In the world of sales, few (maybe even zero) tools have altered the landscape as much as Salesforce.
My own personal journey with the tool began as it likely did for many — with a sense of awe. I could see the vast potential of SFDC to streamline customer relationship management the moment our eyes met. But, as the platform evolved, it brought with it baggage that few could have anticipated.
The tool, with its many offerings and possibilities, became too complex. And this complexity has introduced a ton of challenges, particularly in pipeline management.
My previous experience at Salesforce HQ — as Ops and Strategy Manager — provided a front-row seat to these challenges.
I witnessed teams struggle to adapt. I saw them become beat down by the ever-growing demands of Salesforce, juggling between tools and processes. I saw growing inefficiencies and frustrations and a lot of missed-out revenue.
As Salesforce has grown, the promise of its power has been overshadowed by the realities of managing it. There's a full cottage industry of products out there, like Scratchpad, or Dooly, each hellbent on solving different one-off issues that Salesforce’s expansion has created.
To make matters worse, the modern selling environment is tough. Understanding and mastering Pipeline Management has become more than a technical skill — it's absolutely necessary now.
Your ability to manage your pipeline can mean the difference between thriving and not. It can mean your sales team hitting their numbers, or not. It can mean managers get to show up to that next board meeting above plan, or they don't.
So, now, I’m aiming to detail the challenges revenue teams face with Pipeline Management and to note where these challenges are coming from. This way, we can find novel solutions to the pains of modern sales processes.
First up, let's talk about why pipe management is so important to begin with.
The Current Hellscape of Salesforce Pipeline Management, By Role
As I said before, while Salesforce's robust feature set is often its greatest strength, it can also be its deepest challenge.
Speed, simplicity, ease, the like doesn't jive with Salesforce.
In fact, this “challenge of complexity” isn't merely a function of the number of Salesforce features but in how they interconnect and impact sales operations on the daily.
Let’s take a look at pipeline management by role, and why it’s so important to get it right, starting at the top of the sales funnel:
Marketing
- Role in Pipeline Management: Marketing feeds the sales pipeline monster.
- Where the Ball is Dropped: The main challenge is ensuring that the leads they generate are tracked in Salesforce. Miscommunication or data misalignment between marketing and sales can mean leads aren't properly integrated into the pipeline.
- The Consequences: When leads aren't tracked or nurtured, it can result in a gap between marketing efforts and conversions. This misalignment can lead to a weaker pipeline, with quality leads not being effectively captured or pursued, ultimately impacting the organization's revenue potential.
SDRs
- Role in Pipeline Management: As they’re often the first point of contact between potential customers and the company, SDRs play a crucial role in building pipeline by identifying and qualifying leads.
- Where the Ball is Dropped: The main challenges for SDRs are managing and categorizing leads and meeting lead SLAs. This includes timely updates of lead status and ensuring that handoff information is good/complete so their AE counterparts can provide a delightful experience.
- Consequences: Inaccurate or delayed lead management by SDRs can result in a clogged pipeline with unqualified or stale leads and a less-than-delightful experience for potential customers. This affects the efficiency of the entire sales process, as AEs may spend time on leads with low conversion potential, ignore otherwise high-conversion potential leads, or make prospects feel unmoored or un-listened-to. Ultimately, this inefficiency can result in missed opportunities and reduced overall sales effectiveness.
AEs
- Role in Pipeline Management: Account Executives are key drivers of the sales process, responsible for moving leads through the pipeline to close deals.
- Where the Ball is Dropped: AEs often face challenges in keeping Salesforce updated with the latest interaction data, opportunity progress, and closing probabilities. This is usually due to the time-consuming nature of data entry and/or prioritization of active selling over CRM updates.
- Consequences: When AEs don't consistently update Salesforce, it leads to a pipeline that doesn't accurately reflect the current status of opportunities. This can result in poor forecasting, missed follow-up opportunities, and a lack of visibility into the sales process. Ultimately, these issues can hinder the AE’s ability to effectively close deals and hit their targets, impacting the organization’s revenue.
FLMs
- Role in Pipeline Management: FLMs oversee team performance and ensure overall pipeline health.
- Where the Ball is Dropped: The primary challenge for FLMs lies in maintaining an accurate and real-time overview of the sales pipeline. This difficulty often arises due to inconsistent or incomplete data entries by their teams. FLMs may also struggle with extracting actionable insights from Salesforce due to its complex reporting features.
- Consequences: When FLMs don't have a clear and accurate view of the pipeline, it impairs their ability to make informed decisions, allocate resources effectively, and provide timely guidance to their teams. This can lead to suboptimal sales strategies, missed opportunities, and a potential decline in win rates. Ultimately, these issues can affect the organization's ability to meet its sales objectives and grow revenue.
In the end, I've observed what many McKinsey and Gartner reports consistently back up: teams are spending more time wrestling with the nuances of data entry and report generation than on actual sales activities. But the result is still a pipeline that's not just difficult to manage but also riddled with inaccuracies and outdated information.
It is, in short, a mess for all of us.
To counter these challenges, many teams resort to using external tools like spreadsheets for managing their pipelines. While this might seem like a simple solution, it introduces its own set of problems — from huge data security concerns to the lack of synchronization with Salesforce. This makeshift approach, while providing temporary relief, often leads to a fragmented process that undermines the core benefits of Salesforce to begin with.
So, it's clear that traditional methods are becoming less effective.
The need for solutions that can simplify Salesforce's complexity, streamline data management, and provide meaningful insights is more pressing than ever.
Understanding the Pain in Your Pipeline Management
To truly address the suffering in Pipeline Management, it's crucial to also understand the specific pain points that sales teams encounter.
