A Guide to Improve Sales Leadership and Salesforce Admin Skills

If you are a sales leader then your prime job is to offer your staff the information, tools, and support that is needed to close deals and improve revenue. You would also want to help your representatives develop decent professional careers in sales management. However, this is something that cannot be done alone and neither can you.

In case you have recently been promoted to the role of a Salesforce admin or if you are also looking to improve your leadership skills then there are some skills that will help you create a successful team. When you develop these skills, the sales team will be able to understand how to develop tangible customer relationships and insights.

By developing sales leadership skills, the team will be able to understand how to build strong customer relationships and close deals. Every sales leader needs to hire and retain the sales team, focus on the overall performance, learn ways to coach effectively, understand numbers, and rethink the overall approach to leadership.

Working of a Salesforce Admin

Salesforce is essentially a CRM system that enables businesses of all kinds to automate the sales process. A salesforce admin can manage the business sales and marketing process easily by monitoring leads and driving sales.

The work and job roles of a Salesforce professional are mostly multi-faceted. It includes customizing a business to optimize the overall processes and workflows used by a team. Being a Salesforce admin, you can be in charge of setting up a platform specification, managing data and enabling a team to organize and manage workload on a platform.

There are professionals who have a Salesforce certification but that is not always necessary. So many organisations offer detailed training material on unique processes for professionals to gain Salesforce admin skills.

Top Ways to Improve Sales Leadership and Salesforce Admin Skills

If you have been thinking of becoming a Salesforce admin and wondering if you have the right skills then some of them are mentioned below.

1. Organizational Relationships

User management and validation are some of the important tasks for any Salesforce admin. In this role, you are likely to assign user profiles, set user accounts, set user validation rules, assign roles to new users, and allow for different degrees of data access so that the teams can work efficiently and access the right objects.

All organizations access user management in different ways. However, it is important to understand an organizational structure well while also knowing how teams are separated from one another. This helps in figuring out if there are teams that must have limited access to important information.

2. Data Management

Other than managing different users in a Salesforce team, you should also be able to manage data that is stored on a platform. This helps in precise sales management. Good management of data that gets saved determines how a team proceeds with future goals.

A capable Salesforce admin must be able to manage the platform for ensuring clean and accurate data storage.  There should also be accurate knowledge of importing data into the Salesforce platform.

3. Translating Ideas Into Processes

Getting a detailed knowledge of the way in which business processes work is one of the advantageous Salesforce administrator skills. The platform includes many workflows needed for speeding up the sales team with their work.

Being an admin, you must know Salesforce works. However, that does not mean that your internal customers do too. Rather, they might give you ideas and tell you all that they want to be done so that you can translate the goals into a good end product. The Salesforce admin must be able to process mapping for understanding the need and creating the best solution.

Many times, you can use different methods for building an end product for the teams. If you use a process map then you can communicate effectively with the implications of a solution while pushing back to ensure that your colleagues get an end product that meets your needs.

Knowing all about the Salesforce process builder is one of the best ways to acquire one of the important Salesforce admin skills. The process builder works as in platform tool that most admins can use to create a customized workflow and process.

4. Flexible Communication

Gaining and nurturing leadership skills are very important for a Salesforce admin. It does not matter whether or not you are managing a team, you must work with integrity, solve more problems creatively and make quick decisions.

Salesforce has great capability to function as a good machine but if things go wrong, an admin must be able to solve problems and even communicate them effectively with a team. In the role of an admin, the customers are like internal users.

Many times you work with execution teams and dig into Salesforce even more. At other times though, you may also be required to explain a detailed process so that the higher management understands things better. A capable Salesforce admin should be able to communicate effectively at different levels of an organization.

5. Sales Process

Although a Salesforce admin is not so likely to do a lot of selling, it is important that you support the sales team with their work. You must have a fundamental understanding of how the sales processes function.

You should always remember that a sales team is one of the biggest customers that you can have. It is necessary that you put yourself into their role and get in the habit of creating solutions that can serve the big picture.

It is important for people to approach you and request solutions without telling you about their problems. The main problem is that many times the solutions presented by people do not make sense.

Finally, it is your task to build the best possible solution so that you can ask why a solution is being requested while understanding what must be done to achieve the results. You can also use your expertise to evaluate your options and look for the best way to solve a problem.

6. Resourcefulness

Salesforce comes with new releases of the CRM often. Hence, many times the solutions that you have used before might not work now. Understanding where to find the updated information and even holding yourself responsible for expanding your knowledge are skills that set you apart as a Salesforce admin.

Being a Salesforce admin, you will be required to answer important questions while also teaching members the steps needed for using the software. You must know which tools are available in Salesforce so that you can use them to solve different problems.

It is important to always remember that Salesforce is a big platform and you may not always have the right answers with you. However, you must know where to look for answers so that it becomes easy to follow up with the present information.

Being an active member of the Salesforce community helps with resourcefulness and various admins can also serve as experts while turning to you for advice. Hence, it is important to know things.

7. Project Organization and Management

One of the important Salesforce administrator skills is that you can organize the overall flow of a project. In fact, the overall is pretty similar to that of a project manager.

With prior knowledge of developing end-user training and building custom dashboards, you can make a versatile and useful addition to the team members. A good Salesforce admin will always have a tangible experience with important components of project organization and management.

Things such as a detailed understanding of the project charter, consistent communication with key stakeholders, planning and establishing quality controls, and communicating with other members of the execution team are important.

8. Organizational Optimization

The simple ability to effectively plan and strategize is very important for a Salesforce admin. It helps in creating optimal automation and user settings without any foresight afforded by a strategic approach.

A salesforce administrator must be able to understand potential problems, get inspired by solutions to the team management problems, and even imagine a time frame for an upcoming project. 

As a skilled Salesforce admin, a proactive mindset at work as opposed to simply reacting to requests from team members can be helpful. It is possible for you to bring a lot more to your team in case you look ahead and suggest ideas rather than waiting around for a problem to get solved itself.

9. Development Mindset

Although coding experience is not an essential requirement for a Salesforce admin, understanding developer logic is one of the best skills. A good part of your job involves administering permissions.

In different words, you need to set up rules that make the job role of everyone pretty clear when it comes to operating a CRM. You should also be able to write logic and use tools including validation rules and process builders.

In addition, you must be able to think logically while understanding the possible limitations that come with software. Anytime you are able to make a change, you must understand the implications of all the changes that you make.

10. Knowing Numbers

Being a sales manager, numbers can be your new best friend. Analytics and data insights on how a business is performing can make a lot of difference. Data will improve all areas that require more attention so that you can pass advice to representatives.

In case you are a newly promoted salesforce admin or manager then it is best to think about things as a shift from sales execution to being a number-driven coach. You must look for the story behind the numbers by studying the financial reports.

Other than this, you can also try to look beyond sales-specific numbers. You must know how the marketing is performing and what it is about customer service that you should know.

Detailed knowledge of company performance all across the customer lifecycle matters. This gives you a better understanding of where sales management comes in. You can also guide your team in a better way.

Conclusion

Coming into the world of Salesforce administration is the best case if you are interested in sales and have a penchant for organizational management. This is irrespective of whether or not you have gained certification. The above-mentioned Salesforce admin skills can be helpful to find your way and use the platform easily.

You can have professionals manage your platform with the expert assistance of a Salesforce consultant like Encaptechno. The professionals can help you automate the administration process and even monitor the inboxes for transferring and syncing sales data into the Salesforce platform easily. You can start a free trial today and try it for yourself.