How to Pass Salesforce Sales Representative Certification Exam

Last Updated on September 8, 2023 by Rakesh Gupta

As a newly minted Salesforce Certified Sales Representative, I am sharing my study experiences with you and want you to be the next one to ace it! So, get ready and dive in!

Sales is a high-pressure job, but it can be highly rewarding. Succeeding in sales takes confidence as well as the ability to convey the value of your products or services to a varied audience without giving the impression of a “hard sell.” It’s truly a people-person career choice.

While training and certification can’t teach the personality traits required for the job, they can get you noticed by hiring managers and give you an edge over others vying for the same positions.

The newly introduced Salesforce Certified Sales Representative certification exam covers various aspects of sales functionality within the Salesforce platform, including lead management, opportunity management, sales productivity, forecasting, and more. By preparing for and passing the exam, you’ll gain a comprehensive understanding of how to effectively utilize Salesforce as a sales representative, improving your sales skills and productivity.

👉 As you are here, you may want to check out the How to Pass Salesforce User Experience Designer Certification exam article.

What Does A Sales Representative Do?

A sales rep interacts directly with customers throughout all sales process phases. They’re responsible for identifying a customer’s needs, pitching relevant products or services, and ensuring they have a positive experience from start to finish. Sometimes, a sales agent will cold call prospects they find through business directories or client referrals. Other times, “warm” leads that have already expressed interest will be sent to them by their company’s marketing team. Being successful requires a mix of both building and maintaining customer relationships and consistently seeking new business opportunities.

A sales representative is typically expected to reach a particular sales quota each month. And as we just mentioned, the level of income you make in this career largely depends on your abilities and work performance. If you’re the type of person that wants to “control your own destiny” rather than working for a traditional salary, this is a career to consider.

Here’s a list of common day-to-day responsibilities:

Selling products or services to customers, and representing the brand. This can include asking questions to pinpoint the best offerings, giving demos or presentations, and maintaining customer relationships.
Reaching out to potential leads through a variety of channels, such as email, phone, text, and social media.
Negotiating with leads and using persuasion techniques to overcome objections and landing deals that are beneficial to the company, while also providing customers with optimal value.
Submitting and processing orders to ensure customers receive the products or services they request on time.
Participating in company meetings with sales managers and other sales reps. This usually involves providing a recap of recent results and accomplishments to show they’re hitting their quotas.

Key technical skills for a sales representative:

Customer and prospect research
Pipeline management
Sales data analysis
Strategy development
Recruiting/hiring

Critical tactical and soft skills include:

Prospect/customer communication
Team collaboration
Relationship building
Problem-solving
People management (sales leader)
Culture-building (sales leader)

So, Who is an Ideal Candidate for the exam?

The Salesforce Sales Representative credential is designed for individuals who exemplify sales excellence using a customer-centric methodology. Candidates’ skills span customer communication, research, discovery, team selling, value selling, and account planning and strategy. This guide provides information about the target audience for the certification exam, recommended training and documentation, and a complete list of exam objectives—all with the intent of helping you achieve a passing score. Salesforce highly recommends a combination of on-the-job experience, course attendance, and self-study to maximize your chances of passing the exam.

There are several reasons why appearing for the Salesforce Sales Representative Certification Exam can be beneficial:

Industry Recognition: Salesforce is a leading customer relationship management (CRM) platform. By obtaining the Salesforce Sales Representative Certification, you demonstrate your expertise in using Salesforce as a sales professional. This certification is widely recognized and valued in the industry, which can enhance your career prospects.
Career Advancement: Employers highly regard Salesforce certifications, and having the Sales Representative Certification can open up new career opportunities. It can help you stand out among other candidates when applying for sales roles or higher-level positions within sales organizations.
Comprehensive Skill Set: The certification exam covers various aspects of sales functionality within the Salesforce platform, including lead management, opportunity management, sales productivity, forecasting, and more. By preparing for and passing the exam, you’ll gain a comprehensive understanding of how to effectively utilize Salesforce as a sales representative, improving your sales skills and productivity.
Increased Productivity: Salesforce provides various tools and features to streamline and enhance sales processes. The certification exam ensures you deeply understand these tools and how to leverage them effectively. By mastering Salesforce’s sales capabilities, you can maximize your efficiency, close deals more effectively, and improve your overall sales performance.
Credibility and Trust: The Salesforce Sales Representative Certification adds credibility to your professional profile. It demonstrates to employers, colleagues, and clients that you have undergone rigorous training and assessment and possess the knowledge and skills needed to excel in a sales role. This can build trust and confidence in your abilities, helping you establish yourself as a trusted sales professional.
Continuous Learning and Development: Salesforce regularly updates its platform with new features and enhancements. By pursuing the certification, you engage in ongoing learning and stay updated with the latest sales capabilities within Salesforce. This enables you to adapt to changing industry trends and technological advancements, ensuring you remain a valuable asset to your organization.

How to prepare for the exam?

Learning styles differ widely – so there is no magic formula that one can follow to clear an exam. The best practice is to study for a few hours daily – rain or shine! Below are some details about the exam and study materials:

60 multiple-choice/multiple-select questions – 105 mins
70% is the passing score
The exam Fee is $200 plus applicable taxes
Retake fee: USD 100 plus applicable taxes
Prerequisite: None

There are tons of resources to help you prepare for the certified business analyst certification exam.

The following list is not exhaustive, so check it out and use it as a starting point:

Prior experience in sales and familiarity with Salesforce will be advantageous in preparing for the exam.

What You Need to Know to Smoothen Your Journey

On a very high level, you have to understand the following topics to clear the exam. All credit goes to the Salesforce Trailhead team; I have taken the below content from there.

Planning: 21%

Here are a few questions that help you understand your company’s go-to-market strategy and orient the territory-management process.
1. Are you trying to expand into a new market this year?
2. Has your product changed to suit customers in a new industry?
3. Have you found that the total addressable market (TAM) is larger in a certain industry than what you first anticipated?
4. Are you targeting a certain size of company this year?
You get the picture—using a single factor alone may not result in the equal territories you want. So, what do you do? Introduce more factors into your formula. Some you can consider are:
1. Number of companies
2. Geography
3. Size of companies (This can be number of employees or annual revenue)
4. Propensity to buy
5. Industry
When planning your territories, it’s always best to start early. If territory planning isn’t already part of your culture, make sure you take the time to get buy-in from your salespeople and leadership before rolling out new plans.
1. Plan for Growth
2. Avoid Disruption
3. Lessen ramp time
4. Lead with Data
5. Be Fair
6. Always Adjust
Here is how CRM platforms can address and resolve the main obstacles faced by the modern sales professional:
1. Sales teams can effectively anticipate customer needs, and thus act proactively. They can do this through the use of predictive artificial intelligence (AI). Although this technology is relatively new, it is an integral part of the best CRM platforms.
2. Companies can use CRM platforms with interconnecting applications to collaborate effectively with other departments, providing a single view of the customer, and ensuring that no clients ever get lost in the shuffle between representatives.
3. Sales reps can use CRM platforms to provide omni-channel journeys for customers. In-person communication remains sales’ top channel for connecting with customers, but with an omnichannel experience, sales teams can follow each lead all the way down the sales pipeline, no matter which channel the leads prefer, or how regularly they move between those channels.
Here are five things to focus on when looking into how to close the sale:
1. Improve nonverbal communication.
2. Practice social selling.
3. Listen to your consumer base.
4. Improve your emailing.
5. Maintain relationships.
Territories are not something you set and then forget about. You need to check in throughout the year to make sure they’re still giving your sales team what they need to succeed—and adjust where necessary. Take note of these best practices to keep top of mind.
1. Experience Is Your Friend
2. Go Back to the Data
3. Minimize Territory Disruption
So how do you manage these territories, exactly? First, step away from the spreadsheet—yes, that one right there on your screen. Step away from time-consuming manual processes and embrace Salesforce Enterprise Territory Management. It’s included in Lightning Experience and Salesforce Classic in Developer and Performance editions and in Enterprise and Unlimited editions with the Sales Cloud. Specifically, you can:
1. Model your territories: Play with different territory models, and see their effects without touching your real data. And when you do choose to deploy a model, it automatically assigns your accounts.
2. Create a territory hierarchy: Just like you need an org chart in business, territories need hierarchy. For example, you can create a master territory for the US, broken into smaller territories for East and West, and those can be broken into smaller territories: California, Texas, New York. You can run rules directly from that hierarchy, even if they’re different for each territory.
3. Define assignment rules: Input your rules so you know which accounts belong in which territories. For example, accounts in x zip code, with y revenue, and in z industry belong in Territory A. That way, you don’t have to do it manually. If you’re using a territory hierarchy, you can assign those same rules to every territory in the hierarchy, without having to manually add and re-add them.
4. Promote team selling: A great way to help reps find the right person to close deals is to assign collaborative roles in a territory. This is an effective way to activate team selling.
AppExchange is the official Salesforce app store. It’s where you can turn if you ever feel like you need a more customized solution, but you don’t want to build it yourself. And because it’s by Salesforce, everything you expect from us, like security and trust, carries over to the offerings.
The difference between pipeline and forecast.
1. Pipeline is a comprehensive view of a rep’s open opportunities, no matter what stage they’re in. It includes everything from the newest prospect to that opportunity with a pen in hand, ready to sign.
2. Forecast is a subset of the pipeline and includes just those deals expected to close in a certain period, like this quarter, for example.
At Salesforce, sales leaders rely on this core set of dashboards:
1. State of the Union Dashboard – This State of the Union dashboard gives you a comprehensive view of your sales, highlighting the most important metrics for the business each month. It includes notable open and closed deals, the top teams and top salespeople for the month, and gives insight on how you’re doing against your forecast.
2. AMP Dashboard – AMP stands for activities, meetings, and pipeline. The leaders at Salesforce recognized a need to track all the inputs that go into closed deals. You can’t have bookings without a pipeline and you can’t have a pipeline without really good meetings with clients. Only high-quality activity can drive those meetings, so at Salesforce, we measure each of those steps that eventually lead to closed deals.
3. Daily Pipe Gen Dashboard – The Daily Pipe Gen dashboard is about… well, pipe generation on a daily basis. You really don’t want to wait until the end of the month or quarter to realize you don’t have enough pipeline to meet your target. That doesn’t leave you enough time to fix anything. Use this dashboard to identify issues early and address them fast.
4. Clean Your Room Dashboard – Just like keeping your room tidy, it’s important to keep your CRM clean. With this dashboard, you can assess whether your sales reps are keeping their deals current and accurate. Ultimately, it becomes part of the culture and this dashboard may no longer be necessary. Having this accountability and transparency can really help your team make smart decisions.