These issues go beyond mere technical complexities; they touch on the very essence of how sales processes are managed (or, yes, mis-managed) in a modern CRM environment.
Let’s take a look at the big boys:
Overwhelming Navigation and Usage
The first major hurdle is the overwhelming complexity of literally using Salesforce itself. With its myriad of features and customizations, it can be daunting for sales reps to navigate and utilize the platform effectively. Sales consistently find themselves lost in the fog of tabs, views, and reports, struggling to find what they need. This complexity often leads to underutilization of Salesforce. Teams won't adapt. They'll just revert to more familiar, less effective ways of managing pipeline.
Inefficient Data Entry and Management
A significant pain point in Salesforce pipeline management? The cumbersome process of data entry and management. Salesforce can demand constant attention for its data. From updating opportunity stages to logging customer interactions, you may never finish. However, the manual nature of these tasks makes them a time-suck, prone to errors. I recall a convo with a sales rep who expressed frustration over spending hours each week just keeping our CRM updated. It's time that could be spent on actual selling, she said. And to her credit: her entire performance was evaluated by the latter. (A real morale killer, I should add.)
Reporting and Analytics Challenges
Another important point is the overwhelming nature of Salesforce's reporting and analytics. You’re essentially asking sales leaders and AEs to fish in an ocean of data for a very specific thimble of relevance. We often try to force the issue and the result is either oversimplified reports that offer little value or overly complex ones that are virtually impossible to decipher. As a RevOps leader, I've seen how this challenge leads to a disconnect between what the data is saying and the sales strategies being implemented.
The Struggle with User Adoption & Training
Finally, there's the challenge of user adoption and training. Salesforce, with all its intricacies, requires ongoing training and support. However, due to constraints or underestimation of the platform's complexity, many orgs don’t offer any proper training. This leads to a scenario where the sales team is not fully utilizing Salesforce, thereby negating its potential benefits. (There’s also the massive issue of “inspiring” reps to want to be trained on something that doesn’t make them money, but I digress.)
These pain points have, for years, highlighted the need for solutions that are not just about adding more features to Salesforce but about simplifying and streamlining the existing ones.
It's about making Salesforce more accessible and user-friendly for sales reps. It's about providing the depth and flexibility that managers and RevOps need. This understanding is what led to the creation of tools like Rattle's Board and Digest, designed to tackle these exact pain points head-on.
So let’s talk about them, shall we?
Board & Digest: Innovations Born Out of A Sheer Necessity
After identifying the pain points in Pipeline Management, it became clear that traditional methods — including the Salesforce UI itself — were no longer sufficient. This realization here led to the development of our tools Board and Digest. Both are designed to address the core challenges faced by sales teams and provide a next-level sort of Pipeline Management. We aimed to make it substantive and easy to maintain, all where your team naturally operates and collaborates: your chat app.
Here's how these tools are changing the game:
Board: The Intuitive Spreadsheet Synced with Salesforce
We built Board from the need to simplify the SFDC experience. As a RevOps SME at a RevOps-focused company, I’ve been in a unique position to witness sales teams get ensnared by Salesforce's complexity. We simply knew there had to be a better way. Board is the culmination of this vision. It's a tool that combines the familiarity of a spreadsheet with the power of Salesforce.
Board offers an intuitive interface that is directly synced with SFDC. This design significantly reduces the complexity of data entry and management, making it more accessible to sales reps and with real-time updates and one-click edits. It reduces the pipeline management process down to its barest, simplest, easiest function. It allows for quick updates, ensuring that pipe data is always current and accurate. One of my personal favorites is the ability to remind AEs to update pipe before a forecast call. This makes it super easy for them to update SFDC, but it also serves as a “set it and forget it” strategy for reminding AEs to keep their updates timely.
(And for sales leaders, Board also provides a consolidated view of the pipeline. This enhances visibility and decision-making. It also turns Salesforce data into actionable insights, without those complex reports.)
Digest: Simplifying Updates and Reducing Alert Fatigue
The creation of Digest was driven by a specific challenge — the overwhelming number of alerts and updates sales reps receive daily. Digest aims to cut through this hubbub by providing a focused approach to updates.
Digest does this by condensing multiple alerts and reminders into a single, streamlined view. This approach minimizes alert fatigue. It also makes it easier for sales reps to prioritize their tasks. The conditional formatting (literally highlighting the fields that need to be updated) is a big differentiator. We’re showing you, in no uncertain terms, what needs to be done.
The tool gamifies the process of updating Salesforce data, introducing elements like countdowns and progress tracking. This layer of motivation and engagement encourages reps to stay on top of their updates.
For RevOps leaders, Digest offers a solution to maintain cleaner, more accurate Salesforce data, which is crucial for strategic planning and forecasting. And I can tell you — there has been far less animosity between me and my frontline managers than I’ve ever had before.
The introduction of Board and Digest into the Salesforce ecosystem represents an important pivot in how Pipe Management is understood and approached. These tools aren’t just about adding functionality. They’re about revamping the user experience. They're about making Salesforce more intuitive, efficient, and effective for sales teams.
In the end, that’s really how you get sh*t done.
It’s Time to Embrace a New Era in Pipeline Management
It’s clear to anybody with a pulse that the landscape of sales has evolved dramatically.
The hurdles faced by sales teams before? They're not the same challenges anymore.
This is precisely what Rattle's Board and Digest embody — a leap forward in making Salesforce an even more powerful tool for sales success.
As a RevOps pro, and a front-row witness to this whole evolution, I can confidently say that these tools are more than additions to Salesforce. They are mindset-changers.
I firmly believe that the simpler you make tasks, the more sh*t gets done.
That’s why the future always has a bias toward easy.
