Salesforce adoption and ROI can be a challenge, especially for Salesforce Admins working in organizations where deals are heavily based on relationships. Often, the effectiveness of Salesforce is hindered by its reliance on manual data entry and the lack of actionable insights to truly drive deals.
The key to overcoming these challenges lies in augmenting and extending Salesforce to serve the needs of its users rather than expecting them to adapt to the system.
This guide outlines four best practices to help your team maximize its investment in Salesforce, with practical how-to sections that ensure your CRM boosts productivity and delivers meaningful results to drive the business forward.
1. Capture sales activities automatically
Data can accelerate deals, but bad data will slow your team down. Effective sales interactions and decisions depend heavily on the quality of the data in your CRM.
According to a recent Affinity survey, 65% of sales managers believe poor quality outreach is due to missing context from previous interactions. By tracking this type of engagement activity, you can enrich your CRM data and equip your sales team with the information they need to have more productive, relevant conversations that close deals.
Benefits of tracking engagement activity
Implementing Salesforce activity tracking offers several benefits, from improving data accuracy and Salesforce adoption to increasing seller productivity.
Improve data accuracy and encourage CRM adoption
Inaccurate data can negatively impact the quality of your reporting and sales insights. Automatically logging engagement activities in Salesforce is an easy way to improve data hygiene and ensure sellers have access to the right information for informed decisions.
Understand where sales reps are investing the most time
Your sales team’s time is one of your organization’s most valuable resources. Activity tracking gives sales managers a clear picture of how sellers are spending their time, making it easy to streamline processes and reprioritize activities.
Identify at-risk accounts
In today’s competitive sales environment, sellers balance a lot of potential deals in various stages of the sales funnel. By capturing engagement activity in Salesforce, it’s easy to uncover potential gaps before they become a problem so sales teams can keep prospective deals on track.
Boost efficiencies with AI and automation
Automating activity capture can reduce the time sellers devote to manual CRM tasks, which frees about 20% of their capacity. Additionally, AI can significantly enhance decision-making in the sales cycle. For example, some activity tracking solutions enrich Salesforce records with biographic, firmographic, and experience data, providing sellers with more context to qualify deals and personalize outreach.
Five steps to achieve automatic activity tracking
Ideally, every sales interaction should be tracked in Salesforce, including phone calls, meetings, and email communications. Here are a few steps you can take to get the most out of your activity tracking efforts.
1. Identify the activities that you want to track
An Affinity survey showed a 41% YoY increase in the use of CRM data to drive deals.* By identifying the activities that directly influence your sales (e.g. email outreach and customer meetings), you can tailor your activity tracking to your business needs.
2. Use a tool to automate activity tracking
Implementing an automated activity tracking tool improves data accessibility without disrupting sales processes, saving sellers’ time and reducing errors so they can make more confident, informed decisions.
3. Prioritize CRM data hygiene
Clean and accurate data enhances decision-making and outreach. One way to quickly improve data hygiene is to use tools that automatically create and update Salesforce records for you. This is extremely valuable to customer-facing teams and fortifies trust in the CRM system, which can enhance Salesforce adoption.
4. Use activity data to uncover relationship insights
Activity data provides more than accountability—it also reveals valuable relationship insights. With a tool that layers this on top of activity tracking, sales teams can easily identify connections that can expedite deals.
5. Make Salesforce more accessible with inbox and browser extensions
In addition to tracking activity data, some solutions offer inbox and browser extensions (e.g. for Chrome, Gmail, and Outlook). These extensions surface activity data so sellers can easily access the history of engagement at the account and contact level without disrupting their workflows.
2. Enhance deal insights with relationship data
Capitalizing on existing relationships and warm introductions can transform how sales teams work. So how can you enable your team to get the most value from your collective network to win more opportunities? The answer lies in relationship intelligence.
What is relationship intelligence?
Relationship intelligence uses the vast amounts of data within your CRM to help your sales and deal teams gain a deeper understanding of the relationships between their colleagues and their contacts, leads, accounts, and opportunities.
At its core, relationship intelligence is about transforming raw data from emails, meetings, and Salesforce activities into actionable insights that reveal not only your team’s web of connections but also the strength and history of those relationships.
