The way we work and the way we sell has shifted irrevocably. A shocking 58% of sales reps believe their roles have changed permanently since the start of the pandemic, with increased importance on building trust and long-term customer relationships. Selling has not stopped over the last 18 months, rather sales teams and organizations have innovated to stay engaged with their customers, with 79% of sales reps adapting to new ways of selling.
Sales teams are reimagining how they work and interact with customers to be more productive and efficient in this digital-first world. This is where MuleSoft and Slack can help. Think of MuleSoft as the system integration layer, easily integrating and automating any device or platform, and Slack as the human integration layer, which connects people and teams from across the organization.
We believe the formula of integration + automation + collaboration can transform how sales reps work and allow them to spend more time building trusted customer relationships. Let’s look at five ways sales reps can work smarter with MuleSoft Composer and Slack:
#1 Enable remote team collaboration
For many of us, the traditional 9-5 Monday to Friday workday is history. This means the traditional account team meetings have turned into group chats, hangouts, and Zoom calls. However, the need to stay in touch and up-to-date with your account team is more important than ever to ensure everyone has full visibility into team progress. But you can’t huddle around a desk anymore or jump into a spontaneous whiteboard session. Team collaboration has moved online with tools, like Asana for example.
A perfect example of winning with the integration + automation + collaboration formula is MuleSoft Composer for Salesforce connecting Asana, Salesforce Sales Cloud, and Slack. This ensures that the entire account team is in the know, no matter if they are at their desk, their kitchen table, or on the other side of the country.
For example, when a new deal is about to close in Salesforce, the automated workflow in MuleSoft Composer for Salesforce can create an Asana project and add all relevant people to it. Team members are assigned tasks that need to be acted upon and when those tasks are updated in Asana, the corresponding opportunity in Salesforce is updated accordingly. Then the team is kept aware of progress with automated Slack notifications sent to the account team’s Slack channel.
#2 Automate the lead nurturing process
We all know how important it is for marketing and sales to be closely aligned. Marketing is focused on securing high-quality leads, and sales is concentrated on qualifying them into revenue opportunities. So the hand-off between marketing and sales must be smooth and timely to capitalize on new leads coming in from events, conferences, or via online assets.
Integrating marketing and sales tools behind the scenes allows MuleSoft Composer and Slack to automatically notify relevant account teams when a new lead has been added. For example, if an attendee at a virtual event engages with one of your company’s assets, their information is captured as a lead in the event’s digital platform. When the event is finished, the marketing team downloads the leads from the event’s portal, into a Google Sheet. This sheet automatically syncs and uploads these leads to Salesforce Sales Cloud and the respective account reps are automatically notified via Slack that they have a new lead to follow up with. The automated uploading and syncing process eliminates the manual transfer of new leads for the marketing team and sales reps are automatically notified in real-time of any new leads. No manual effort is required from either marketing or sales.
#3 Recognize new revenue faster
Getting a new customer account set up can be tedious and time-consuming for sales reps. There are multiple internal teams and systems that need to be involved in this process. They want to focus on building relationships with customers, learning about their business or industry, and becoming a trusted partner. The reps need a way to automate this process to ensure that the business can recognize this new revenue, faster.
A great example of the multi-system orchestration involved in a process like this would be if one of the leads our marketing team has secured has turned into an opportunity, thanks to our lead nurturing process. As this opportunity is with a customer — who is not yet set up with an account — MuleSoft Composer for Salesforce can connect systems like Salesforce, NetSuite, and Asana to add relevant internal teams like legal, procurement, and sales operations so the corresponding processes can be kicked off in parallel (contract reviews, security questionnaires, etc.). All internal stakeholders across the various teams can be notified of updates via Slack to allow visibility throughout the automated process for all parties involved. The sales rep can focus on building the new relationship and not on the formalities of setting up a new account.
#4 Ensure forecast accuracy
As a sales rep, forecast hygiene is a key priority for your sales leadership team. Ensuring the most up-to-date and accurate forecast information is crucial for any business to help predict how they are performing against their target. However, most organizations have multiple systems, and achieving the single source of truth of what gets billed to the customer and what is being forecasted is difficult as these systems are not connected.
In this example, let’s say your organization uses NetSuite as their system of record and Salesforce for your sales forecast. Often a sales rep could depend on sales ops to handle order fulfillment. Occasionally, what a customer actually orders is different from what was originally agreed when the opportunity was “closed won,” which can of course throw off a sales rep’s forecast. As a result, this creates discrepancies between the actual revenue generated numbers versus the forecasted revenue numbers for sales leaders.
Having an accurate as possible insight into projected revenue performance is critical for an organization to plan for expansion and growth. MuleSoft Composer for Salesforce can help connect these two systems to ensure consistency between Salesforce and NetSuite. If there are any discrepancies, the sales rep can be automatically notified in Slack in real-time so that forecast accuracy can be maintained at all times for sales leadership and the business.
#5 Have full visibility across your account
Staying on top of every individual update at a client is difficult, as many sales reps have numerous accounts they’re working on. However, you also want to know when a client of yours is experiencing significant issues to ensure the relationship continues to strengthen. Creating an account-specific channel in Slack via Slack Connect with external client stakeholders and internal teams like sales, customer success, and customer service can be a great way to collaborate with everyone across the account in a single destination.
These account channels in Slack are a great way to communicate with the client and ensure everyone on the internal account team is kept in the loop of any issues or updates at the account. For example, a client contacts customer service to notify them of an issue they are experiencing. The service agent creates the case in Salesforce Service Cloud and assigns it as an “Urgent” priority. Thanks to an automated workflow created in MuleSoft Composer for Salesforce, when a case is assigned this priority level, it triggers an automated notification to the account channel in Slack Connect to notify the client and the wider account team of the Urgent issue.
This is beneficial to the sales rep as it automatically gives them full visibility across the account and any potential issues that could require escalation or additional support resources. No more manual effort is required on behalf of the service team to keep the wider account team up to date with client issues. Both internal and external account stakeholders can track the case progress right in Slack.
By automating and streamlining the above processes with MuleSoft Composer for Salesforce and Slack, sales reps can focus more time on building relationships with customers and actually selling.