The foundation of a strong sales team is made up of clearly defined key performance indicators (KPIs). KPIs are the “what” and “how much” which guide salespeople’s behavior. For example, quota is how much money a sales rep is expected to bring into a company in a given year.

Activity measures are KPIs that focus on the actions sales people do daily, weekly, monthly, that help drive relationship building and connecting with new customers. Activity measures are designed to lead sales people to achieve outcome measures.

Outcome measures focus on the end result of these actions, and are usually tied closer to money.

Activity Measure	Description
Calls Made	The number of outbound calls made per rep, over a set period of time
Emails Sent	The number of emails sent per rep, over a set period of time
Meetings Set	The number of meetings set per rep, over a set period of time
Voicemails	The number of voicemails left per rep, over a set period of time
IP Logins (Attendance)	How often and from which IP addresses your sales team accesses company systems like a sales force automation (SFA) or customer relationship management (CRM) system
Onsite Visits	How many times a sales rep has visited their prospects or clients over a set period of time
Webinar Attendance	How many attendees a sales rep has driven to a particular webinar

Outcomes Measure	Description
Revenue	Money booked
Attainment	How close, as a percentage, a sales rep is to meeting their revenue goal
New Logos	Newly signed customers
Leads Generated	Inquiries as a result of outbound sales activities
Lead Follow-Up Time	How long it takes a sales rep to follow up on a new inquiry
Lead Conversion Rate	What percentage of leads become customers
Retention	What percentage of customers remain customers year over year
Churn	What percentage of renewable revenue is lost each year from lost customers or customer reducing their purchases or subscription
Customer Lifespan	How long (in years) a renewable customer has been with a business

While it can be indicative of poor planning if a sales team hits their annual goal in the second quarter (Q2), you do want the team to have that feeling of goal attainment and a job well done. So, even though you may be reevaluating these measures every quarter, it pays to be intentional with any changes you’re making to these KPIs.
1. Consider these tactics to help you.
  1. Early in planning, identify what activity and outcome measures can be adjusted throughout the year. This way, you have a clear focus on what can be changed easily, and what may require more in-depth planning with sales leadership.
  2. Before implementing a change in KPIs, try a contest or stretch goals—for example, the rep who converts the most leads by the end of the month wins a trip.
  3. If you do need to adjust measures based on how the company is performing, pay attention to how you communicate these changes. Know what motivates your sales teams and tie these motivations into your messaging. This is discussed in depth in the Sales Operations Use Case and Best Practices module.
Manage Key Accounts
The five steps of the Dale Carnegie Sales Model
1. Connect – Before you can move the sale forward, you must connect with the customer. This is the first opportunity to begin building rapport and trust. Along the way, show that you care about the customer and their needs. Consider the Trust Is Dead whitepaper. If you skip this step, you have no foundation to move forward on.
2. Collaborate -As you establish yourself as a trusted advisor, you create a feeling of collaboration. In this step you uncover true needs, wants, goals, and desires. It’s the time to understand where they are currently, where they want to be, what is standing in the way, and what the impact would be if they could achieve their goals. If you skip this step, you won’t have clarity about what’s important to them. There are no insights on where to go next.
3. Create – When you have a good understanding of needs or wants, you can create a sales presentation that’s relevant and meaningful. Work with your customer to find a solution that meets their needs and goals. Customize it to that specific person—use the language they conveyed in your dialogue, rather than your own vernacular or jargon. Use evidence, examples, and position the solution based on all you learned in the previous steps. Dale Carnegie has tools and resources to help with this step. We will review some of them in this module.
4. Confirm – After describing the solution in a customized presentation, confirm with the customer that it will be effective. Will it solve their problem? Will it present an opportunity? Are objections resolved?
5. Commit – Lastly, the salesperson and the customer commit to the sale. Your customers commit to the purchase, and you commit to following up and continuing a relationship with them. A trusting relationship with the customer is the most important factor in making the sale. This is because trusting relationships can lead to repeat business, larger purchases, and referrals
When you lose sight of the relationship and just focus on making a sale, you can fall into what is called transactional selling. Let’s take a look at relationship selling versus transactional selling.
1. Relationship selling focuses on:
  1. Long-term results.
  2. Building trust.
  3. Offering insights.
  4. Creating value for the customer.
2. Transactional selling focuses on:
  1. Short-sighted, one-off deals.
  2. Making a sale.
  3. Product.
  4. Price.
When telling the story, include the following elements.
1. Incident: Describe the customer’s situation before implementing your solution.
2. Action: What the customer did to solve the problem (using your solution).
3. Benefit: Describe how your solution solved the problem and the value received by the customer.

Strategic approach to presenting your sales story—the Client Credibility Statement, which is made of three steps.

Client Credibility Statement Example
Make a Connection	“This is [XYZ] calling from Dale Carnegie Training. We help organizations build long-term business partnerships. We do this by turning your salespeople into consultants who build and sustain relationships. This makes the switching-cost to do business with a competitor too high.”
Strike a Nerve	“We’ve found that salespeople who are tactical rather than strategic and simply sell products and services have to continuously reboot their pipeline rather than sustain relationships.”
Tell a Story	Suggest you can help. “If this is an issue with your sales team, there is the potential that we can help your team transform.” Transition. “In order to know for sure, we would need to spend some time discussing where you are now and where you want to be.”

Client Credibility Statement Example

Make a Connection

“This is [XYZ] calling from Dale Carnegie Training. We help organizations build long-term business partnerships. We do this by turning your salespeople into consultants who build and sustain relationships. This makes the switching-cost to do business with a competitor too high.”

Strike a Nerve

“We’ve found that salespeople who are tactical rather than strategic and simply sell products and services have to continuously reboot their pipeline rather than sustain relationships.”

Tell a Story

Suggest you can help. “If this is an issue with your sales team, there is the potential that we can help your team transform.”

Transition. “In order to know for sure, we would need to spend some time discussing where you are now and where you want to be.”

There are two key types of questions that enhance the effectiveness of questioning. Clarifying questions encourage the customer to elaborate on their responses. Confirming questions enables you to “rewind” and affirm your understanding.
Develop a Summary Statement to make this transition. The Summary Statement tells the customer about your ability to help. It shows you listened by restating the customer’s Should Be and Payout.
1. The Summary Statement should:
  1. Begin with the statement, “Based on what you’ve told me…”
  2. Be a quick, simple statement.
  3. Make a specific recommendation.
  4. Reference the customer’s Should Be and Payout that you uncovered through the questioning process.
  5. Use a confident tone and powerful words.
Finally, sell your solution after the Summary Statement. To demonstrate the value of what you’re offering, explain the facts of your solution and clearly describe the benefits. Choose which facts to highlight and which benefits to emphasize, based on the information you’ve learned in the questioning process. Use the technique of Fact, Benefit, Application to make your point.
1. Facts are specific, true, provable statements. Some facts will be accepted without hesitation and some may require proof.
2. Benefits are brief, clear descriptions of how any customer could use and enjoy the solution. The benefit should be directly related to the fact previously stated.
3. Applications clarify how your specific customer will apply and benefit from the solution. This resonates strongly with the customer because it comes more personal.
Listening shows you’re sincere and trustworthy. It shows that you want to solve a problem, not just offer your solution to anyone who will listen. It builds relationships. So, do more listening than talking. Show that you want to build a relationship, not just make another sale.
1. Here are Dale Carnegie’s principles to help you listen effectively.
  1. Maintain eye contact with the person talking.
  2. Be sensitive to what is not being said. Observe body language for incongruent messages.
  3. Practice patience. Do not interrupt, finish the speaker’s sentence, or change the subject.
  4. Listen empathetically and listen to understand. Act as if there will be a quiz at the end.
  5. Clarify any uncertainties after the person has spoken. Make sure you understand what was said by rephrasing what you heard.
  6. Don’t jump to conclusions or make assumptions. Keep an open and accepting attitude.
  7. Practice empathetic listening. Remove all distractions.
  8. Turn off your mind and “be with” the speaker. Try to see things from their perspective.

Dale Carnegie offers several tactics to address objections and an example of how to apply them below.

Tactic	Description
Cushion	A response that shows you listened to the concern and recognize its importance. It does not agree, disagree, or answer the objection. It acknowledges the emotion that was conveyed.
Clarify	Ask a nonthreatening question to clarify the objection.
Cross-Check	Confirm that the specific hesitation is the only factor preventing the commitment.
Reply	Deny, admit, or reverse the hesitation. Provide an explanation. Deny: Deny falsehoods or misinformation. Admit: Admit current or past problems. Reverse: Turn objections into reasons for buying.
Trial Commitment	Ask a question to determine if the objection has been resolved.

Word Pictures remind yourself what the customer wants (Should Be) and why they want it (Payout). They also activate strong emotions that create a sense of urgency, overcoming procrastination. You uncover these through questioning.
1. When creating your Word Pictures, do these four things.
  1. Remind your customer that they lack the benefit of your solution.
  2. Remind your customer that your solution will help them realize that benefit.
  3. Paint a Word Picture of your customer using your solution, enjoying it, and benefiting from it.
  4. Use a trial commitment.
2. Your word picture should:
  1. Show the customer benefiting from your solution.
  2. Appeal to their emotions.
  3. Be clear and concise.
  4. Be in the present tense.
  5. Be believable and realistic.
  6. Activate the senses—sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell.
  7. Appeal to their individual motive.

Review the Commitment Methods listed below. Some of these can feel manipulative if the relationship is not well established. But if the relationship has been built successfully, asking for the purchase should be natural. Also, you don’t have to use all the methods listed here. Rather, choose one method to gain the customer’s commitment. Use a method that feels most conversational.

