The Sales Office: A Customizable Sales Team Workflow

Salesforce is an incredibly powerful tool. But one of the biggest mistakes I’ve noticed in my sales career is to watch sales teams say, “Well, we have Salesforce, so we’re all set. The team will run itself.”

The truth is that you need to be proactive about developing a workflow for your sales team — one that makes it easy to help your reps grow, collaborate with other teams at your organization, capture valuable feedback, and keep team performance high.

Today I want to share with you what I call The Sales Office. It’s a completely customizable workflow that I use to lead my team — and that you can use to lead yours.

I built out my Sales Office in the latest version of Redbooth. Actually building it is easy: it’s simple to type in tasks, give names to lists of tasks, and drag and drop tasks to move them from one list to another or change the order. That’s a breeze.

The hard part is knowing what to focus on and how to set it up. Unless, of course, someone’s already figured that out for you (ahem).

One thing to keep in mind before we jump in: this look into The Sales Office is just a preview, where I’ll be sharing 3 essential components.

To see the full setup in action — and find out how you can access a free version for yourself for 30 days — just register for the upcoming webinar: Leading Growth: Accelerate Sales and Double Your Sales Team’s Productivity with Redbooth.

(Can’t make it at the exact time and date? Not a problem. We send everyone who registers a link to the full recording.)

1. Weekly Strategy Sessions

Sitting down one-on-one with each member of my team is something I do every week. A strategy session can be coaching, it can be sales development, it can be forecast and pipeline.

In Redbooth, I have individual tasks set up with each of the reps on my team to capture what we’re going to talk about, what we figured out in our meeting, action items, and anything we want to discuss next time.

What’s great is that there’s a consistent historical record of all the things we discussed, our strategy sheets, and our goals right there. We always have all of the artifacts of everything we’ve done so that we can go back and remind ourselves, “Hey, what were we looking at a year ago last July?”

If you’re a people person like me, you’re going to want to set up this section first in your Sales Office, because a great team with the right support can accomplish anything.

2. Special Attention Required

I’m sure that every customer is very important to your team. That’s certainly true for us!

In some cases, however, bringing on a potential customer may require a more complex set of resources to best support them. For example, the potential customer may require additional documentation or have unique technical needs.

So for those situations, you’ll want a task list in your Sales Office called something like Team Top Deals.

And here’s why: your executive team might need to be involved, or your support team, or both.

These are the same people who probably don’t have access to Salesforce. It might just not make business sense to get a license for all of those people.

However, you still might need to get some or even all of those folks involved in communicating with a potential customer. With this dedicated space in your Sales Office, you can bring all your key players together to share information, engage in dialogue, and collaborate to provide exactly what your customers need.

3. Capturing Customer Feedback and Requests

One of the best things your sales team can do is to listen. But then what do they do with the feedback and requests that they hear?

And that’s not the only question you have to ask yourself. How can you spot themes and trends? And crucially, how do you pass that feedback on to other members of your organization who want to hear it?

In our Sales Office, we created a list where any member of the sales team can share the feedback they’re hearing. We automatically know who added the feedback and when they did that.

Now if a customer provides some feedback, the sales rep can go straight to the list and see: did another rep already post it up there? Great, go in and add a comment: “I’m hearing that too!”

If not, it takes about five seconds to post it. It’s all visible to our whole sales team, which is key.

Then when I sit down with Jon, our VP of Product, we can review each item on the list together. He can then bring it all back to his team, where they can discuss the feedback and look at how it fits into the product roadmap.

In so many organizations, this kind of feedback is gathered haphazardly — at best — and then it may or may not ever make its way over to the Product team or wherever it needs to go. That’s why cross-functional collaboration is built right into Redbooth, and why you’re going to want to make sure it’s built into your Sales Office.

But That’s Not All

It’s great to be able to tell you about three of my favorite aspects of how I set up our Sales Office. I can’t wait to show you everything in the webinar!

I know what a difference this methodology has made for my own team — I’m excited to find out what it can do for yours.

Don’t miss the opportunity to get the deluxe video tour of The Sales Office and discover how to customize it specifically for your team. Reserve your webinar spot today >>