Published on: 21 June 2019
Last Updated on: 09 December 2021
Managers are a special breed of people who lead by example, and if you have a team of senior managers in your organization, they also require motivation and leadership. Building and maintaining a strong relationship with your senior managers in an integral requirement, and with that in mind, here are a few tips on how best to build a good working relationship with your managers.
Tips Of Building Better Relationships With Senior Managers
Setting Achievable Goals:
We all need to set realistic goals, especially those who manage others, and as their mentor, you should be helping your senior managers to set themselves attainable goals while making sure they are doing this with their teams. Once goals are set, it is important to keep them at the forefront of your mind, and should any employee underperform, the first things to look at is goal setting. There is also a great guide that explains how to set achievable goals, which you probably know anyway.
Managing Performance:
If you put your senior managers through a review of performance management training they will be better equipped to manage their teams’ performance, and this type of training course can be downloaded online, and for a single payment, you get to keep the very useful tools and resources that the course contains, and can use them in any way you see fit. You need to firmly establish the key elements of performance management, and by investing in a training program that you can deliver, you can help your senior managers to better manage performance.
Dealing with Poor Performance:
If a team player is underperforming, we must be careful not to negatively impact their morale, and with constructive analysis using a positive approach will help the employee to identify the causes of poor performance, while also helping them to rectify things. If you are at all unsure how to deal with poor performance, search online for a specific training course on the topic, and for a small cost, you can download dynamic training material that comes with full instructions for the trainer, and what’s more, you can use and re-use the materials, with zero restrictions.
Managing Conflict:
Conflicts among team players can literally destroy morale, and any good senior manager should be able to use a range of strategies to resolve conflicts in a positive manner, and it is always a good idea to review these strategies with your management team, and by downloading the right training course, you can boost your managers where it matters. Discipline is an important aspect of team management, and there are modules on managing conflict and maintaining discipline in the online training course, which you can access for a small investment.
Your senior managers should look to you as their mentor, their guiding light, and if you source a dynamic training course that specifically deals with building relationships in senior management, you can deliver the contents to your team at your convenience. The material would be put together by recognized business gurus and designed to be very easy to deliver and comes complete with a step-by-step guide for the trainer.
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There are several tools in the market that can aid your brand in many ways. The challenge is that most business owners don’t understand some of these tools. This article sheds light on the benefit of Sferic to your enterprise. This tool is used as one of those instruments that you can use to gain a competitive advantage in the market.
When you own a business, your number one priority is protecting the investment. Protection comes in many forms, including remaining weather alert. By remaining aware of the weather, you will be better able to make decisions about employee safety as well as make changes to protect your property when needed. One product to try is Sferic Protect. The benefits of Sferic Protect are vast, including the provision of essential information to stay weather aware. Weather is critical because it affects nearly all businesses in one way or another. Here are some of the ways Sferic can help you to prepare your business for the upcoming weather conditions.
Quality Weather Tracking Software
To run your business effectively, you must be weather aware. Knowing when severe weather will strike will help you to decide on closing operations for the day, adding protection measures such as boarding up windows due to high winds, etc. With this special storm tracker software, you can easily monitor the daily weather patterns, making decisions for your business operations. Several entrepreneurs make great losses because they are ignorant of the weather.
This weather monitoring system provides excellent benefits so that business owners can remain aware of the impending weather, especially severe storms or the potential for a natural disaster. One benefit of Sferic Protect is real-time storm tracking. With this feature, business owners can easily view the weather portal to see what is taking place at the present moment, as well as what type of weather is on the way. With this feature, business owners can decide to shut down operations for the day due to serious weather threats and ensure employees can get home or to shelter before a major weather occurrence takes place.
Customized mobile alerts are another benefit to the Sferic Protect product. With these alerts, each business owner can tailor their weather updates to their specific needs. Weather affects every business differently, so having a customized option allows one to be alerted to weather patterns that can affect operations. This knowledge helps to streamline what each enterprise needs to be aware of without annoying interruptions every few minutes.
With this product, a business can easily protect employees and property. With so many features, including outdoor audible alerts, businesses will be able to stay weather aware at all times. There is nothing that is as important as making sure that your property and staff are safe.
In conclusion, Sferic is one of the most important tools you can find it the market. It will give you insights that will help you to plan for your business. This, in itself, will help you to avoid losses and enhance the productivity of your enterprise.
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Building a Brand for Your Small Business
As an entrepreneur, your customers are the biggest pillar of your business. No matter your industry of domain, area of specialization, or even your business focus, they are the single most valuable asset to your organization and you should treat them as so.
Through their valuable feedback, your business can gain a new sense of direction, develop new concepts, as well as bring in more revenue. With that said, as a business owner, simply appreciating your customers isn’t enough. You need to truly understand them to tailor your products and services to meet them at their point of need. And that’s where Salesforce application development comes in.
