You’ve implemented the Salesforce CRM platform and now your sales process runs smoothly on its own? Probably not. Despite Salesforce’s massive success, it often takes significant adjustments before your company’s established sales process can be fully mapped and executed within the Salesforce environment.
Salesforce Sales Process – Standard Features Often Fall Short
Salesforce offers a broad portfolio of standard features, as highlighted in our first blog article on Salesforce Collaboration. However, when external systems such as an ERP tool or contract management solution are involved, cross-system processes can become highly complex. Due to Salesforce’s high licensing costs, not all user groups have access to Salesforce – and vice versa, access to external systems (ERP, contract management) may also be restricted. As a result, documents often need to be duplicated manually and made available in each respective system. This approach poses risks to a smooth sales process and leads to frustration among employees. Ultimately, these inefficiencies negatively impact the customer experience. Numerous studies have shown that a positive customer experience significantly contributes to customer loyalty, referral rates, and overall business success.¹
Typical Sales Process and Its Challenges in Distributed Systems
Let’s take a look at a typical sales process: ideally, your marketing efforts are successful and generate plenty of leads, which are then followed up by the sales team.
1. Creating an Opportunity in Salesforce
Once a lead is successfully qualified, an opportunity is usually created in Salesforce and assigned to the appropriate stage of the sales pipeline. At this point, the sales representative may attach relevant documents – such as a PowerPoint presentation – to the opportunity.
2. Requesting a Quote from Internal Sales
The sales team continues with further meetings and product presentations, aiming to prompt the customer to request a quote. Here’s where things get tricky: in many companies, additional applications are used alongside Salesforce – such as an ERP system for quote generation. The sales rep either requests a quote from the internal sales team or creates it directly in the ERP system.
Common issue: Even when quotes are generated within Salesforce, they often need to be stored in compliance with country-specific regulations. Standard Salesforce storage is typically insufficient for this.
3. Quote Creation in the ERP System
Back to the process: ideally, the internal sales team has access to Salesforce and can retrieve the necessary information from the opportunity. In the worst case, the sales rep must manually pass on the data using another medium. The internal team then creates the quote based on this information and stores it both in the opportunity and in the ERP system. The sales rep is informed and can then send the quote to the customer via Salesforce or email.
Common issue: During negotiations, customers often request changes. New versions of the quote must be created repeatedly, which increases workload for both the sales rep and the internal team.
4. Closing the Deal and Creating Additional Documents
If the opportunity is successfully closed and the quote accepted, further documents such as order confirmations and contracts must be generated. These documents are often created outside of Salesforce and then manually duplicated and uploaded to Salesforce.
Common issue: Any changes made in external systems must also be reflected in Salesforce. After each revision, the latest version must be stored in all relevant systems. Otherwise, there’s a risk of data loss or working with outdated documents. These redundant steps slow down processes and introduce potential errors. Ultimately, these internal inefficiencies affect customer satisfaction – and in the worst case, may lead the customer to reconsider their purchase decision.
Multiple Challenges in the Sales Process
Of course, the example process above only highlights a few of the many challenges faced in everyday sales operations. Various studies have shown that a significant portion of employees’ working time is lost searching for information. With seamless integration of all relevant applications within the company, both effort and frustration among staff can be significantly reduced. However, this is often a major issue in many organisations. A Forrester study found that over 57% of CRM systems are not sufficiently integrated.² At the same time, expectations from customers – and the need for companies to respond quickly and effortlessly to enquiries – are expected to rise significantly in the future.
Digital document management explained
Seamless Salesforce Sales Process Through Centralised Data and Integration
So how can companies tackle the challenge of a fragmented system landscape? In 2018, Salesforce acquired Mulesoft as a solution. Mulesoft acts as middleware, enabling data and document synchronisation between different systems. However, this approach creates duplicates of documents in each system, which can lead to the issues mentioned earlier. Moreover, regulatory challenges around data storage are not fully addressed by this method.
A Document Management System Offers a More Effective Solution
An alternative approach is to use a document management system (DMS) as a “single point of truth” for all documents. All documents processed within business workflows are stored centrally in the DMS and displayed contextually in the relevant business applications – whether Salesforce, ERP, or contract management systems.
Access to All Documents – Anytime, Anywhere, from Any System
With proper document mapping, all consuming applications – such as Salesforce – can display documents in the correct context. Applied to the sales process, this means: all documents related to an opportunity are stored directly in the DMS by the sales rep via Salesforce. When a quote needs to be created, the internal sales team can access all relevant documents from the ERP system via the DMS. The quote is then created and stored back in the DMS.
Further Benefits of a DMS with Salesforce Integration
- Sales teams have direct access to all relevant documents – without the need for synchronisation. Necessary corrections can be reflected directly in the document and shared between departments.
- Elimination of media breaks – all employees work on the same document.
- Time savings, cost reduction, and lower employee frustration.
- Contracts and order confirmations are instantly available across all systems – always in their latest version.
Conclusion: A Seamless Salesforce Sales Process Is Possible with DMS Integration
Sales processes are often lengthy and require effective collaboration across multiple departments. CRM, ERP, and other software tools are involved – creating a bureaucratic monster. And let’s be honest: nobody likes bureaucracy. It slows down processes and hinders agile responses in today’s fast-paced business world. Yet companies need clearly defined workflows and efficient collaboration. Managing information and documents within Salesforce plays a central role in this.
The logical solution is to access a centralised data repository from Salesforce and all other systems. The benefits are clear: no outdated or redundant information, faster responses to changing circumstances, and – most importantly – a collaborative environment that drives success across the entire organisation.