If you want to learn How to sell on Salesforce, You need to understand how to use your CRM to organize potential clients, track business opportunities, and guide each negotiation through to closing.
Salesforce lets you centralize virtually everything information related to your sales, preventing contacts, conversations, tasks, and opportunities from being scattered across spreadsheets, emails, and other applications.
The key is not simply to enter contacts into the system, but to create a organized and repeatable business process that allows you to know at all times what you should do with each potential client.
You can learn about the available commercial solutions directly on the page of Salesforce Sales.
📊 Salesforce Sales Process Summary
| Phase | What to do | Target |
|---|---|---|
| Prospecting | Create and register leads | Attract potential customers |
| Qualification | Analyze needs and interests | Identifying real opportunities |
| Conversion | Convert the qualified lead | Create account, contact and opportunity |
| Negotiation | Manage the opportunity | Moving towards closure |
| Follow-up | Record tasks and activities | Keep negotiations active |
| Closing | Mark the opportunity as won or lost | Record the result |
| Analysis | View reports and dashboards | Improve future sales |
🎯 1. Define your sales process in Salesforce
Before you start introducing clients, you need to be clear about what your [targeting/marketing] will be. sales process, Because Salesforce works best when each opportunity follows predefined stages.
Your process could begin with prospecting, continue with qualification, move on to a sales presentation or proposal, and end with a negotiation and closing.
Salesforce allows you to adapt the opportunity stages to the way each company operates, so you can configure the CRM according to your company's specific characteristics. business cycle.
The more defined this process is, the easier it will be to identify which negotiations need attention and which ones are progressing correctly.
👤 2. Register your potential customers as leads
The leads or candidates They represent people or companies that could buy your products or services but still need to be qualified before becoming a business opportunity.
To register a new potential client, you can follow these steps:
- Log in to your Salesforce.
- Open the tab Leads o Candidates, depending on the language configured.
- Click New to create a record.
- Enter data such as name, company, phone number, email address, and lead source.
- Add any information that might help you later to complete the sales follow-up.
- Save the record to incorporate it into your sales process.
It is also recommended to register the origin of each lead, This is because you will later be able to analyze whether your best customers come from advertising, web forms, referrals, events, sales calls, or other channels.
🔎 3. Qualify your leads before trying to sell
Not all contacts have the same chance of becoming customers, so you need to do a proper lead qualification.
You can analyze factors such as the problem the potential client needs to solve, their available budget, the timeframe for making a decision, and who has the power to decide. purchasing authority.
You should also log calls, meetings, emails, and next actions to keep everything organized. commercial activity related to that contact.
A good qualification allows you to dedicate more resources to those contacts who show a real commercial interest, reducing the time spent on irrelevant opportunities.
🔄 4. Turn the lead into an opportunity
When you determine that a lead is genuinely interested and there is a reasonable possibility of doing business, you can convert it to to move forward in the commercial process.
By converting a qualified lead, Salesforce can generate the necessary records to continue working with that customer and create a sales opportunity.
To do this, you can follow this process:
- Open the qualified lead.
- Please check that your information is correct.
- Use the option Convert.
- Check the account and contact that will be created or associated.
- Create the corresponding business opportunity.
- Confirm the conversion.
From that moment you can manage that potential sale from the opportunity registration.
💼 5. Manage your opportunities correctly
The opportunities They represent potential sales and allow recording information such as the negotiation phase, the expected amount, and the planned closing date.
When you create an opportunity, try to complete at least the following information:
- Opportunity Name to quickly identify the negotiation.
- Account corresponding to the client or company.
- Estimated amount that the sale could generate.
- Expected closing date of the operation.
- Commercial stage where it is currently located.
- Related contacts with the purchase decision.
- Next action that you must do to move the negotiation forward.
Keeping these fields properly updated allows you to have a much more reliable sales pipeline.
✅ 6. Always plan your next action
One of the best practices for selling using a CRM is to ensure that no opportunity goes unnoticed. without tracking.
After making a call, meeting, demonstration, or sending a quote, immediately record what your next commercial action.
You can create tasks related to pending calls, follow-ups, meetings, sending documentation, or any activity necessary to move the sale forward.
This discipline makes Salesforce a true business organization tool instead of using it solely as a customer database.
📈 7. Update the stages of each opportunity
As a negotiation progresses, you should update your stage within the sales process, since these phases allow you to visualize the real situation of your pipeline.
An opportunity can progress, for example, from prospecting to needs analysis, proposal, negotiation, and finally closed won or closed lost.
It's not a good idea to leave all opportunities in the same phase for weeks, because this makes your business forecasts less accurate.
Updating each opportunity after an important interaction will help you maintain a realistic view of your future sales.
💰 8. Register products, prices, and proposals
Depending on the configuration used by your company, you can associate products and prices to the opportunities to more accurately reflect what you are trying to sell.
This is especially useful when you have multiple products, services, plans, licenses, or commercial packages with different prices.
Keeping this information within Salesforce makes it easier for salespeople and managers to quickly understand the potential value of each negotiation.
It also avoids relying exclusively on external documents to understand exactly what proposal has been made to the client.
🤝 9. Close the sale and record the result
When the client finally accepts your proposal, you should update the opportunity to reflect that the negotiation has ended. sale won.
If the customer rejects the offer, it is also important to record the opportunity as lost and indicate, whenever possible, the reason for the loss.
This information can later help you discover patterns related to price, competition, product features, or existing problems within the commercial process.
Recording lost sales is also essential because it provides you with useful information to improve your next negotiations.
📊 10. Use reports to improve your sales
Salesforce can help you transform all the information recorded by your team into reports and business dashboards.
You can analyze metrics such as open opportunities, closed sales, pipeline volume, sales activity, or performance according to different criteria configured in your organization.
These metrics help you detect potential problems and better understand how your system works sales funnel.
Instead of making decisions solely based on intuition, you can use the data stored in Salesforce to establish clearer business priorities.
🤖 11. Automate repetitive tasks
As your sales process begins to grow, you can look for opportunities to automate tasks and reduce manual labor.
For example, you can configure specific processes to manage assignments, notifications, updates, and other operations related to customer management.
The goal of automation should be to get salespeople to spend less time on administrative tasks and more time on selling. talk to potential clients and close deals.
You can also explore available apps and extensions in Salesforce AppExchange to expand the possibilities of your Salesforce environment.
🎓 12. Learn Salesforce by practicing
If you're still getting started with the platform, a good option is to use Salesforce Trailhead, the official Salesforce learning platform.
There you can practice concepts related to leads, accounts, contacts, opportunities and other essential functions through different training modules.
There is even specific training on the management of candidates and opportunities, two fundamental elements to understand how to make sales within the CRM.
🚀 Tips for selling better with Salesforce
For better results, try applying these practices:
- Always keep data updated of your customers.
- Record important interactions immediately after they occur.
- Add a next action to every open opportunity.
- Remove or correct duplicate records when you find them.
- Periodically review your stalled opportunities.
- Use reports to analyze your business results.
- Define clear criteria to know when to convert a lead.
- It correctly records both the sales gained as well as lost.
🏁 Conclusion.
Learn How to sell on Salesforce This means using CRM as a guide to organize each stage of the relationship with the potential customer, from the first contact to closing the deal.
If you properly register your leads, qualify each contact, convert the best candidates into opportunities, and keep your pipeline updated, you'll be able to work with a much more organized business process.
The real advantage emerges when you make Salesforce part of your daily routine and use its data to determine Which customer needs attention, what's the next step, and where are your best sales opportunities?.