It entails creating integrated customer relationship management solutions that interface businesses with their customers. These CRM platforms also give all the departments in a particular organization a unified view of all the customers and how they interact with various aspects of the business.
In this article, we are going to look at what Salesforce is and its uses. While at it, we are also going to delve deeper to see the entire Salesforce application development lifecycle.
What Is Salesforce?
Simply put, it’s a cloud computing SaaS company that provides customer relationship management (CRM) solutions. Thanks to the company’s cloud technology, businesses are able to better connect with their existing clientele, partners, and potential customers.
Over the years, Salesforce software has grown to become the leading marketing and customer behavior tracking solution for both small startups and Fortune 500 companies. As it turns out, customer relationship management is one of the key driving factors for the increasing demand for application development in Salesforce.
Recent research from Vonage offered a compelling view of the effects and consequences of poor customer service. In the US alone, the research revealed that an estimated $62 billion is lost annually as a result of bad customer experience.
To underwrite this figure, a different report from Huffpost has indicated that 91% of customers won’t hesitate to switch brands once they experience bad customer service. These are mind-blowing figures, especially if a business has no solution to counter the consequences of poor customer experience.
However, with Salesforce in place, businesses are able to overcome the problems caused by poor customer service and other business process variables. According to statistics published on Salesforce’s website, companies that are currently using their software have continued to see average increases in multiple areas. For instance, 34% of users have seen an increase in customer satisfaction, with 27% and 32% users seeing an increase in sales revenues and lead conversion respectively.
In 2018, Salesforce emerged as the biggest CRM software commanding a total of 19.8% market share of the CRM software market. During the same period, the company was voted as the #1 CRM provider by the International Data Corporation. It shouldn't come as a surprise that companies are willing to pay the highest Salesforce consultant salary just to get wind of this technology.
The Benefits of Using Salesforce
Given the commendable portfolio of Salesforce, here are areas it can help your business find success. Below I am going to discuss the benefits of using Salesforce.
Helps Collect Customer Intel
In the prevailing competitive business environment, overlooking data collection can be a fatal and unforgiving mistake. As a business, collecting and collating customer intelligence should be an obsession or the very least treated as a full-time affair, because it can lead to loss of revenue. As such, if you are to improve customer satisfaction and continue remaining competitive, hiring qualified Salesforce developers to build a high-quality CRM tool is inevitable.
And with Salesforce, you get an upper hand over your competitors by enjoying tools that help you identify, understand, and solve customer problems.
Flexible And Scalable
As companies and business needs continue to evolve, the tools of trade must also adapt. For instance, if the structures of your business start to grow, the management software should be able to seamlessly accommodate the changes. Cognizant of this fact, Salesforce CRM comes with multiple functions that allow for scalability right from the initial stages to any future interactions.
Helps in Account Planning
Having a unified view of customer information allows your teams to independently make plans for various accounts. It also facilitates a more hands-on customer connection approach as well as allows various reps and departments in your organization to modify their plans for optimized results. Salesforce also comes with a to-do items feature, which helps your entire workforce stay organized throughout the day.
Along with that, Salesforce also works as an organizational tool. Your team can create calendar reminders specifying the future customer follow-ups or important duties reminders to the upper management, which helps prevent anything from falling through the cracks.
If you are in the service-based businesses, Salesforce also gives you insights into the amount of time a particular customer/s has stayed in a particular subscription package. Once this info is established, your team is able to customize marketing materials to match a particular customer niche.
Cloud Connectivity
Many companies are now gravitating towards software as a service (SaaS), which means software that is available online. Luckily, Salesforce doesn’t need to be installed on a computer as it is cloud-based. This means that you can easily access it everywhere, interface it with other digitized services, and enjoy unlimited storage capacity. And since no maintenance is required, you get to save on a Salesforce developer salary that would have otherwise been paid for this purpose.
Facilitates Team Collaboration
Poor team communication and collaboration can lead to reduced productivity. On top of a unified view of customer data, Salesforce’s “Chatter” feature allows your team members to easily and regularly communicate work-related information. Additionally, the feature also lets you highlight and prioritize urgent issues that require special attention by inviting different team members to look at them.
Salesforce Application Development Lifecycle
Software developers spend a lot of time designing, developing, securing, and delivering products that perform better than initially envisioned. As a result, different software development approaches like agile development, waterfall model, and many others have merged.
When it comes to cloud-based solutions, the incorporation and implementation of various software development methodologies make it even more complex. Moreover, the Salesforce Development Lifecycle also means that the software is developed, tested, and deployed in a cloud environment.