Method	Description	Example
Direct Question Method	Often the best way to gain commitment is to ask for it.	“Are you ready to go ahead with this decision now?”
Alternate Choice Method	Ask the customer to select one of two options.	“Would you like one from the standard stock or from our specialty line?”
Minor Point Method	Call on the customer to make a minor decision that indicates the larger buying decision has been made.	“In whose name should this title be drawn?”
Next-Step Method	Assume the sale has been made and look past the commitment to the last actions that need to be taken.	“When would you like for me to schedule the installation?”
Opportunity Method	Present the customer with a brief window of opportunity when options are available.	“Just a reminder that our prices always increase in September. You will want to make sure to get the lower price, right?”
Weighing Method	If the customer still has second thoughts about making the purchase, show them how the return on investment outweighs the cost.	“Let’s weigh the ideas causing you to hesitate and the value you’ll realize from going ahead.”

Dale Carnegie calls out different methods to develop continued business in order of effectiveness.
1. Referrals
2. Social media
3. Cold calling
4. Door-to-door
5. Seminars
6. Mass emails
7. Networking events
Below are common incentives that may be found in an incentives package.
1. Cash Incentives or Commission. This is the universally accepted motivator for a salesperson across industries. From software to hardware, to services companies, every sales team member has an incentive plan with a cash or commission component.
2. Material or Cash-Related Goods. Extra paid vacation, consumer electronics (phones, tablets, laptops, smart watches), home goods (coffee maker, food subscriptions), expense paid trips—these are all extrinsic rewards that can be part of a robust incentive structure.
3. Social Recognition. Praise from your colleagues can feel as rewarding as hitting your number! Social recognition can be facilitated via deal bells, team-wide email recognition, leaderboards, and so on. Creating a supportive and even fun environment can boost intrinsic motivation in your team members. Seeing others rewarded can also become an extrinsic motivation for onlookers who may not have hit their goals yet.
Key skills, methods, and thinking Salesforce sales reps use to succeed
1. Pipe Generation – The easiest way to generate pipeline is to start with existing pipeline. Sales reps can be taught to be curious and to always ask if there is room to upsell or cross-sell beyond the initial solution being evaluated. Account reviews with existing customers can often identify additional business challenges customers didn’t even know your product could solve.
  1. You can also generate pipeline by going back to “dead opportunities” — prospects who said no to us in the past because we had the wrong product, wrong pitch, spoke with the wrong person, or had the wrong timing — and presenting them with reasons why this is the time to reconsider.
2. Time Management – We train our reps to put time on their calendar to get organized. Spend 15 minutes at the end of the day planning what you will do tomorrow. Focus on revenue generating activity but don’t tip the scale too far towards your quota. You can’t afford to neglect accounts. You never know which account could be your next big deal. You also can’t neglect your own development. Make time for training, mentorship, and practice.
3. Business Acumen – Business acumen is a term that gets used in many ways. I love when sales professionals have the business acumen needed to understand all lines of business within their customer’s organization, understand the biggest challenges and priorities, and speak executive language.
4. Sales Acumen – Sales is a process. To be great you need to master each step, otherwise your efforts will not lead to results. The steps of our process typically begin with prospecting, followed by discovery to better understand the prospect’s needs. This serves as proof that you can solve their challenges, negotiation, and implementation.
5. Big Deals – Larger, more complex sales cycles require additional sales skills that go beyond general sales acumen. These evaluations require more creativity and organization. There will be far more people involved, so you will need to triangulate the relationships within your account and maintain multiple relationships, gathering feedback, and uncovering objections along the way.
6. Product Knowledge – If you play a musical instrument you might appreciate how hard it is to write a song that includes chords you can’t play. If you do not understand the value of each of your products, it is very difficult to sell the value of the product and you will definitely miss out on opportunities within your territory. Know the value proposition, the competitors, common objections, and ideally how to get hands-on with the solution to do your own demos.
7. Forecasting – Forecasting is all about making smart decisions for your business. Based on the pipeline you can see and the pipeline you can source, are you on track for your goals? If not, what do you need to do differently?
  1. The best sales professionals know how to use their forecast to prioritize their time, to ask for help where needed, and when to walk away from a deal. They use CRM to keep their pipeline in real time, all the time, so that the data gives consistent information for others in their organization to also make smarter decisions.

Customer Engagement: 15%
1. Difficult conversations are those in which a person or party has wants, needs, opinions, or perceptions involving feelings or emotions. These happen every day—in life and in business. And although you can feel anxious about having difficult conversations, particularly with customers, they tend to have positive results, offering clear next steps and a path forward.
2. But sometimes, difficult conversations are spontaneous and can’t be planned for. An issue may not seem like a big deal going in, but you discover that it is for the customer or company.
  1. This can happen when a customer is unhappy about something that is out of your control. For example, say a customer is still building a relationship with you. You can anticipate that they had an established rapport with their last point of contact and worry they won’t get the same care and attention from you. Or there can be an additional trigger you’re unaware of. Maybe they recently ran into a colleague who seems happier after switching to a competitor.
  2. These situations can lead to difficult conversations. And they can be harder for you to navigate because you didn’t get the chance to prepare, anticipate, or brainstorm solutions. Remember to think calmly and holistically when talking to the customer.
  3. Remind yourself that it isn’t personal, rather the customer perceives a stake is in jeopardy. You may not always know why or what leads to those feelings at that moment, but you can take control and redirect the conversation by using the OFNR questions.
    1. Observation: What is the conflict? What stake is at jeopardy?
    2. Feeling: How did or do they feel about the focus of the conversation?
    3. Need: What does the customer need?
    4. Request: What is it they are asking?
3. The OFNR set of questions is a great start to understanding the issue. To further steer the conversation in a productive direction, use these best practices.
  1. Manage emotions: Focus on the customer and their body language, and not your personal feelings or emotions. Emotions show through body language and tone too. Whether in person, virtually, or on the phone, listen and look for any cues that indicate the customer is telling you something beyond the words they’re using. Be aware that you’re sending a message to the customer even if you’re not speaking—and they’re sending one back.
  2. Give acknowledgement: Allow the customer to talk, practice active listening, and paraphrase with empathy. Once the customer is done talking, ask permission to speak to show respect: “May I say something?” Acknowledge their emotions. “I see you’re angry about this situation. I can tell it’s causing you a lot of stress or anxiety.”
  3. Be transparent: If you misstep, take responsibility. Stick to the facts, and avoid power struggles over who is “right.” If something has impeded your customer’s success, take responsibility. When they succeed, you succeed. Perhaps a misstep occurred that didn’t involve you specifically. Your apology can acknowledge their frustration and take responsibility for the team, as in, “I’m sorry that this (situation, person, or event) made you feel this way. What can we do to ensure that this doesn’t happen again?”
  4. Be solution-focused: Provide the right recommendation—one that helps move the customer toward success, is delivered at the right time, and is formulated with the customer’s help. Sometimes solution-focused folks want to start solving the problem before stepping back and doing research. It’s important to step away, allow the air to calm, and research options. If there isn’t a clear path forward, let the customer know you’ll research options and follow up. Not following up is one of the easiest ways to break trust.
  5. Adopt a mindset of inquiry: After you’ve acknowledged the customer and taken the necessary responsibility, it’s time to ask questions, so you can get a clear view of the issue.
4. Here are a few more tips for preparing for and conducting a difficult conversation
  1. Focus on breathing before the meeting.
  2. Stand in a power pose before the meeting begins.
  3. Listen to a song or playlist before the meeting to calm your brain and get out of your emotional headspace.
    Write down the facts for the meeting and create an outline with the key items you have to hit during the meeting. This keeps you on track.
  4. Practice your message in the car, shower, or with your manager. This helps you sort through your thoughts, hear yourself, and anticipate the customer’s reaction.
  5. Inform your manager about the meeting and what is at stake. Keeping your manager in the loop always ensures that you won’t have to defend yourself later if a customer further elevates the issue. Managers and mentors can also help find solutions you haven’t identified.
  6. Bring a notepad and paper instead of your computer. Computers can block eye contact and physical space.
  7. Make eye contact. When the eye can’t see something or someone fully, it can be processed as suspicious.
  8. Set the expectation. You may be aware that this conversation isn’t going to occur in one instance. It’s OK to set the expectation up front by giving a hard out for yourself. “I have a hard stop for our time together at the top of the hour.” Or, “I know my team is doing some research and pulling in more people for this topic, so let’s see how deep we can get and then go from there.” Be clear about what you can commit to and what falls under the customer’s responsibility. Recap your meetings via written communication.
5. It’s important to gauge when you’re asking too many questions and need to pivot into listening mode. Here are some go-to questions to keep your customer conversation going in the right direction.
  1. Can you tell me more about this situation?
  2. What’s working well in this situation?
  3. Can you help me understand what changed?
  4. How can I help you get you to your goal?
  5. What’s the biggest obstacle in reaching your goal?
  6. What does my team need to do to improve this situation/partnership/feature/integration?
  7. How can I help you make this change?
  8. Who has eyes on the data to measure value and success?
  9. What measurements are you taking or monitoring?
  10. What was your expectation?
  11. Why? Why did this happen?
6. Most business people take on one of the following perspectives when trying to solve a problem.
  1. Feasibility perspective focused on technologies and tools they can use to address a need or opportunity
  2. Viability perspective focused on a given business strategy of a financial target
7. The cold calling process starts by gathering a list of prospect names and telephone numbers. These might be ones you researched yourself, lists of sources your company has bought from paid researchers, or a combination of the two. Next, it’s best to draft a basic cold calling script to guide your calls—this ensures you offer and request the right information. Then, start dialing.
8. The goal of a cold call is simple: Verify that a prospect is interested enough in your product or service to seriously consider buying it.
9. The advantage of cold calling is that, unlike more indirect forms of contact like email, it provides an opportunity for real-time, two-way communication. This gives you an opportunity to introduce yourself, your company, and your product or service, and directly address questions or concerns in the moment.
10. Before you start dialing, it’s important to know what makes a cold call successful. As prospects will likely be unfamiliar with you, your company, and what you’re offering, you need to carefully share this information in a compelling way to grab their attention.
  1. Be compelling: Most people aren’t sitting around waiting for the phone to ring. That means as soon as a prospect picks up the phone, you should share your name and a quick hook that ties in your product or service. You can do this by underscoring a unique prospect need uncovered during research, or by making a personal connection.
  2. Ask smart questions: After a quick introduction it’s time to ask an open-ended question. This helps get the prospect talking—and keeps them talking. The goal is to collect information about their business problems, budget, who the decision-makers are, and anything else that might be important for framing a formal sales pitch.
  3. Make a plan: When you’ve collected enough information to qualify the contact as a warm prospect, make plans to follow up with more information. Ask for a date and time to call back, confirm their contact info, and thank them for their time. Give them your contact information so they can reach out with any questions.
11. Customize a script for each prospect. Here are a few quick tips to make this easier:
  1. Explain your value proposition. Have a clear value proposition and be ready to articulate it fast. Offer a concise statement of what value you are bringing to the prospect.
  2. Draft your questions. You can’t predict where the conversation will go, but you do know what information you need to qualify the prospect as a likely buyer. Craft a series of 3–5 open-ended questions that will help you get this information. Make sure at least one is tailored specifically to the prospect—this shows that you took the time to learn about them, which can make a favorable impression. Lastly, when you ask your open-ended questions, be prepared to listen. Remember: Cold calls are designed for information gathering, not hard sales pitches.
  3. Approach your prospect as a person, not a sales target. It’s easy to focus on the potential sale, but nobody wants to be the target of product pushes. Remember that your prospect is a person dealing with the struggles and successes of business life. Listen for these cues during the call and address them (if appropriate). Treating the prospect like a real person goes a long way to building rapport. This rapport is key to building trust.
12. Here’s how to prepare for objections during cold calls and still collect valuable insights:
  1. Write clear responses to common objections. When you’re first learning to cold call, you won’t be great at handling objections on the fly. Prepare yourself for the most common ones by talking to sales reps and other Business Development Representatives (BDRs) on your sales team about objections they hear frequently. Draft compelling counterpoints based on data and tie back into prospect needs.
  2. Collect objections. When you hear an objection, write it down. After your call is over, draft responses to those objections and keep them in an easy-to-access location for reference during future calls. The more calls you make (and objections you address), the easier it will be to get past them and gather the information you need.
  3. Turn objections into open-ended questions. Often, objections are clues to greater company needs or pain points. Common ones—like limited budget, lack of time, not enough staff—can paint a bigger picture of the state of business. Use these to inquire further and collect additional details. For example, if a contact claims they have no budget at the moment, ask them when their fiscal year begins and what budgetary priorities are. This can help you identify when you should call back with a sales pitch that fits within their budget and meets business needs.
13. After a successful cold call, it’s time to hand over your warm prospect to an account executive (sales rep) who will follow up with a sales pitch and demo. While you likely gathered a smattering of information during your call, reps need three specific details to make the sales call successful.
  1. Prospect decision-maker: Your initial contact may not be the person who makes purchase decisions. During your information gathering, you secured the name, phone number, and email of the primary decision-maker (read: the person authorized to make the final purchase). This will be the person the sales rep targets for the final pitch, so be sure to provide him/her with all contact details.
  2. Ideal follow-up day and time: As you closed the cold call, you asked about the prospect’s availability for a follow-up call. They may have given you several days and time slots—send all of these to the sales rep so they know when to reach out.
  3. Key pain points, needs, and budget: Any pertinent details that can help with a sale should be shared with your AE. However, the best nuggets are those that can be easily leveraged in a sales call to push the prospect to close. This includes clear identification of need that aligns with your product/service, pain points that can be easily solved using your product/service, and available budget for making a purchase.
14. The sales process goes from cold leads to warm opportunities to red hot deals. Prospecting is what happens in between:
15. Here are the established four stages in the buying process (identified back in the early 1900s).
  1. Attention: The customer is aware of the product.
  2. Interest: The customer demonstrates a desire to learn more about the product.
  3. Desire: The customer chooses to purchase the product.
  4. Action: The customer makes the purchase.
16. One approach to segmenting prospect accounts is to place them into tiers.
  1. Tier 1 are those most likely to be interested and actually purchase. They are the ones you likely want to focus on with a high-touch approach.
  2. Tier 2 are those that may not be ready for that level of engagement, but can be developed with a little effort.
  3. Tier 3 are the larger pool of prospects that definitely require nurturing before they’re ready to enter the sales pipeline.
17. Messages that grab attention are:
  1. Short
  2. Specific
  3. Results-driven
  4. Conversational
  5. Positive (both in their message and energy)
  6. Inspiring
  7. Unique (demonstrate the benefits of doing business with you)
  8. Beneficial to the prospect (address “What’s in it for me?”)
18. The key is finding a way to get the prospect’s attention with whichever channels work.
  1. High touch. Each time you call or email, try to say something different and add value right from the start. It also helps to schedule these to ensure you’re making the calls and sending the emails.
  2. Medium touch. This is a less aggressive outreach, but make sure that you don’t neglect them for too long. For every two emails you send, maybe make one call to the prospect.
  3. Low touch. These are clients who prefer to be contacted less frequently, and maybe only by email.
19. 10 Steps To Get Your Product Adoption-Ready
20. The Value of Measuring Customer Satisfaction