Three Salesforce reports to build using relationship data
Here are three real examples of how you can use relationship intelligence data in Salesforce to improve performance and drive more revenue. Before diving in, it’s worth noting that:
- Field labels may vary for every Salesforce Org.
- After creating new reports, you can adjust the chart appearance and type directly on dashboards.
- All relationship scores listed in the examples below are out of 100 (i.e. 100 is the highest possible score).
1. Uncover accounts that need engagement
Monitor the strength of your relationships with key accounts and create Salesforce triggers to alert account owners when relationship scores drop below a specific threshold.
How to create this report in Salesforce
Create a new report and select “Accounts” as the Report Type.
Add the following columns to the report:
- Last Activity
- Account Name
- Account Owner
- Last Email (Affinity)
- # Highest Relationship Score
Next, add filters:
- Filter the report so it shows the accounts you want to monitor. For example, you can show all accounts, your team’s accounts, or your personal accounts.
- Add a “Created Date” filter and select the timeframe you want to evaluate.
- Add a “Relationship Score” filter and set it to surface accounts with relationship scores that are less than or equal to 70 (or whichever threshold you deem too low).
2. See who at your company has the most connections
A leaderboard can help sales leaders understand their team’s collective network and identify who can assist with outreach efforts.
How to create this report in Salesforce
Create a new report and select “Users” as the Report Type. First, group rows by Full Name. Then add a column to display # of Connections.
Next, add filters:
- Filter the report by “Last Login” and select the timeframe you want to evaluate.
- Add a “View” filter and select “Active Users”.
3. Compare how relationships impact closed opportunities
By comparing closed opportunities with different relationship scores, sales leaders can better understand the impact of relationships on sales outcomes. If opportunities closed with higher relationship scores consistently yield more revenue, it validates the effectiveness of relationship-building strategies employed by the sales team.
Note that in the example below, we’re looking at opportunities that closed in the last year and comparing those with lower relationship scores against those with higher relationship scores.
How to create these reports in Salesforce
This one requires two reports that are nearly identical except for the relationship score filter. To get started, create a new report and select “Opportunities” as the Report Type.
First, group rows by Stage. Then add the following columns to the report:
- Owner Role
- Opportunity Owner
- Account Name
- Opportunity Name
- Fiscal Period
- # Probability (%)
- # Amount
- # Age
- Close Date
- Created Date
- # Highest Relationship Score
- Next Step
- Lead Source
- Type
Next, add filters:
- Filter the report so it shows “All Opportunities”.
- Add a “Close Date” filter and select “Previous FY”, or choose a specific date range.
- Add an “Opportunity Status” filter and select “Any”.
- Include a “Probability” filter and select “All”.
- Filter by “Stage” and select “equals Closed won”.
- Add a relationship score and set it to show any score that is less than 70.
- Once you save this report, clone it and change the relationship score filter to be greater than or equal to 70.
3. Power account planning with network insights
Account planning refers to the process of identifying and understanding key accounts, analyzing their needs and challenges, and developing targeted plans to build and nurture relationships. While it’s a necessary part of today’s sales process, it’s not always easy to manage in a complex B2B sales process.
When asked in a recent Affinity survey if customer relationships help them make sales, 51% of respondents confirmed that relationships are a significant part of their sales process.* Account planning is an effective way to maintain those key relationships and by augmenting Salesforce, you can use it for more strategic account planning that drives CRM adoption and positively impacts revenue.
The value of relationship data
“In today’s corporate landscape, everybody’s inboxes are inundated, and it can be hard to break through the noise,” Ben Maxwell, Strategic Account Executive at Affinity explains. “So, when we’re talking about how to strategically plan to make an impact, using the existing relationships within your company’s network is the future of where technology sales is going, regardless of what industry you’re in.”
Successful Salesforce account planning involves understanding the connections between your colleagues and key contacts at prospective and current customer accounts. Relationship intelligence tools can help with this, mapping relationships and assessing your organization’s network so you better understand the strength and nature of every relationship.
“People buy from people they know and trust,” Maxwell elaborates. “When you aren’t starting from scratch with a new customer—and you can be introduced through someone in your company—that’s going to be the easiest way to get a seat at the table with these key account stakeholders.”
When it comes to account planning in Salesforce, sales leaders and AEs are looking for ways to identify new opportunities faster and monitor key accounts more easily. You can help by setting up relationship-focused triggers, reports, and dashboards.