Below, we have laid down 6 steps that clearly illustrate the entire Salesforce Development Lifecycle:
Business Requirements Analysis
The first step towards a successful custom Salesforce application is to conduct an internal business needs analysis. It entails the development team eliciting the potential customer needs, elaborating them, validating all the assumptions, and devising efficient methodologies to meet these requirements.
Business requirements analysis is important as it helps avert potential mistakes as well as make the final product both efficient and compatible with the existing system and security standards.
UI/UX Design
Another important aspect of Salesforce application development is optimizing the app for user experience. A report by iMPACT indicates that 52% of customers are less likely to conduct business with a brand offering a poor mobile experience. On the other hand, Forbes conservative estimates indicate that intentional and strategic user experience can yield a conversion rate as high as 400%.
If these numbers are anything to go by, designing a user-friendly and highly responsive Salesforce application development is absolutely paramount. In order to optimize an app for effective and enjoyable use, developers need to map out the user journey and creatively choreograph user/platform interactions to benefit the end-user.
Development Phase
The next step in Salesforce application development entails creating developers creating isolated sandboxes. Generally, these distinct sandboxes hold the main production app copy and other supplementary Salesforce configuration information. They are also independent, implying that changes in a single sandbox don’t affect the main Salesforce production enterprise. Individual developers have to clone their branches.
To retrieve the metadata from the sandboxes to the IDE, the developers need to use Force.com IDE. Once they have the metadata, they continue coding their assigned app features, performing initial unit testing, and then submit the finished code to the Git repository.
If a subsequent developer wants to build on top of this freshly updated branch, they need to clone it to their sandbox and continue developing new features. Once done, they also have to submit their latest development to the repository.
With that said, the possibility of multiple developers working on the same branch cant be overlooked. To avoid conflicts, it is important for everyone in the development team to check for possible branch updates before committing.
Testing
The next step after building a Salesforce application is to ensure that it has an excellent and stable performance. This mainly entails developers carrying out QA activities including unit tests and code reviews. It is also at this stage that functional, performance, and integration testing is conducted within the development process.
Lastly, automation tests and debugging are conducted to augment the app’s speedy delivery.
Integration
During the integration phase, the custom CRM application is interfaced with third-party software like CMS. To facilitate a smooth transition, the development team also conduct hands-on training sessions as well as provides training materials to the client.
Launch
Once the app is launched for internal use, it is transferred to the client and subjected to their User Acceptance Testing environment (UAT). Once satisfied, the finished product is moved to the production environment and deployed to the end-users.
Salesforce Application Development Team Actors
During the app development process, different players are involved and handle different aspects of the app. In the Salesforce app development life cycle, the most common actors include:
Product Manager: Help finalize business requirements.
Release Manager: Help coordinate the app’s release schedule.
Software Developer: Handles the main coding and produces the requisite deliverables.
Quality Analyst: Tests and confirms the functionality of various app features.
Potential money from the Salesforce AppExchange development:
After researching the fact this has been seen that Potential money from the salesforce AppExchange development can depend on several other factors.
How To Build an App for Salesforce AppExchange?
To build your AppExchange app, you must go through the multi-step procedure, which includes compliance, release, ongoing support, and demand app development. Below, I will discuss how to create an App for Salesforce AppExchange.
1st Step: Become the Part of Salesforce Business Partner Community
The first and foremost step in becoming a Salesforce AppExchange trade Partner is to join the Salesforce Partner Community. In this case, you must submit the form using AppExchange. After all, the Salesforce Partner Community is the hub of existing AppExchange Partners.
2nd Step: Examine AppExchange Market
The next step in building the app is to examine the AppExchange market. AppExchange offers many products and solutions for several products and cloud services in Salesforce. In this case, for optimal outcomes, you must use the curated collections of AppExchange.
3rd Step: Make the First Sketches of Your Product
Once you are done researching the existing solutions on AppExchange, you must start defining the unique value proposition of your product. For the outline, you must follow the below-mentioned procedure such as:
Firstly, you must understand your target audience.
Secondly, ensure you have an idea of business targets.
Thirdly, you must follow the types of Salesforce editions you will support.
After that, ensure you have an idea of the package type.
Next, ensure you have the Salesforce Licenses that you want to use.
Lastly, it would help if you ensured the requirements for your AppExchange App security.
4th Step: Define the Type of ISV Partnership and the Type Of Your AppExchange Solution
Once you have joined the Salesforce Partner Community, then, you must analyze the existing products, and you can create a rough roadmap. In this case, ensure you have defined the type of ISV partnership, and consequently, you also have built the AppExchange solution.
There are seven types of ISV partners in AppExchange. It includes OEM, CDP Cloud Partner, Commerce Cloud Partner, All Other Clouds (paid), All Other Clouds (free), and Technology Partner/Tableau.