Deal Management: 37%

The four phases of selling

Stage	Description	The customer is thinking
Attention	Aware of the product	Wow, I’ve never seen a reel like that before.
Interest	Curious to learn more about the product	I’m so tired of my old reel. I want to check that one out.
Desire	Choose to purchase the product	It’s smoother, faster, and more reliable than anything I’ve ever seen—and a good price. I want it.
Action	Purchasing the product	I’m entering my credit card info and… done.

The sales process is a series of steps that move a sales rep from product and market research through the sales close—and beyond. The number of steps in the sales process may change depending on a rep’s industry, product, and prospect but include four key stages: research, prospecting, sales call and close, and relationship building.
Steps of a successful sales process
1. Research
  1. Build Product Knowledge
  2. Research Your Ideal Prospect
2. Prospecting
  1. Begin Prospecting and Lead Generation
  2. Qualify Prospects
  3. Analyze a Customer’s Needs
3. Sales Call and Close
  1. Lead a Sales Call
  2. Follow Up and Close the Deal
4. Relationship Building
  1. Nurture the Relationship and Upsell
If all goes well, your prospect is now a customer. Congratulations! But the sales process isn’t over yet. Satisfied customers provide a huge opportunity for cross-selling and upselling. Employing a deliberate follow-up schedule helps keep the door open for continued business from a customer.
1. Three days after the sale, check in with the customer to make sure they’re feeling good about the deal.
2. Three weeks after the sale, follow up to see if your customer has any product questions or issues you can help them with.
3. Three months after the sale, check in with your customer to be sure they’re satisfied with the product and the service. This is a good time to ask them for a referral.
Here are common sale process don’ts.
1. Don’t Go in Unprepared
2. Don’t Skip the Discovery Call
3. Don’t Make a Sales Pitch Before Qualifying a Lead
4. Don’t Highlight Product Features, Highlight Value
5. Don’t Be Unempathetic
6. Don’t Talk Too Much
7. Don’t Be Unprepared for Objections
8. Don’t Make Sales Calls Too Long
9. Don’t Wait Too Long to Follow Up
Think of the sales process as the “what” of the sales equation—the steps necessary to close a deal and nurture a new client or prospect relationship, as detailed in a previous unit.
A sales methodology is the “how”—how a rep executes each step in the process and engages a prospect or customer. When you put the right “what” and the “how” together, you increase your chances of successfully closing a sale.
Different types of sales methodologies
1. Challenger Selling
2. Trigger or Signal-Based Selling
3. Value-Based Selling
4. 360-Degree Selling
Sales contracts often include the following items.
1. Sales agreements: Sales agreements define what is being purchased and the terms of the sale.
2. Order forms: These are forms that buyers fill out with their specific needs and then return to the seller.
3. Change order forms: These forms allow a buyer to make changes to an existing order. These additions to existing contracts will adjust the terms and conditions.
4. Master service agreements: MSAs are meant for long-term agreements, and outlines the terms and conditions for all future agreements.
5. Statement of work: SOWs are often used for contracted work and services. They cover what the contractor provides, and includes deadlines, payment details, and requirements for the relationship.
6. Terms of service: These are a collection of clauses that define how users interact with offerings such as digital products, websites, mobile apps, software, or online stores.
7. Renewal and upsell agreements: A renewal is a contract where a customer chooses to renew a previous contract. An upsell contract is the same as a renewal but also includes additional products or services.
Consider these questions when drafting your plan of action.
1. How will you engage with the customer’s legal team? Some may benefit from an introductory legal presentation, where others may prefer to read FAQs.
2. How and when will you position possible concessions for maximum impact?
3. Which team is best to lead on specific issues?
4. How will you present a unified front to the customer?
Customer-centric discovery is a method for learning more about customers so you can:
1. Gain insights into your customers’ business challenges.
2. Share those insights with your customers.
3. Inspire and connect with your customers.
4. Lead customers to new opportunities.
5. Improve how your customers work.
Customer-centric discovery has four steps.
1. Know your customer.
2. Be your customer.
3. Connect with your customer.
4. Create with your customer.
Each step of the customer-centric discovery process brings you closer to your customers so you can:
1. Co-create strategies based on confirmed challenges. This lets you know you’re working toward what matters most to your customer.
2. Focus on solutions that are the right size for your customer’s needs. This lets them deliver on time and within budget.
Look closer and start to analyze your customer’s business directly so you can understand more about their:
1. Goals: What they want to achieve.
2. Values: What their guiding principles are internally and with their consumers.
3. Initiatives: What they do now to achieve their goals.
4. Strategies: What they plan to do to achieve their goals.
5. Obstacles: What problems they face as they work to achieve their goals.
Empathy takes some practice to do it well, although the concepts are pretty straightforward.
1. Identify common ground. Find something your customer does that’s relatable to you.
2. Develop a genuine interest in your customer’s business. Take that relatable idea and figure out how you might feel if you were involved in the story. For example, imagine you’re the customer or an employee.
3. Look for shared experiences. Think about how you can respond in a way that makes sense to your customer. Start to think about how you’ve solved problems like theirs in the past.
When you meet with your customer, deliver your insights with these tips in mind.
1. Be sincere. Share your experiences with their business in an authentic and optimistic way. Describe positive points and the areas for improvement.
2. Follow your insights with an empathetic statement. Try something like, “We’ve seen this before…” or “Other customers I’ve worked with deal with this same challenge by…” These kinds of statements show you have experience.
3. Get your customer’s opinion by asking open-ended questions. If you find something challenging about your customer’s mobile app experience, ask, “What is your current strategy for mobile development? How well do you think it’s working?”
4. Share a notable quote that your customer has said before. It can be very powerful for the customer to hear their own words, especially when they’re about something that needs improvement.
Analyze each challenge with your customer by asking:
1. Who—Who’s most affected by this issue?
2. What—What’s the result of this issue?
3. Where—Where does this issue happen?
4. When—When does this issue happen?
5. Why—Why does this issue happen?
6. How—What conditions cause this issue?
In this last step of customer-centric discovery, Create with your customer, you:
1. Review the challenges you confirmed with your customer.
2. Storyboard your customer’s vision for the future.
3. Draft a plan with detailed recommendations for next steps.
Challenges are a normal part of life. But when it comes to the strategy design process, a challenge means something very specific. In this case, a challenge is a problem you’re trying to solve that considers the users of what you’re creating—specifically in how they think, feel, and act.
Challenge framing is the first alignment moment in a successful initiative or project. It defines the focus of the problem you’re trying to solve and clarifies what your team is setting out to do. Challenge framing:
1. Informs scoping, in terms of the time and skills required to solve a challenge.
2. Provides clarity and direction for the team.
3. Sets expectations of decision-makers and other stakeholders on what they will and won’t solve within a project (and provides the opportunity to negotiate these).
4. Creates a shared definition of success for the project.
5. Ensures the team is working on something of value to the organization.
Good challenge framing creates empathy for your users and leaves room for discovery and exploration in problem-solving. You start the framing process by asking questions like:
1. What’s wrong with the status quo?
2. Who does the solution stand to impact?
3. What are the desired outcomes?
4. What adjacent areas should be excluded from this focus?
While challenge framing is about inspiring solutioning, the scoping process is the logistical plan for how the project will be structured. Scoping should be intentionally designed to allow for both discovery and exploration. Scoping allows you to plan, organize, and manage the time, people, and other resources needed to solve the framed challenge. It outlines the work to be done, how it will be completed and by whom, and the expected outcomes.
When the strategy designer started to plan for how to solve Cloud Kicks’s challenge, they used these five key elements to scope the process. Each element was considered carefully because each can drastically change the project.
1. Understand the need.
  1. Need: What is the problem you’re solving?
  2. Audience: Who is the audience your solution will serve?
  3. Context: What important factors are known about this problem?
2. Articulate the opportunity for design.
  1. Challenge Statement: What is the opportunity for design?
  2. Value: Why is this important?
  3. Assumptions: What are the hunches about the opportunity? Be explicit. What must be true about our users for this to work? What hypothesis leads us into this project that we need to test?
  4. Goals: What business, customer, and social outcomes will your solution drive?
3. Establish the problem-solving approach.
  1. Design: What strategy design process will you use to solve this challenge?
  2. Rationale: Why is this approach right for this challenge?
  3. Team: What expertise and life experiences do you need on your team to problem solve?
  4. External stakeholders: What users do you need for discovery and exploration?
4. Create a project plan.
  1. Time: What timeframe do you need?
  2. Milestones: What are important milestones to share progress and review work?
  3. Resources: What budget and resources do you need to be successful?
5. Identify measures of success and potential risks.
  1. Success: How do you know if you’ve been successful?
  2. Tracking: What user, business, and society metrics can you use to measure?
  3. Risks: What risks or consequences should be considered?
Keep these planning considerations in mind during the challenge framing and scoping process.
1. Framing
  1. Constraining the challenge framing helps you be more precise about understanding the need and the opportunity for design (the problem, audience, context, and challenge statement).
  2. Broadening the solution space by establishing the approach and creating a plan allows for greater opportunities to discover and explore.
2. Framing
  1. Keeping the scope broad before the project allows for a more human-centered process to find the most impactful solution.
  2. Narrowing the scope prevents wide exploration. You can always narrow throughout the process at key convergence milestones—the moments when your team narrows options and decides what to prioritize in the next phase of work.
A How Might We (HMW) statement turns your challenge framing into a question that can be solved. It turns problems into opportunities for generative thinking and organizes how you think about the problem and possible solutions. It starts with a call to action, and in moments of ambiguity, it guides you in how to push your design.
1. A key craft of the strategy designer is creating and refining HMW statements throughout the strategy design process. Because they are used to clarify the opportunity for design, they are regularly revisited throughout the strategy design process and have different uses at different phases.
  1. Challenge framing and scoping: Clarify the project’s purpose and unify the design team with a common challenge to solve.
  2. Synthesis: Articulate opportunities for design after new insights/findings have emerged from users to guide the ideation and concepting phases.
  3. Ideation: Generate ideas around specific aspects of the larger design challenge. You create many HMW statements and use several per brainstorm or ideation session.
  4. Iterating: Guide iterations in prototyping to see if the prototype answered the question, and refine it as you learn new findings from users to refine the question.
A good How Might We question is essential to arriving at a good solution because it allows for focus and creative exploration. Here’s how you craft a successful HMW statement.
1. Write down your problem statement. Based on your answer to your questions when framing the challenge, what is the problem you’re trying to solve?
2. Draft your design challenge using the phrase “How Might We.” For that first draft, take your problem statement and add “How Might We” to it.
3. Identify the impact. State the key outcome you’re trying to achieve by answering the question, “If we solve this problem, the impact will be ____.” You can then use that impact to test the design challenge and refine the statement.
4. Test the design challenge. Test the How Might We by brainstorming as many solutions as possible. If the How Might We isn’t generating many solutions for the intended impact, continue refining it until you find the solutions that will achieve your desired impact.
5. Refine the problem and impact. Beyond considering the impact, write down important content aspects or constraints you need to consider, like shifts you need to see in the ecosystem around the user or factors that are technological, geographic, time-based considerations, and so on.
6. Try again. Rewrite your How Might We statement and go through the testing process again.
When assembling your team, expand your criteria to include expertise and life experiences that also represent the customers you want to reach. Keep these elements in mind.
1. Stakeholder roles/disciplines/levels/departments
2. Soft and hard skills
3. Experiences
4. Expertise
5. Personalities
6. Culture
7. Backgrounds
8. Gender
9. Race
10. Age
11. Neurodiversity
The challenge framing process is filled with ambiguity. So it’s no surprise that there will be moments throughout the strategy design process when your team will need more support.
1. Kickoff: The invitation to join a project and the kickoff meeting set the tone for the project and the team dynamic. Making sure to balance clarity on purpose and roles and responsibilities initiates trust and the learning journey the team will go on together.
2. Research moments: Findings can sometimes be different from the experience and expertise of the team members. Creating time to process either one-on-one or as a team can help expand understanding.
3. Synthesis moments: Taking key insights and turning them into opportunities for design—whether in challenge framing, after research, or throughout prototyping—there can be differences of opinion. These are key decision-making moments, so it’s important to stay connected to the original challenge framing and what you learned from users.
4. Review moments: When holding design reviews with key stakeholders, use feedback as the opportunity to learn and explore. If the review is not in alignment with user feedback, it’s a chance to understand more deeply the important factors from the stakeholder point of view.

Common deal terms.

Term	What It Means	Example
Annual order value (AOV)	Annual value of the contract	The quote amount, divided by the number of years, equals the AOV.
Total contract value (TCV)	Total amount a contract is worth	If the AOV is $500,000 with a 2-year term, then the TCV of this deal is $1,000,000.
Annual contract value (ACV)	How much the value of a contract has gone up or down compared to last year	If a customer’s current AOV is $500,000 and they’re purchasing an additional $200,000 of products, then the ACV equals $200,000 and the new AOV equals $700,000.
Revenue	Money your company earns and can recognize in its financial statements	Your company reports revenue to Wall Street in your quarterly and annual reports.
Deferred Revenue	Cash up front on a subscription contract based on invoice generated. This turns into revenue as you deliver the services.	The customer paid the whole $500,000 invoice, but that’s deferred revenue until you start delivering services.

When pricing deals, you also need to understand your company’s revenue model. Let’s compare two popular revenue models in the software industry–subscription and on-premises–to see how each impacts the bottom line. Even if the terms “subscription” and “on-premises” are new to you, at a high level the difference between them is pretty simple.
1. Subscription: When the customer subscribes to software as a service, revenue is recognized as services are delivered. That is, revenue is recognized when licenses are activated, which may not be the day the contract was signed.
2. On-premises: When the customer buys software outright, revenue is recognized up front for the licenses and equipment necessary to run software on site.

Before you set out with your customer to build and price a d

Pricing Term	What It Is	When to Use It
Worldwide/company price list	List of prices for all product SKUs	When you need to know the price of a product
Discount approval matrix	Hierarchy of approvers for pricing discounts	To get the approvals you’ll need to offer different discounts
Pricing system	Often color-coded, this guidance helps you know if your pricing is great, good, or below average	To make sure your pricing is right for the size of your deal
Percentage-based pricing	List of products with derived pricing	When you need to know the price of a percentage-based product
Approval matrix–quoting	Hierarchy of approvers for contractual terms of a deal	To get the approvals you’ll need for terms in your deal contracts

eal, your company likely has a number of pricing tools and terms that you need to be familiar with. Here are some of the most common.

