Salesforce Automation Cheat Sheet for SMB Sales Managers

photo of Salesforce Automation on a smartphone

The new year is upon us, and along with it comes new sales resolutions.

One of the most popular sales resolutions for 2022 will be a commitment to reduce non-selling activity. Did you know that most salespeople spend over 60% of their time not selling.

Imagine how much revenue those sales orgs are losing every single year.

The quickest way to resolve this problem is to automate Salesforce. Sounds simple enough, right? I shared this insight with a friend of mine who’s a sales executive, and he sent me this 635 page Salesforce guide on automating business processes.

He doesn’t have time for 635 pages of workflows and if/then statements—and neither do you!

Introducing the Salesforce Automation Cheat Sheet. Be sure to bring this to your next meeting, because this time next year, you’ll understand just how much revenue was left on the table before automation.

screenshot of the salesforce automation cheat sheet

What is Salesforce Automation?

When we speak of Salesforce automation, we’re talking about the automatic processing of administrative tasks and manual sales tasks related to Salesforce.

For example, this could be entering in the contact information of a new prospect at one moment, and manually prioritizing outreach at another.

Did you know these two specific tasks account for 166 annual hours and 146 annual hours respectively for most salespeople?

How much more could one of your reps sell with an additional 300+ selling hours a year?

Salesforce delivers very powerful functionality out-of-the-box for automating repetitive business tasks. These features include Process Builder, Flow Builder, Approvals, and Workflows.

The only problem with this functionality is that you’ll require a Salesforce Developer, a role that usually commands a salary between $70,000 and $125,000 per year.

Did I forget to mention how long it will take for that talent to program such automation (don’t ask, it takes months).

Good thing you’re here! I’m going to show you how a handful of Salesforce automation solutions can rapidly deliver you the results you need at a great fraction of the cost of hiring.

What are the Benefits of Salesforce Automation Software?

When you think of sales software, you might cringe a little because you think of the expense of it and the potential complexity of use. That’s understandable, I’m the same way.

That’s why I’m only going to share software solutions with you. By solutions I’m referring to software that solves problems, not creates them.

Salesforce automation software has two main goals. Streamline sales processes tied to Salesforce, and save time. But there’s more benefits to share:

  1. Improves Data Accuracy: The more time your salespeople spend typing first and last names, as well as dozens of other data points, the more likely they are to mistype, thereby lowering data quality. By greatly improving data quality, you eliminate duplicate records, upset contacts, and other related non-selling activity.
  2. Maximizes Selling Time: By automating non-selling activity, you’re giving your sales team more time to spend with their customers. This is where the real impact on revenue comes to play. By automating Salesforce, individual salespeople see a 124% increase in customer engagement!
  3. Smartly Prioritizes Leads: Gone are the days when salespeople prioritized outreach based on excel spreadsheets, demographics, or heaven forbid intuition. Thanks to Salesforce automation software that leverages artificial intelligence, outreach can be prioritized by their customers’ buying signals (eg. inbox activity, content engagement, etc.).
  4. Improves Reporting and Forecasts: With improved data accuracy and buyer intent analysis comes improved reporting and forecasting. The last thing you want are wrong numbers telling the wrong story. It’s also common to leverage Salesforce Developers to clean up and optimize Salesforce dashboards, however, most automation solutions already come with developer-approved dashboards.
  5. Improves Morale and Retention: This is an underrated benefit of Salesforce automation. Salesforce has been around for over twenty years, and salespeople old and young are still hesitant to use the world’s most popular CRM. By automating the tasks salespeople despise, and thereby improving the chance of their success, salespeople morale is greatly improved with the automation of non-selling activity.

How Does Salesforce Automation Development Work?

As I shared earlier, a Salesforce developer can create sales process automations custom to your organization’s unique needs. While this can take a significant amount of time and effort, and sometimes expense, it’s good for you to know what programming is already built-into Salesforce automation software.

Do you know what this is? sforce.one.editRecord(recordID)

It’s one of hundreds of unique lines of action code that developers can add to Salesforce’s Visualforce interface. The level of javascript programming required to customize your Salesforce is very high, which is demonstrated by their common salary demands.

Salesforce developers choose one of four paths when automating Salesforce:

  1. Approval Processes: The simplest to develop, these are record-based automated processes that are dependent on the actions of individual Salesforce users. For example, a user choosing whether or not to approve, reject, or reassign a lead.
  2. Process Builder: This development process adds the “that” to the basic if/then automated process. When salespeople perform specific tasks throughout the day, this is the process that triggers based on activities like updated records and status updates.
  3. Workflow Rules: While limited and legacy-like, workflow rules can be quite useful and easy to implement. Developers will write if/then processes that automate subsets of automations performed in Process Builder.
  4. Flows: The most dynamic of the four automation tools, Flows is where developers add complex logic and anything else that cannot be done with Approval, Process Builder, and Workflow, especially supporting the deletion of records.

