements. The solution we selected allowed us to:

  • Auto-log calls

  • Record calls for review and training

  • Take live notes on calls

  • Set call statuses quickly

  • Send emails directly from Salesforce

  • Track emails that are sent out

  • Call data reporting

  • Call monitoring for managers

In starting the implementation, we began with the sales representative to better understand how they had been previously performing activities, and the importance of their role in overall sales efforts.

We then had meetings with sales managers to understand what they wanted to know about the sales representative’s activities, and what makes it easier for them to train representatives on their call performance. Some beneficial things came out of these meetings to ensure project success:

Sales Representatives 

  • Manually dialing phones to make individual calls

  • Logging calls in CRM separately after each call

  • Outgoing calls were not being reached

  • Monthly quota was being affected

Sales Managers

  • Had to manually call in sales representatives for call training

  • Not good enough call data reporting

  • No call monitoring

Project Success

After completing the Salesforce telephony integration, our client was able to effectively increase time for sales representatives to focus on making deals, rather than troubleshooting problems. The sales team no longer had to manually log activities, and managers could now see all sales statistics through user-friendly activity dashboards. Most importantly after the integration, our client experienced a clear ROI to set them up for success in future sales initiatives.

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