There are a few different strategies out there when it comes to pricing.
1. Cost plus pricing: Take the base cost of production, or cost of doing business (service side), and add to that a markup, or profit for your business.
2. Bundle pricing: Combine several products or services to create an incentive to buy “more” at a lower price than buying each individually. This is a good strategy to sell more inventory or get a customer to try a new service they hadn’t been using previously.
3. Value-based pricing: This is pricing based on the customer’s perception of how valuable your product or service is. But how do you know how much they value your offerings? Asking for feedback, marketing outreach, and marketing research are the best ways to understand your customers’ perception of the value your business has to offer.
4. Competitor-based pricing: Price your product or service based on your competitors’ pricing. This is considered pretty low-risk, because you are just matching the rate that others in your market are already paying.
5. Price skimming: Set a higher price and slowly lower the price as more and more competitors enter the market. This pricing is typically best for new businesses and businesses that are targeting “early adopters” of their products/services.

Each business has a certain ideal customer. Also known as a customer persona or customer profile, this ideal customer could be a marketing professional or a sales executive, for example, then categorized by the size of the company they work for. Each customer persona has different business needs they prioritize from most to least valuable.

It’s crucial that you don’t try to appeal to everyone, because you are not targeting everyone. Determining the right customer persona for your product or service is essential when setting a pricing strategy.

Examples of Customer Personas	Business Revenue
Marketing leaders	$1M–$10M in revenue
Marketing leaders	$10M–100M in revenue
Sales executives	$1M–$10M in revenue
Sales executives	$10M–100M in revenue
Software engineering leaders	$1M–$10M in revenue
Software engineering leaders	$10M–100M in revenue
Operations leaders	$1M–$10M in revenue
Operations leaders	$10M–100M in revenue

Here’s how a sales proposal helps your customer understand the value and benefits you offer them–and how it helps you drive more sales, faster.
1. It makes the prospect feel valued. When you create a sales proposal that demonstrates how your product or service helps their business goals, the customer feels that you understand and value their business needs. They feel that you are truly invested in them and care about them.
2. It keeps everything in one place. You need to include a lot of details in your sales proposal such as the product/service summary, pricing and payment options, and how you’ll work together. A sales proposal keeps all of this organized and in one place, so the prospect can quickly and easily find all of the information they need. The proposal provides a good customer experience.
3. It increases your chances of closing the deal. A sales proposal aims to get your potential customer to take action by taking them through a business discovery process. It enables you and the prospect to move through these steps together.
  1. Step 1: Introduce the product/service and provide all of the relevant information.
  2. Step 2: Talk with your prospect about their existing problems or challenges.
  3. Step 3: Connect your product or service to those pain points to show how you can help with their challenges.
  4. Step 4: Now that your prospect knows there’s a “problem” and a need to fix it with your product or service, they will start looking into their options. This could include looking at your competitors as well.
  5. Step 5: The prospect sees why you would be valuable to their business and becomes a loyal customer.
An objection is a statement or question that indicates a barrier in the buying process.
Here are some suggestions for how to boost your emotional genius.
1. Stay cool. Take your time and avoid reacting too quickly.
2. Practice empathy. Look for common ground and show genuine interest in your customer’s objection, so you can create a shared experience and respond in ways that make sense to your customer.
3. Be assertive. Be clear on your position, and disagree as necessary in a pleasant and professional way—and without sounding defensive.
4. Bounce back from adversity. If your conversation isn’t working, try another strategy. Stay optimistic at every turn.
You know objections are a good sign, and you know how to:
1. Defuse—acknowledge objections and address the emotions behind them.
2. Discover—ask questions to find out what’s going on.
3. Deliver—respond to objections.

Pipeline Management: 12%
1. A sales pipeline is a visual representation of where all of your prospects are in the sales process. This allows you to gauge likely revenue and determine the health of your business. It provides a snapshot of the health of your business.
2. A sales pipeline is not to be confused with a sales forecast. Though they draw from similar pools of data, a sales pipeline focuses on the present moment and what reps should be doing right now to close deals while a sales forecast estimates how much revenue a company can hope to bring in if those opportunities are indeed won.
3. Stages of a sales pipeline
  1. Prospecting: Sales prospecting refers to the process of developing new business. It’s the search for potential customers or buyers of your product, and it involves a lot of research and outreach. There’s outbound prospecting, where you do cold outreach to folks you might have found from doing research on LinkedIn or Google, and there’s inbound prospecting, where you reach out to someone who has already expressed interest in your product through visiting your website or maybe signing up for your newsletter.
  2. Lead qualification: Don’t spend precious time and resources on a deal that never closes. Instead, focus on qualifying, or filtering out, your leads by creating an ideal customer profile, or buyer persona, that outlines the characteristics of the customers you’d like to bring in.
  3. Sales call, demo, or meeting: At this stage, your pipeline should be starting to narrow. You’ve strategically filtered out leads that are not ready to buy, and now you’re zeroing in on those that are. This is when you start to go in for a sale. So you should schedule a demo or meeting. Make sure everyone involved understands the goal of this meeting; having an agenda prepared ahead of time will help keep everything on track. The demo should only happen after the need for your product is clear. This is when you bring all your collective insights and build a business case that demonstrates how your product will help your prospect achieve their goals.
  4. Proposal: This stage is when you make an official sales offer. You again summarize how your company can help address the potential customer’s pain points. You reiterate pricing information and demonstrate why the business value of your product more than offsets its cost. This is also when you’ll spend time differentiating your proposal from the competition, and driving home the advantages of your product. Key things to remember at this stage: personalization and perceived value. You want the prospect to know that you understand their company inside and out, so make sure you’re not giving them a one-size-fits-all proposal but rather tailoring it to their specific pain points.
  5. Negotiation and commitment: The prospect will likely have objections or additional inquiries that require renegotiating the initial proposal. Discuss expanding or shrinking the scope of work, adjusting pricing, and managing expectations to come to a final agreement.
  6. Contract signing: Pop some bubbly because you just closed a deal! Make signing the contract simple by using an e-signature service that allows your soon-to-be-customer to sign and upload from anywhere. Now you can move the deal toward order fulfillment.
  7. Post-purchase: When you close a deal, you might think that it’s all over, but the customer experience has just begun. The buyer will expect attentive service during implementation and regular monitoring of the account’s progress. At the right times, you can cross-sell existing customers on new services and upsell them on premium solutions. Overall, be sure to treat your new customers well — referrals and future sales depend on it.
4. The most important parts of building a pipeline include:
  1. Qualifying Leads – Find out if someone is a good fit for your product by qualifying the lead. Each company has different criteria for what counts as a good lead, with many companies even using a lead scoring system to prioritize leads based on how likely they are to purchase.
    1. Ask yourself the following when qualifying leads.
      1. Does this lead have a need for our solution?
      2. Do they have a budget for our solution?
      3. Is this lead in a decision-making position?
  2. Nurturing Leads – Nurturing leads means developing and reinforcing a relationship by providing powerful insights that build trust in your solution. When it comes to nurturing, personalization and communication is the name of the game.
    1. There are many ways to achieve this, but a common one is email nurturing. It’s cost-effective and easy to automate with email marketing tools like Salesforce Account Engagement. You can send leads relevant content, whether it’s blogs, videos, white papers, or e-books, and email marketing tools allow you to track how long a prospect is engaging with the material.
  3. Converting prospects into customers – Guiding prospects down the pipeline until they’ve become customers is known as conversion. For each interaction you have with a prospect, be thinking of next steps. Focus and persistence are key when it comes to moving the conversation forward. Follow up, ask for feedback, and make use of a CRM so you can supervise prospects at each stage. If you’re in a position to do so, you can also offer discounts and incentives to give prospects a nudge.
5. A healthy pipeline always has new opportunities entering and won opportunities exiting. A pipeline that’s top-heavy has a lot of opportunities coming in, but not enough of them making it to the final stages. A pipeline that’s bottom-heavy will have plenty of deals closing, but not enough new opportunities entering at the top of the funnel. Either scenario means lost revenue.
  1. A good pipeline will have high sales velocity, a short sales cycle length, and a high conversion rate.
