Take a critical look at how potential prospects get in touch with you. And how they are then processed. Be careful: there are pitfalls here that must be avoided at all costs. Too much heterogeneity in the way contacts are made presents your sales team with organisational challenges. Generated lead data is provided in a wide variety of technical formats. It is transferred to the IT infrastructure for further processing manually, via lead lists. Manual processing of these contacts is particularly inefficient.

The solution: Offer your customers personalised landing pages and web forms with a direct link to your Salesforce system. Your prospects are seamlessly transferred to your IT process and processed immediately without delay. Ideally, this is automated for optimal conversion.

Your IT system covers the sales process perfectly, but nothing more? Think about your operational processes too. Think about your accounting. These processes are often poorly covered and take place outside the existing IT infrastructure. Or in third-party systems that are fed via manual interfaces. This causes errors and costs time. Uncovered process steps that rely on Excel or, in the worst case, the head of a long-standing employee, also pose a major risk for processes falling by the wayside.

The solution: Ensure comprehensive coverage of your business processes in Salesforce. And make sure that system breaks do not hinder the progress of processes. This ensures that your employees can concentrate on the essentials. And sustainably increases your efficiency.

What was the next step again? What do I need to do? Which processes need to be handled right now? If your employees are asking questions like these, there is only one reason: poor task management. Good task management ensures that there are no open processes in your workflow that are not assigned to at least one specific task for a specific person. Automated. This is the only way to ensure that no process corpses arise. Specifically, tasks that no one feels responsible for anymore, even though they are still in progress. Many process corpses fill up a veritable efficiency graveyard. And this costs you money.

The solution: You can achieve greater efficiency by avoiding process gaps. We generally recommend two different approaches: delegate open items via specific tasks or lists within your Salesforce system. Both approaches have their individual advantages and disadvantages. Both have their raison d'être. Which one you use is therefore secondary, as long as you do it consistently.

Our number one time waster: manually creating documents. We've all had to manually create a quote, presentation or invoice at least once. Typing errors, formatting issues, converting to the right final format. All of this takes up one thing above all else: time.

The solution: Enable you and your employees to create documents fully or partially automatically. Directly from Salesforce. What used to take hours is now done by the system with a single click or completely independently within a few seconds. Whether it's a quote, order confirmation, invoice or liquidity planning.

The same old thing every day? Please, no! Whether it's a follow-up email in sales, an accompanying letter for an invoice or information about important news: having to rewrite the same correspondence every day is not only incredibly time-consuming, it also leads to frustration because our minds strive for meaningful activity. Another important factor in this context is the clear documentation of outgoing correspondence. If this is missing, your employees will lose valuable time familiarising themselves with the processes they need to work on.

The solution: avoid unnecessary manual effort through meaningful automation and intelligent standards. Templates stored in Salesforce save your employees from having to manually write the same emails or letters over and over again. They can be sent with a single click – or fully automatically. And they are documented in your system.

We'll pick up where we left off: automated email sending is important. So is documenting outgoing correspondence. However, the history and context-related documentation of incoming messages are at least as important for ensuring that your processes are traceable. Think of the accounting employee who does not notice the customer's email response to the reminder and calls the customer instead. This costs nerves, customers and time.

The solution: ensure that incoming correspondence is automatically assigned to the correct processes in Salesforce. You can do this by automatically monitoring email inboxes or mobile phone numbers (SMS). The responsible employee always has an overview of messages from customers, service providers or suppliers, always in the direct context of the respective process.

What happens to a process when no one knows exactly what the current status is and how to proceed? Correct: it gets stuck (we already discussed this above). Avoiding such process gaps is one of the most important tasks we consider ourselves responsible for when advising our customers. And one process gap that, in our experience, everyone has had to deal with at some point is the processing of incoming payments. Sifting through bank statements in search of THE one payment can eat up valuable time.

The solution: automation provides a remedy here. The basis for this is the provision of account transaction data in your Salesforce system. Automated processes ensure that payments can be automatically assigned to the correct transactions. And if a customer fails to pay, you can send reminders automatically. This saves you a lot of time.

Customised object and data structure: check. Individual rights and role concept: tick. Appropriate configuration of the user interface: done. It's great if your IT infrastructure has reached this stage. That means 80% of the essential groundwork has been done. The system is ready to be used. So where's the catch? Some companies tend to remain at this stage. However, they overlook the fact that the 80% of the groundwork they have laid only exploits around 20% of the potential for optimisation and efficiency. Because what's missing alongside the mandatory elements is the icing on the cake. And in Salesforce, that's called ‘automation’.

The solution: the missing 80% can be tapped through seamless process management, automated document creation, automated email dispatch, accounting automation, marketing automation, etc. And we are convinced that this will give your company a further boost in terms of efficiency. Take advantage of this opportunity.

Well, automation is important (see previous section). However, if used excessively, it can cause incompatibility reactions. In concrete terms, this means that if used incorrectly, it can harm your company. Why? Let's take a look at system theory. It distinguishes between ‘complex’ and ‘complicated’ tasks. While the path to the goal is clear for complicated tasks, i.e. they can be solved with knowledge and the result is predictable, the situation is completely different for complex tasks. Here, the path to the goal depends on the situation and is different every time, the result is unpredictable and knowledge is only of limited help. What counts more is experience. The mistake that is made far too often here is that Companies automate complex tasks, thereby depriving their employees of the opportunity to make individual decisions where they are urgently needed to successfully complete the task. The result: lack of success, frustrated employees, circumvented processes. Inefficiency.

The solution: Focus on automating complicated tasks and create scope for decision-making and action in complex areas.

Let's continue with the checklist from the previous point and assume that you have also automated the essential (and correct) tasks in your system. Then we would like to congratulate you first of all (because very few people get this far). And then we would like to ask one last critical question: namely, about the usability of your process interface. Many of our customers tend (without further support) to neglect this point. And that is a big mistake, because there is immense potential for efficiency gains here too.

The solution: Ask yourself whether the right information is available in context. Is it clear what needs to be done next and, above all, how this task can be completed? Does it take 1 or 4 clicks to complete a task? The standard Salesforce interface is good, but not perfect. However, it can be customised to suit your individual needs. Do this! Even if the net processing time of your business processes (time spent by employees) has already been significantly reduced by the above points, good usability can bring about further improvements of 50% or more. Don't neglect this aspect.

We analyse your business processes together and go through them step by step. We pay particular attention to the areas that require the most manual effort from you and your employees.

Together, we will develop a "digital ideal", i.e. a process that is efficient for your company. We will draw on our many years of experience and provide tips that can be applied immediately.

We compare your ideas with technical best practices and develop a feasible and sensible strategy for implementing them. You will know exactly what options you have and what exactly needs to be done.