The beginnings of my Salesforce journey.
Since starting with Traction Complete, I have been surrounded by Salesforce power users, developers, experts, and trailblazers. I talk with people every day who have been apart of the Salesforce ecosystem for decades. It certainly makes me think, “how did I not know about this ecosystem before?”
In my previous experiences, I have worked with other CRMs, legacy databases, and lots….LOTS of Excel. I was constantly hearing about Salesforce and I wasn’t sure why. That is until I started my journey with Traction Complete. I’ve never seen anything like the Salesforce ecosystem. The Trailblazer community alone is amazing; a place where people can collaborate, help one another, and learn new skills. And the AppExchange takes it to the next level. It’s an online marketplace for finding applications or custom solutions that can help enhance Salesforce. If you have a business problem then chances are, there is a solution on the AppExchange. And if there isn’t, then you have the opportunity to create an app to solve your problem.
Admittedly, I’ve been spoiled so far in my Salesforce journey. I’ve experienced the pain first hand from customers when it comes to lead management or manually building account hierarchies. But it’s hard to relate personally. I’m fortunate enough to have Traction Complete installed in our Salesforce instance and I reference it hundreds of times a day.
The complexities of Salesforce.
I imagine those without a Salesforce lead management tool like Traction Complete can empathize. I’ve never had to navigate Salesforce to find related records, been assigned a duplicate lead or an incomplete lead record. I couldn’t imagine a worse start to my Salesforce journey than finding the perfect prospect, emailing and calling them just to find out they have been a customer for years. Not only would that be horrible for my relationship with my new colleagues but it kills our credibility with our customers.
I know what you may be thinking, lazy newbie, why didn’t you just check Salesforce to see if they were a customer? Valid point, but how sustainable is that? Every single time a new lead is assigned to me, I have to “google” the database to find out the following:
- Is there an open or closed opportunity?
- When’s that opportunity from?
- Who was the last person to engage with them?
- When was the last activity or time they were engaged?
- Wait, why is there 4 different contacts with the same name?
Let’s make things more complicated.
Imagine I did “google” Salesforce and found out there was no current relationship with that target company. Great, let’s contact them! But then I get tapped on the shoulder by my boss asking me if I knew that they were a subsidiary of one of our largest customers. Traction Complete gives me the visibility into who I am dealing with and what kind of relationship that account has with our company. I couldn’t imagine where I would start if I had to understand complicated enterprise accounts and how they relate to other existing accounts without a tool like Complete.
I’m loving my journey so far with Salesforce but it is a huge learning curve. It took me a bit of time to understand what an “object” is or why leads are usually the first object to get kicked to the curb. But I am slowly figuring it out and peeling back a layer of the onion every day. But it’s a very large onion! I’m extremely grateful to be able to be apart of a knowledgeable team and use tools that enable my learning. There are millions of people in this ecosystem that know more than me about Salesforce. But I take pride in knowing that I get the chance to talk to others and hopefully make their job a bit easier by leveraging Traction Complete.
If you’re a part of the Salesforce ecosystem and want to learn how to automate your workflows, book a personalized demo to see what Traction Complete can do to improve your sales performance.
Written by
Taylor is an AE at Traction Complete.
