Salesforce.com For Dummies®

Part III. Driving Sales — The Next Level

In this part . . .

Sales is pretty straightforward, right? Your company makes widgets, you help sell them, and in return, you get a nice commission check for your efforts. Well, for many companies, possibly even yours, life may not be that cut and dried.

What if your company sells a whole laundry list of products and services to a wide range of customers in varying industries. . . and even the prices of your offerings differ depending on the customer? Or what if your company depends heavily on an indirect sales force to help bring in deals from across the globe? How will you track all those moving parts to get an accurate view of what's really in your pipeline? Don't worry. Salesforce can help sales organizations that want to move to the next level of managing their deals.

In this part, we cover how to track more complex sales scenarios, such as the ones just described, in Salesforce. We show you how to use Salesforce to track the various products and pricebooks that you deal with, forecast your pipeline more accurately, manage more complex sales territories, and better involve your partners to close more deals. Note that though we use the word “complex” to describe the next level of selling, we understand that both smaller companies as well as global conglomerates face these business issues. Whatever the size of your sales organization, read ...