Four ways to use network insights in account planning
1. Relationship strength triggers
Create automated alerts in Salesforce to notify sellers when relationship scores drop below a specific threshold or key account insights change. This helps sellers take timely action to maintain or strengthen client relationships.
2. Account engagement monitoring
Use Salesforce reports to track account engagement using activity data. This allows sales managers to identify potential gaps and reprioritize accounts as needed. Regularly monitoring account engagement ensures that high-potential accounts can be adequately nurtured.
3. Relationship trends dashboard
Build a relationship trends dashboard in Salesforce that sales leaders can use during team meetings to quickly assess the health of client relationships, review the status of recent opportunities, and identify accounts that need engagement. You can include visualizations such as trend graphs showing relationship scores over time, a bar chart that displays relationship scores against revenue outcomes, or scorecards displaying key metrics.
4. High engagement score reporting
Generate reports in Salesforce that highlight opportunities with the highest relationship scores. This helps sellers prioritize deals with a higher likelihood of closing. These reports can be segmented by sales rep, team, or other specific criteria to provide tailored insights.
4. Extend Salesforce to where teams actually work
Salesforce extensions for Google Chrome, Gmail, and Outlook are an easy way to improve the functionality and accessibility of your CRM. These extensions make it possible for sellers to access critical insights where and when they need them, increasing productivity and eliminating crossed wires. With the right extensions, sellers can also take actions like creating new opportunities, adding notes, or editing existing records, all without breaking the flow of work.
The impact of extensions on productivity
During a recent Affinity roundtable discussion about driving productivity for sales teams, one Salesforce Admin stated, “everyone is aware of the struggle of getting sales professionals to adopt Salesforce, so you need to give them a reason to log in.” They also listed a few examples, “things like automation, time savings, and other things that let them focus on selling [will help].”
With Salesforce for Outlook sunsetting and the ongoing need to improve CRM adoption, now is an excellent time to evaluate your extensions or research new ones.
Five ways to use Salesforce extensions
Your customer data is meant to live in Salesforce, but that isn’t always where your team works. Get your sales team to engage more with Salesforce by extending data, actionable insights, and record creation directly to the tools they use every day.
1. Update Salesforce from anywhere
Move deals forward by updating and creating Salesforce records while responding to emails and researching around the web without having to navigate to Salesforce.
2. Improve team collaboration
View notes, account details, and activity history to prevent duplicate outreach efforts. No more blindly reaching out just to find out a coworker already contacted the same prospect last week!
3. Access deal context
Get quick access to Salesforce records and engagement data inside Outlook, Gmail, or Chrome.
“If you can easily see what kinds of meetings took place in an Account a year ago, what kinds of emails were exchanged, that provides you with a level of context so you can make informed outreach to specific Contacts,” says Maxwell. “It allows your outreach to be much more relevant based on the information that was automatically logged.”
4. Add relevant notes
Quickly add or view notes in Salesforce while scheduling a follow-up, responding to emails, or browsing websites and LinkedIn profiles.
5. Automate data entry
Automatically capture engagement data and automate the creation, update, and enrichment of Salesforce records so sales teams can focus on revenue-generating activities.
Maximize Salesforce ROI with Affinity for Salesforce
Affinity for Salesforce uses automation and artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance the functionality and efficiency of your CRM.
With Affinity for Salesforce, you can:
- Automatically capture engagement activity: Affinity automatically creates and updates CRM records by analyzing your company’s email and calendar activity, saving each user 200+ hours of manual data entry every year.
- Surface network and relationship insights: Affinity’s AI-driven relationship intelligence allows sellers to quickly identify who can provide the best introduction to a top prospect. Relationship scores are calculated using the recency and frequency of interactions between your colleagues and your company’s expanded network of connections.
- Optimize Salesforce for account planning: Create reports, dashboards, and triggers using captured and enriched data to help sellers plan more effectively, personalize outreach, and manage high-value accounts and contacts.
- Improve seller productivity and efficiency: Affinity’s Chrome and Outlook extensions allow your team to access, update, and create Salesforce records directly from their inbox and browser.
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* Data from Affinity’s 2024 survey of 250+ business leaders across investment banking, media and communications, real estate, professional services, healthcare, financial services, manufacturing, and enterprise technology.
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