5th Step: Choose the Programming Type and Tools to Build Your Salesforce App
Recently, Salesforce provided two types of programming languages and two types of tools that you can use. Let’s know what programming tools are used in Salesforce App development. This includes Apex Cloud-based programming language. Next are Lightning components and Visualforce.
6th Step: Build Your Salesforce App
Once you can identify the exact type of solution, it must have the programming language, licensing, and packaging, and of course, you must continue with the building procedure.
Two ways to do this are using internal sources or outsourcing the dedicated team. If you want to build the SalesForce App using an in-house team, it could be one the most viable and remarkable options. If you don’t have enough resources, ensure you can control the entire product cycle of AppExchange.
7th Step: Test Your Salesforce App
If you want to ensure optimal performance, then it must conduct comprehensive end-to-end testing in technological domains. In this case, you must adhere to the development of best business practices, especially for testing.
8th Step: Prepare Your App for the Launch on AppExchange
Once you are done testing and finalizing the app, the next step is to prepare by submitting it to the SalesForce AppExchange. In this procedure, it includes creating the managed packages and providing screenshots.
9th Step: Submit Your App for Security Review and Market This
Ensure you have submitted your final app by undergoing the security review and then have met the necessary security requirements.
Final Thoughts
Salesforce CRM is a critical business tool. It helps streamline data analysis and reporting, provides invaluable customer feedback, and aid in formulating better customer service strategies. As a result, businesses are able to align their resources towards creating timely, customer-oriented solutions.
With that said, Salesforce application development isn’t a linear process. It entails working with different tools and multiple software development methodologies. And with cloud solutions continuing to capture the imaginations of business owners, the world is yet to see the full potential of CRM Salesforce and the cloud ecosystem as a whole.
Read also:
Top User Tips For Getting Started With Salesforce
CRM And ERP Combination For Business Solutions
5 Things To Take Into Account To Hire Custom Software Development Services
This works for all businesses! If you're in Marketing, consulting, or coaching, this applies even more to your field!
What Got you Off the Island is Not What this is Keeps You Growing Hack
Ryan Holiday What shifts you have to make as an entrepreneur when you scale:
The best way I can describe it is a baseball analogy. In the Dominican Republic, there is a saying in the baseball league that you can’t walk off the island, which means you have to hit your way off in the baseball league. The players that make it off the island are usually some of the best hitters. But once they get into the major league, it becomes different, because it’s about bat discipline and talent is very different. So, what got you there to get off the island is not going to be what allows you to maintain your success because you’re in a whole different league. That is what it’s like when you are scaling your company. What got you there is not going to be exactly what allows you to scale to another level! Be ready to shift and pivot and learn in order to grow!
Not the How, But the Who Hack –
Dan Sullivan:
As you scale, there are going to be all areas in your company that is going to require your attention, from sales to marketing, to operations. So how do you take all of this on and still manage to scale? There’s a great hack for it! It’s called not the how but the who rules! Once you figure out what you need to scale (process, sales, marketing, etc.), don’t ask yourself WHAT do I need to learn? Ask WHO is the best at that and get them on board! This will allow you to scale quickly vs. having to go learn another skillset now vs. staying in the lane where your talents are best served! So, to scale, instead of just figuring out the what, you need to figure out The Who, so you can do it faster!
Be Cautious and Bold Hack -
Mindset for scaling:
you Must exercise your caution in laying out your plans but be bold in carrying them out. A man who is all cautious will never dare to take hold and be successful, and a man who is all bold is merely reckless, and must eventually fail. You must have both the caution and the boldness, to ensure success.
How to Keep from Falling When you’re Experiencing Success Hack
David Metzer:
I think the biggest thing that led to my downfall was losing my values. There are really only a few things I use now to play the top of my game and stay there. Number one gratitude; just being grateful for whatever you have, no matter how big or small. Number two is Empathy for others. As I got into this competitive world, I became an asshole. I was more worried about taking rather than giving that I really didn’t focus on anyone else and I went straight to blame and shame and justification, as I was Midas! Meaning I turned everything into Gold, right? So, it had to be everyone else’s fault. Number three is accountability. There are two parts to this one: what was as my part that the thing that went wrong, and what lesson did I learn so I don’t go thru this again. The fourth is effective communication. What I mean by that is not just being a team leader and effectively communicating with everyone on your team on what you want and how to run a company. Rather, what I mean is that I had lost my ability to effectively communicate what inspired me! When I was making money and I got done with spending it, it took me a while to learn that I need to give back and be of service. I wish I would’ve done it when I had the money instead of having to lose it and build it back up again. But that’s part of lesson learning that I have here, so I can inspire others so they can avoid the same mistakes.
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