If you’re more interested in going down the route of custom development, here are some applicable Salesforce automation cheat sheets:

photo of a developer programming

The Salesforce Automation Cheat Sheet: Choose Wisely

When choosing between Salesforce Automation solutions and developers, you should consider the following 4 factors:

  1. Developers Can Leave at Any Time: Simply put, Salesforce Developers are always in demand. Salary increases should be taken into consideration as they are easily able to prove their contribution to Salesforce ROI. By choosing the software path to Salesforce automation, you don’t have to worry about losing staff at your company, however, you do have to consider their support and software updates.
  2. Salesforce Support & Updates: Your Salesforce Developer will occasionally have to leverage Salesforce Support, as well as make modifications to custom automation due to Salesforce updates. This is normal, however, as Salesforce’s reputation for lackluster or inconsistent support is widely known, leading to occasional downtime. Software solutions stay well ahead of Salesforce updates, and any and all updates to their solution are low-impact to users.
  3. Customization Now or Later:  While developers are very good at what they do, customization initiatives around automation can take a considerable amount of time. Added to this fact is that your customization is going to be user-focused, and depending on your salespeoples’ role-based and industry-based needs, such customization can be difficult. Software solutions take more of a best practice approach, automating the areas that bog down salespeople and are not often role or industry specific.
  4. User Adoption: Where all of this comes together is user adoption. The greatest pain point to SMB Sales Managers who choose to invest and deploy Salesforce is the lack of use by their sales reps. It’s more than just comfort with previous ways and a fear of oversight—it’s having to do things that aren’t the best use of time for salespeople (eg. data entry and admin tasks). This is where Salesforce Automation solutions stand out above developers, as user adoption is one of their key differentiators.
cartoon of a sales manager choosing between two paths

Salesforce Automation Solutions to Consider for 2022

There’s more to Salesforce automation than merely updating records and prioritizing leads. Salesforce is meant to be used collaboratively across the whole organization, from Sales to Marketing, and Human Resources to Customer Service. Here are some of the most popular Salesforce Automation solutions used by SMB Management:

  1. Veloxy – Start for free here: While this may seem like a plug, it’s actually a recommendation backed by four and five star ratings from companies of all sizes, including T-Mobile, Comcast, and Shell. Veloxy does more than automate and eliminate data entry and admin tasks, it automagically prioritizes leads based on buyer intent, helps you discover prospects in your territories and adds them to your Salesforce (at no extra cost), and it extends Salesforce to your favorite tablet and smartphone.
    1. Frank Ortiz, Vast Networks (SMB Telecom): “Veloxy is a game changer. The Salesforce Automation alone has saved us over $100k a year! Not to mention the rapid results we received once we deployed Veloxy—300% funnel size growth in the first month, 400% sales growth by the second month.”
  2. signNow – Get it now here: Non-selling activity tied to proposals and contracts account for over 180 hours every year per salesperson. Now you can drastically decrease or eliminate that number with signNow, an eSignature and document app that enables you to easily map fields in Salesforce to fields in digital documents. The contract was signed? Perfect, all the fields and even the signature is instantly added to the appropriate Salesforce records.
    1. Anthony T., Senior Revenue Operations (eCommerce): “We downloaded it because we wanted all of our pending signature contracts to be stored right within the opportunity/account as soon as it’s completed. Previously we would have to manually download the file and upload it to Salesforce so that saved us a couple of clicks already!”
  3. Eventbrite – Get it now here: Ever experience bottlenecks caused by hundreds, if not thousands of event or tradeshow leads? Easily map the fields in Eventbrite to fields in Salesforce without having to worry about lost or inaccurate data. Similar to Veloxy’s Contact and Opportunity 360° screens, Eventbrite empowers you with a 360° view of all attendee engagement, live at the event and afterwards.
    1. Adam A., Director (Pet Supplies): “We have been using the Campaign Monitor to Salesforce App for a while, and have now adopted the Eventbrite to Salesforce App. Both are extremely well thought out and the integration, as well as the setup, is seamless. We’re able to track all the useful metrics we need and save a lot of time being able to manage most of our activity on all platforms within Salesforce.”

As you can see, the diversity of software solutions approved by Salesforce for automation purposes is almost endless.

Conclusion on Salesforce Automation for SMB Sales Managers

The thing with most “cheat sheets” is that the user has to continue referencing it over-and-over again. Not the Veloxy Salesforce Automation Cheat Sheet!

Open the cheat sheet and move down from the top to discover the best path your sales org can take for confident and rapid success.

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Samir Majumdar

Samir Majumdar

Samir is the CEO and Co-founder of Veloxy. After spending 20+ years creating corporate systems, boosting revenue, and eliminating inefficiencies, Samir started Veloxy to help sales professionals shorten sales cycles, accelerate pipelines, and close more deals.

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