6. A pipeline needs accurate data on prospects in order to be meaningful. This data can change minute to minute, which is why it demands constant monitoring. By tossing dirty data and adding updates whenever a new lead comes in or a prospect progresses to another stage, you’ll keep your pipeline well-oiled. At Salesforce, we use dashboards in Sales Cloud to visualize the pipeline and see which stage deals are in.
7. To keep your data clean and deals moving forward, you can set up trackable metrics and prospect details in your CRM and review them regularly. Each sales executive should customize pipeline metrics to meet their own aims, but here are a few of the basics that are usually included. Monitoring these numbers will tell you a lot about the state of your pipeline and help you catch potential problems early.
  1. Lead source: How did prospects find out about your product? Was it through an email campaign, a print promotion, digital marketing, and so on? Once you start paying attention to these sources, you might discover that some have a higher conversion rate than others. A referral might be more likely to buy than someone who stumbled across an online ad, for example.
  2. Industry: Buyers from a wide range of industries might be interested in your product, but is it a bit more popular in certain industries? Tracking this metric will help suss that out.
  3. Deal size: The budget of every prospect will be different. Some might be ready to drop six figures, while others won’t be able to afford your product at all. Keep this in mind when you’re personalizing and prioritizing pitches.
  4. Decision makers: Do you have a direct line to the folks who will ultimately call the shots? Are you talking to the VP of sales or the VP of sales operations? If not, how can you connect with the decision maker?
  5. Conversion rate: Not every qualified lead turns into a customer. To accurately forecast, you need to know what percentage of opportunities end up progressing from stage to stage. If you’re trying to close 500 deals by the end of the quarter, and your conversion rate is 10%, that means you need to have 5,000 opportunities in your pipeline to meet that goal.
  6. Sales velocity: How much revenue does your team generate each day? Sales velocity helps you measure this by examining the speed at which a deal moves through your pipeline. A low velocity indicates pipeline bottlenecks. It also indicates whether you should reevaluate that prospect — either spending more energy on moving them along or cutting them altogether.
  7. Sales pipeline value: Tally up the dollar value of every deal in your pipeline. This number helps you determine the return on investment of your team’s efforts.
  8. Sales cycle length: How much time passes between a rep qualifying a lead and then closing that deal? This allows you to estimate how many opportunities might close in a given time period. It’s also a good measuring stick for the progress of a deal, if the rep knows the average sales cycle length.
8. When properly done, pipeline meetings can accomplish several things:
  1. Create a system of accountability for both sales reps and sales managers
  2. Establish action items and deal priorities with a specific timeline
  3. Confirm the exit criteria for every pipeline stage
9. Welcome to Stage 1 of your sales journey: Mastering Metrics.
Forecasting: 6%
1. Building a sales forecast is both an art and a science. Accurate sales forecasts keep your leaders happy and your business healthy.
2. A sales forecast is an expression of expected sales revenue. A sales forecast estimates how much your company plans to sell within a certain time period (like quarter or year). The best sales forecasts do this with a high degree of accuracy.
3. All sales forecasts answer two key questions:
  1. How much: Each sales opportunity has its own projected amount it’ll bring into the business. Whether that’s $500 or $5 million, sales teams have to come up with one number representing that new business. To create the number, they take everything they know about the prospect into account.
  2. When: Sales forecasts pinpoint a month, quarter, or year when the sales team expects the revenue to hit.
4. Sales teams factor in the important ingredients of who, what, where, why, and how to make their forecasts:
  1. Who: Sales teams make their forecasts based on who their prospects are. Depending on if their prospects are the actual decision makers or just influencers, the forecast will be more or less exact.
  2. What: Forecasts should be based on exactly what solutions you plan to sell. In turn, that should be based on problems your prospects have voiced, which your company can uniquely solve.
  3. Where: Where is the buying decision made, and where will the actual products be used? Sales teams see better accuracy when they get closer (at least for a visit) to the center of the action.
  4. Why: Why is the prospect or existing customer considering new services from your company in the first place? Is there a compelling event making them consider it now? Without a forcing function and a clear why, the deal may stall inevitably.
  5. How: How does this prospect tend to make purchasing decisions? If you’re not accounting for how they do it now and how they’ve done it in the past in your forecast, it may be fuzzy math.
5. Sales forecasts help the entire business plan resources to ship products, pay for marketing, hire employees, and beyond. Accurate sales forecasting yields a well-oiled machine that meets customer demand, both today and in the future. And internally on sales teams, sales revenue that delivers in its estimated time period keeps leaders and collaborators happy, just like a shipment that arrives on time.
6. Each organization has its own sales forecast owners. These are some of the teams who are usually responsible:
  1. Product leaders: They put a stake in the ground for what products will be available to sell when.
  2. Sales leaders: They promise the numbers that their teams will deliver. Depending on the seniority of the leader, how they forecast varies. For example, first-line managers forecast collections of opportunities, where third-line managers consider a wide set of numbers and traditional close rates to come up with an overall forecast.
  3. Sales reps: The report their own numbers to their managers.
7. Sales forecasts touch virtually all departments in a business. For example, the finance department uses sales forecasts to decide how to make annual and quarterly investments. Product leaders use them to plan demand for new products. And the HR department uses forecasts to align recruiting needs to where the business is going.
8. The main objective of sales forecasting is to paint an accurate picture of expected sales. Sales teams aim to either hit their expected target or exceed it. Outside of just aiming for accuracy, though, sales teams hope their forecasts will achieve two simple objectives: smooth internal and external operations.
  1. Smooth internal operations: When the forecast is met, the friction inside the organization – about all the things revenue funds – melts away. Trade-offs and compromises don’t need to be made about things like cutting the workforce, reducing support, or halting product development. Instead, business hums along nicely.
  2. Smooth external operations: Every company wants to delight its customers and partners. When forecasts are met and internal operations are flowing as they should be, your company can continue funding external marketing events, staffing ample customer service touchpoints, investing in its community, and more. From the outside, it’s clear that everything inside is working as it should be.
9. Craft a sales forecasting plan with your team by focusing on three primary activities:
  1. Calculating number and time period: Your plan should explain how you’ll calculate the estimated monetary amount and what the timeframes will be. See the section “How can CRM help forecasting?” later in this guide for more on the tools you can use to do this.
  2. Reviewing and revising: You should also plan to review the forecast at key milestones and revise it if necessary. Most sales leaders track progress against their forecast daily! But you’ll also want to schedule designated check-ins throughout the quarter.
  3. Breaking the patterns: Even the best sales organizations need to shake up their processes once in a while. Breaking your patterns can help you find new ways of crafting even more accurate forecasting. Try skip-level forecasting, ask different questions, have executive sponsorship reviews, and take different angles of the data.
10. As soon as an extraordinary event hits, sales and finance leaders at your company will quickly want to know:
  1. How’s our pipeline looking today?
  2. What are the best- and worst-case scenarios?
  3. How has the forecast changed from a week or a month ago?
11. Sales leaders tend to be accurate within 10% of their forecast the majority (more than 50%) of the time.
  1. It’s rare for forecasts to be within 5%, but it does happen. If you’re within 5% of your forecast, and you’re dealing with a big number of opportunities, you’re a sales forecasting rockstar.
12. Sales Cloud is the part of Salesforce that’s most commonly used by sales leaders. In particular, Sales Cloud forecasts revenue by giving you:
  1. An accurate view of your entire business. Comprehensive forecasts in Salesforce come with a complete view of your pipeline.
  2. Tracking of your top performers. See which reps are on track to beat their targets with up-to-the-minute leaderboards.
  3. Forecasting for complex sales teams. Even if your company has a complex sales organization, Salesforce can help. Overlay Splits allows you to credit the right amounts to sales overlays, by revenue, contract value, and more.
13. In Salesforce, a forecast is based on the gross rollup of a set of opportunities. You can think of a forecast as a rollup of currency or quantity against a set of dimensions: owner, time, forecast categories, product family, and territory. You can also collaborate on forecasts with all the necessary people. Check out this screenshot of how you’d predict sales with collaborative forecasts.
14. Sales forecasting is significantly more accurate when using a CRM instead of a spreadsheet. When a company is just starting out, sales teams usually rely on spreadsheets or back-of-the-napkin ways to calculate their sales forecasts. This may work for a while, but eventually, you’ll find this doesn’t scale.

