In an interaction with CRN, Khadim Bhatti, Co-Founder & CEO, Whatfix shares insights into how Sales Force Automation (SFA) tools allow sales teams to unlock additional revenue opportunities through process automation across the sales cycle and how the company is serving enterprises’ need for better sales task management and hands-on salesforce learning.
Q. How can companies improve productivity on their salesforce platforms with better adoption onboarding?
With the ever-changing landscape, there has been fundamental changes within the sales process for organisations across all industries and sizes. The end-to-end sales processes have become more complex which also includes sub-processes such as analytics and strategic planning, lead management, opportunity management, and contracting. This called for an imperative introduction of highly specialised sales roles such as BDRs, SEs, presales, etc. with great targeted responsibilities which focus on the specific parts of the sales process.
As a result, the high-level complexity led to the emergence of various adoption challenges, which slowed down the growth and severely reduced the profitability of organisations. The increased complexity reduces the productivity of sales professionals, allowing less time to focus on high-value tasks such as customer discovery, creating solutions and building value propositions, meeting customers and building relationships, researching competitors, learning about the industry, etc. Longer onboarding time represents a major adoption challenge across all companies and all industries. The higher ramp-up time affects revenue generation and growth of the organisation.
Moreover, reduced productivity also leads to highly increased operational costs. Due to the higher degree of specialisation of sales professionals, training at a large scale has become less efficient. This leads to an increase in training costs. Due to lack of training, end-users face issues while using applications and need additional support resulting in an increased number of service tickets and a surge in support costs. With complex processes, users also struggle to enter data correctly into Salesforce.
With a reduced data quality in the system, reporting such as sales forecasting becomes less accurate. Salesforce user-adoption translates to enabling a user to get the best out of SFDC’s full CRM capabilities by offering in-app guidance and support in real-time and simplifying the experience of using the application. This includes a seamless onboarding experience, step-by-step interactive product tours, contextual support in the moment of need, automation capabilities to improve productivity, and continued development. The process of creating a Salesforce adoption strategy is complex and if not developed on time may lead to low ROI. The first step for companies to craft their Salesforce adoption strategy is to understand their employees. To benefit from industry-proven best practices, Whatfix offers a solution set for all end-to-end sales processes.
Q. How is Whatfix serving companies need for better sales task management and hands-on salesforce learning?
In many companies, despite a strong training set-up, users struggle to leverage Salesforce in their sales process with initial training emphasis heavily focused on how to use the tool. Heavy customization to Salesforce results in a diverse, high number of processes implemented. At Whatfix, we provide real-time training and onboarding assistance that’s personalized to users’ role, language, and instance which is customized per region and business unit.
Our contextual in-app guidance helps execute processes like creating, nurturing and converting leads and opportunities, identifying sales-ready leads, and finding competitive intelligence. We have Interactive On-Screen Guidance where hands-on interactive training is delivered as a part of the onboarding course in the form of 40+ walkthroughs. There are role-based enablements for BDRs, account executives, sales managers, solution engineers, and consultants. We have automated manual tasks such as logging a call, updating leads and opportunities from email. With the help of tools like CRM, we offer uninterrupted guidance across applications. We also have smart tips and data validation for entering information into the system like lead, opportunity, and account details, checking quote input variables, etc.
Whatfix’s auto-generated help content in multiple formats (videos, PDFs, slideshows, etc.) significantly reduces help video creation effort. The content maintenance effort for the frequently changing Salesforce application, especially on videos that could run into days is also done now in minutes. Our contextual self-help solve issues by enabling representatives to find high priority leads, understand how to request pre-sales and get discount rates approved.
The other feature called visual in-app alerts allows to communicate process changes like new lead and opportunity conversion processes, lead and opportunity field changes and outstanding approvals. Many organizations also plan to leverage Whatfix’s SCORM integration to use this content as learning courses in their LMS.
Q. How can Whatfix help in reducing user adoption time and improve productivity with salesforce adoption?
Whatfix offers a unique Digital Adoption Platform that helps with in-app walkthroughs, videos, and guides for using new software solutions and features. CRMs, ERPs, HCMs, and other sophisticated software require significant training and time before they can be used to their full potential. Whatfix is enabling faster, more efficient onboarding and usage for all types of organisations.
We are effectively replacing the traditional over-the-shoulder help with contextual and real-time support. We have designed the platform to ease customization and authoring of outflows. Whatfix content can be easily integrated with your learning management system (LMS). We are easing onboarding and change management through features such as Whatfix Flows which provide step-by-step in-application guidance and Smart Tips which help users with first-hand information.
Our in-app engagement/communication capabilities have helped improve our customers’ engagement with their users by 150 percent every month, compared to the pre-covid period. Whatfix’s DAP can handle volumes of users and numerous use cases that enterprise-scale software serves. As enterprises deploy our platform, we have observed that support queries have come down by 30-50 percent while the data quality in CRM or SCM subsequently improved by 20 percent.