Customer Success: 9%

Get Started with Salesforce Order Management in Commerce Cloud ^YouTube
You can think of order management as everything that happens “behind the scenes,” from the time you submit an order to the time you receive it, including post-purchase service requests such as cancellations and returns. And there is a lot going on during that time. Managing the movement of orders from submission to fulfillment is a delicate dance. Fumbling a step can throw off the whole routine. To be successful, merchants must coordinate the activities of many people, systems, and processes—often spanning multiple locations and time zones—to ensure that your purchase makes it from their warehouse or store to your door.
Consider the following trends that are shaping consumer shopping behavior and expectations.
1. Customers can choose from a variety of in-store and online shopping experiences.
2. Selection is virtually unlimited and can be sourced from multiple locations.
3. Order completion can occur anywhere and at any time.

Here’s a snapshot of what the order management lifecycle looks like for a B2C retail order.

Order management lifecycle stage	What happens?
Capture	A customer places an order. The order details are submitted to the merchant. Payment is authorized.
Fulfillment	The order is assigned to a fulfillment location where order items are prepared for shipping.
Delivery	The order items are transferred to a shipping carrier for delivery to the customer. Payment is captured.
Service	Service agents respond to customer questions and process discounts, cancellations, returns, refunds, and reshipments.

By connecting commerce, orders, and service, Salesforce Order Management lets you and your team:
1. See a global view of the entire order lifecycle.
2. Manage order capture, fulfillment, and delivery—all in one place.
3. Access a main repository of all order information.
4. Service orders before, during, and after fulfillment.
Salesforce Order Management includes some integrations right out of the box.
1. It’s fully integrated with B2C Commerce to support order capture from B2C Commerce stores.
2. It’s fully integrated with B2B Commerce to support order capture from B2B Commerce stores.
3. It natively supports Service Cloud to give service agents full access to order data and history.
A great customer-centric order management system delivers:
1. Fast and easy shipping
2. Transparent order tracking
3. Convenient service
4. Hassle-free returns

The following benefits that Salesforce Order Management offers you and your customers.

I am a…	How does Salesforce Order Management help me?
Customer	You can submit orders from any channel at any time, and then track your orders throughout the order lifecycle.
Merchant	You can manage the entire order process—including order fulfillment, payment capture, invoicing, shipping, and service—by using integrated and customizable business process workflows. You have insight into the entire order lifecycle, which makes it easier to identify opportunities for improvement.
Service Agent	You can access a repository of all order information with a global view of the entire order lifecycle. With the native synergy across B2C Commerce, B2B Commerce, and Service Cloud, you can access customer data, records, order history, and anything else you know about a customer in a single view. This makes it easier to provide exceptional service to your customers.

I am a…

How does Salesforce Order Management help me?

Customer

You can submit orders from any channel at any time, and then track your orders throughout the order lifecycle.

Merchant

You can manage the entire order process—including order fulfillment, payment capture, invoicing, shipping, and service—by using integrated and customizable business process workflows.

You have insight into the entire order lifecycle, which makes it easier to identify opportunities for improvement.

Service Agent

You can access a repository of all order information with a global view of the entire order lifecycle.

With the native synergy across B2C Commerce, B2B Commerce, and Service Cloud, you can access customer data, records, order history, and anything else you know about a customer in a single view. This makes it easier to provide exceptional service to your customers.

The Order Management Console shows all order information at a glance and includes tools that help you manage and service orders across every stage of the order lifecycle.

What do you want to do?	How can the Order Management Console help you?
See key order details at a glance.	The console’s intuitive tab and subtab layout puts key order details on the same page, and minimizes clicks and scrolling.
Review additional order-related information.	Access supporting records, such as fulfillment orders, order payment summaries, invoices, and credit memos with a single click, by using quick links and related lists.
Manage service requests quickly.	The split view feature lets you see all records in a list view while keeping the console workspace tabs and subtabs open, so you can work through a list of records without switching between screens.

By default, you can access the following records.
1. Accounts
2. Credit Memos
3. Fulfillment Orders
4. Invoices
5. Locations
6. Orders
7. Order Payment Summaries
8. Order Summaries
9. Process Exceptions
10. Return Orders

The order summary in Salesforce Order Management is much more than a simple rehash of order information. It’s a data object that consolidates all order information—from order capture through fulfillment, payment collection, shipping, delivery, and service—and displays it in a single view.
The order summary is your go-to information hub where you can find answers to all your order-related questions, including:
1. Who placed the order and when was it submitted?
2. What was ordered (products, quantities, and prices)?
3. What items have been allocated?
4. What items have been fulfilled?
5. What items can be canceled or returned?
6. What items have been canceled?
7. What items have been returned?
8. Where and how were items shipped?
9. How much money has been authorized, captured, and invoiced?
10. How much money has been refunded on returned items?
11. Where can I see all activity on the order since it was submitted?
Order Management Objects
1. To fully understand the power of the order summary, you need to know a bit more about Salesforce objects. Let’s take a moment to review a few key concepts.
2. Standard Salesforce objects include:
  1. Credit Memo
  2. Invoice
  3. Order
3. While objects that require a Salesforce Order Management license include:
  1. Fulfillment Order
  2. Fulfillment Order Product
  3. Order Summary
  4. A Summary object is a special type of object. Summary objects are populated with data from underlying data objects. For example, an Order Summary object pulls data from an underlying Order object that represents the original transaction order.
  5. A Change Order object represents a change to an order that affects charges and payments, such as canceling a product from an order. A Change Order object updates the corresponding Order Summary object, but it doesn’t change the original order details in the Order object. Only substantive changes generate change orders. Normal updates that are part of the fulfillment workflow do not generate change orders.
4. When a customer submits an order from your ecommerce store, the details of the order transaction are transmitted to Salesforce Order Management. The order capture triggers the creation of an order and an order summary. The order, which represents the original order transaction, becomes the foundation of the order summary.
5. The information in the order summary initially matches the information in the transaction order. When a substantive change occurs to an order, such as a cancellation or return, Salesforce Order Management creates a change order.
  1. Details of the change are recorded in the change order.
  2. Order details are updated on the order summary to reflect the information contained in the change order.
  3. Order details in the original transaction order remain the same.
You can define custom report types for the following objects in Salesforce Order Management.
1. Change Order
2. Credit Memo
3. Fulfillment Order
4. Invoice
5. Order
6. Order Payment Summary
7. Order Summary
8. Payment
9. Payment Authorization
10. Process Exception
11. Refund
12. Return Order
The primary function of any order management system is to ensure accurate and timely order fulfillment.
The order lifecycle begins when Salesforce Order Management receives an order, triggering the creation of the order and order summary records. At this point, your automated fulfillment workflow kicks in to create fulfillment order records for the products in the order and then assign those products to fulfillment locations.
1. If all the products in an order can be fulfilled together, only one fulfillment order is created.
2. If the products in an order can’t all be fulfilled together, Salesforce Order Management groups products that will ship together and creates separate fulfillment orders for each group.
3. All fulfillment orders are automatically linked to the order summary.
When you set up Salesforce Order Management, you can configure the payment methods, payment providers, and payment processors for your ecommerce site. You then need to think about how to integrate payment processing into your automated fulfillment workflow.
To help you manage payment transactions, Salesforce Order Management creates an order payment summary for each order. The order payment summary simplifies order management by providing you with a single view of all payment transactions for an order.
1. You can find the following information in each order payment summary record.
  1. Amount authorized
  2. Amount captured
  3. Amount refunded
  4. Balance due
  5. Credit memos
  6. Invoices
  7. Payee name
  8. Payment method
  9. Refunds
Salesforce Order Management uses invoices and credit memos to let you reconcile order payment transactions with your external financial management systems.
1. An invoice represents funds captured as payment for an order. An invoice lets you reconcile the funds captured with your external financial management systems. You determine the timing for invoice generation within the framework of your fulfillment workflow.
2. A credit memo represents a payment refund resulting from a product return. A credit memo lets you reconcile refund disbursements with your external financial management systems. A credit memo is generated automatically when you process a return.
3. Invoice and credit memo generation occurs automatically. Accounting reconciliation requires an integration between Salesforce Order Management and your financial management systems.
An automated routing process follows these basic steps.
1. Schedule routing
2. Determine route
3. Execute routing
4. Create invoice and ensure funds
5. Fulfill reservation
Distributed order management (DOM) lets you optimize your fulfillment workflows to efficiently deliver orders on time and at the lowest cost, from all of your locations. And you can quickly adapt your workflows to incorporate new selling channels, fulfillment methods, and inventory locations. By implementing a distributed order management workflow you can:
1. Optimize your network: Use your network of stores and distribution centers to offer fulfillment from each location.
2. Reduce costs: Build in logic to identify the smallest set of locations that can combine to fulfill the order to reduce shipping costs.
3. Fulfill faster: Dynamically route orders to the best location for fulfillment based on time/speed to deliver to boost customer satisfaction.
4. Work smarter: Seamlessly unify digital and physical experiences for a single source of truth across all data and order records.
The Find Routes with Fewest Splits action prioritizes fulfilling from locations that can fulfill an order in the least number of order splits.
1. If an order can be shipped complete, the Find Routes with Fewest Splits action returns a list of locations that can ship the order in a single shipment. If it can’t be shipped complete, the action moves on to one split, which means splitting the order into two shipments from two separate locations. If there is availability to ship in two shipments, then the action returns iterations of two locations that can accommodate the two shipments. If it can’t ship after being split once, then the action moves on to two splits, the maximum number of splits allowed. This means the order will be split into three shipments, and the action returns iterations of three locations that can accommodate the three shipments.
Proximity Based Routing – The Order Routing Rank By Average Distance action evaluates the sets of locations returned by the Find Routes with Fewest Splits action to determine which set has the shortest average delivery distance based on an order recipient’s postal code.

This table provides descriptions of the Salesforce Omnichannel Inventory core flow actions that you can use to improve your routing logic.

Core Flow Action	Description
Get Inventory Availability	Get inventory availability for one or more products at one or more inventory locations or location groups.
Transfer a Reservation	Transfer one or more inventory reservations between locations or location groups and update inventory availability at the locations or location groups.
Fulfill a Reservation	Fulfill one or more inventory reservations at a location and update inventory availability at the location.
Release a Reservation	Release one or more inventory reservations at a location and update inventory availability at the location or location group.

An order summary routing schedule record represents a single attempt to route an order. The record provides you with the scheduled date and time of the routing attempt, the status of the routing attempt (Scheduled, Completed, or Abandoned), and the reason that the attempt failed.
The Routing Attempts field lets you record the number of routing attempts made for an order summary. As with order summary routing schedules, how you use it is up to you.
When a customer contacts a service agent with a question about an order, the agent accesses the customer’s account record directly in the Service Console. The account record shows the customer’s order history. This makes it easy for the agent to locate the customer’s order information. The agent can then open the appropriate order summary directly in the Service Console.
In addition to accessing order summaries to answer customer questions, service agents can also process cancellations, discounts, reshipments, returns, and refunds by using links in the Actions & Recommendations section on the Order Summary page.
1. Cancel an Item: A service agent can process a cancellation for order items that haven’t been allocated or fulfilled.
2. Discount an Item: A service agent can process a discount or price adjustment for order items before the items are allocated or after they are fulfilled.
3. Reship an Item: A service agent can process a reshipment to replace fulfilled order items that were missing from the original shipment or lost by the carrier during shipment.
4. Return an Item and Issue an Immediate Refund: A service agent can process a return and issue an immediate refund for order items after the order items are fulfilled.
5. Return an Item and Track the Return with a Return Merchandise Authorization (RMA): A service agent can process a return by creating an RMA for order items after the order items are fulfilled. The RMA lets the agent track the return and verify the quantity and condition of returned items before issuing a refund.
  1. When an agent creates an RMA, Salesforce Order Management:
    1. Creates a return order to track the return.
  2. When an agent closes an RMA after the order items are received and verified, Salesforce Order Management:
    1. Creates a change order for the return.
    2. Updates the order product status and order product totals on the order summary.
    3. Creates a credit memo to reconcile any refund amount with your financial management system.
Value creation is effort that creates a quantifiable benefit. Value realization is effort that creates a quantifiable benefit that accrues to a stakeholder.
These five business drivers will continue to accelerate your customer success investment.
1. Demand for improved B2B experiences
2. Need to accelerate embedded customer base growth
3. Opportunity to create shared risks and shared Accountability
4. Discover hidden customer needs
5. Innovate together
There are four steps to value selling.
1. Do your discovery: Get to know your customer.
2. Build a value hypothesis: Turn your customer’s pains into gains with Salesforce solutions.
3. Create a cost-benefit analysis: Show how the benefits of an investment in Salesforce outweigh the costs.
4. Build your business case: Bring it all together in executive-ready form, built around a value map.
Account executives use value drivers, or the value a product or service creates for a customer. They use two types to impact a customer’s business—primary value drivers and our unique Salesforce value drivers
Primary Value Drivers Salesforce Value Drivers
Increase revenue

Decrease costs
Speed and agility

Risk mitigation
Primary value drivers are a great place to start a conversation with your customer about how Salesforce can impact their business. Starting with costs and revenues is an easy way to reframe your conversation in terms of the value Salesforce brings to your customer.

Primary Value Drivers	Salesforce Value Drivers
Increase revenue Decrease costs	Speed and agility Risk mitigation

The Salesforce value drivers map directly to the first two goals.

Differentiator	How Salesforce Does It	How Customers Use It
Speed and agility	Salesforce helps customers move fast and stay nimble, whether they’re launching a new product, growing through acquisition, or keeping ahead of the competition.	Speed and agility help your customers grow and deliver value to their end consumers. Speed helps right away, while agility means they’re ready for the future.
Risk mitigation	Our global security team and transparency via trust.salesforce.com keep customers protected and aware.	Our platform guards against failed implementations and downtime while maintaining security and compliance standards.

Your business case can also include your cost-benefit analysis
1. Customer stories.
2. Line of business references.
3. Meaningful metrics from other companies that have found success with Salesforce.