Inspiration and updates from the team
at LavaBox.

What makes great Salesforce Architecture? Q&A with LavaBox Principal Salesforce Architect, Aparna Gopalakrishnan

I recently had the pleasure of sitting down for a wide-ranging conversation with LavaBox’s newly-appointed Principal Salesforce Architect. Here’s what she had to say:

Applying Marketing Automation Across the B2B Customer Lifecycle

Selling high-value B2B products and services isn’t quick or easy. Deals typically involve multiple decision-makers and influencers, and can take many months (or even years) to close. Marketing Automation plays an important role in addressing this challenge.

Welcome Abhishek, Raigo, Sumeet and Marek

We believe there are two ingredients to a strong culture: meaningful work and meaningful relationships. Our environment is designed to cultivate both. We’re excited to welcome these exceptional consultants to the LavaBox team.

New Arrivals: Welcome Rob, Yana and Denver

In a year that has seen unprecedented IT skills shortages, it’s gratifying to see the LavaBox team and culture continue to grow and thrive.

Kitchen Mania uses Salesforce to Rapidly Adapt During Covid-19

When Covid-19 caused New Zealand to go into lockdown in early 2020, Kitchen Mania leveraged the Salesforce platform to rapidly adapt.

St John Takes Their Supporter Scheme Digital

Pardot delivered an end-to-end journey that transitioned St John supporters to lower-cost digital channels while delivering a more efficient and engaging member experience.

Start Up Success: The Tic Co Leverages Salesforce to Scale & Innovate

LavaBox worked alongside The Tic Co to implement an operational backbone that streamlined and automated their end-to-end delivery process.

Watch Now: Building a resilient sales team in a post Covid-19 New Zealand'

New Zealand's sales leaders are being called on to find new levels of resilience. They're being asked to execute new strategies, to adapt to new ways of working and to keep their people engaged and focused at a time where pressure and uncertainty are running high. We've assembled a unique lineup of presenters. Each brings actionable insights to help you develop resiliency at every level of your sales organisation.

Watch Now: LavaBox’s CRM Customer Panel

Watch the highlights of LavaBox’s recent ‘How to pull off a CRM, step by step’ event.

Watch Now: LavaBox CRM Customer Panel

Learn from the experiences of LavaBox customers who have successfully implemented Salesforce CRM into their business. They’ll share challenges they faced, lessons they learned and commercial outcomes they experienced.

Watch Now: 'How to pull off a CRM project, step by step' presentation

If you’ve tried to implement CRM and it’s fallen flat, or you’ve put it off because you’re not sure how to make it work for your company, this presentation is for you.

Managing your CRM roll out part 3: Clarify your CRM Road Map

Your business doesn't stand still. Neither should your CRM.

Managing your CRM rollout part 2: The iteration cycle

There is a critical stage your CRM project must pass through to succeed

10 Reflections on My First 10 Years in Business

In September 2007, my (still) best friend, John McLean and I decided to go into business together. I was 21 years old and John was 24. Our plan was to design a ton of quality, affordable websites for small businesses, make recurring revenue from the web hosting and retire within 4 years to live out the rest of our days on a beach somewhere. How hard could it be?

Managing your CRM rollout part 1: System presentation & training

Your CRM system only delivers commercial wins when everyone commits to learning it, using it and improving it. This doesn't happen automatically. Rolling out a CRM requires a defined plan, and the commitment to execute it.

Selecting the Ideal CRM Consulting Partner

Implementation and consulting partners, like CRMs, come in all shapes and sizes. Although you may have hired an external IT consultant to help in your evaluation, an implementation partner is typically aligned with a specific CRM platform so their role isn't to offer impartial advice, but to show you how their approach can combine with the prospective CRM to deliver a system that achieves your business objectives. Think of the CRM as raw building materials, and the partner as the architect and builder.

How to navigate a CRM evaluation

Cutting through the marketing, feature comparisons, demos and trials to find the right solution for your business may seem like a perilous road to travel. But when you know what to look for, and the right questions to ask, the ideal solution will become clear. Here's how to back the right CRM for your business, step-by-step.

To integrate, or not to integrate

Pulling data into a CRM, or pushing data out into external systems can be more time-consuming and complex than anticipated. There always needs to be a strong commercial reason to go down this road. "More visibility" isn't usually a strong enough driver on its own. Data needs to be used for a commercially beneficial reason to justify the investment.

Documenting your CRM requirements (in 4 pages or less)

Before speaking to potential CRM providers, documenting your high-level requirements is critical. Going through this process has three main benefits.

Watch Now: Client Success - Pedersens

Pedersens came to LavaBox to create an automated sales and marketing engine. We leveraged Sales Cloud & Pardot to create an engaging user and customer experience across both the mortgage and property management sides of their business. A great example of Salesforce working in the financial services vertical.

Selecting the ideal CRM

There are hundreds of CRM systems on the market. Although it's true that some are outright terrible, it's usually horses for courses. It's more about how the CRM you're considering fits your business. After it's all said and done, CRMs typically fall into four categories.

How to assemble your CRM project team

Getting the right mix of people involved is critical to the success of your CRM project.In reality, when assembling your project team, you'll work with what you've got. If you're a smaller business without a large IT department, multiple business units, dedicated business analysts and project managers and a large senior leadership team, you'll assemble your team differently to a larger enterprise.

Define your CRM Priorities

Customer relationship management (CRM) is a broad term that covers any business software system that help teams handle their customer interactions. Although CRM began with a focus on sales, leading CRMs are now robust Cloud technology platforms that span the entire customer lifecycle across marketing, sales, customer service, key account management, business intelligence and channel partner communities, to name a few.

Watch Now: Client Success - Deadly Ponies

Deadly Ponies needed a help desk system that delivered a premium customer service experience that matched their premium product. We developed an intuitive architecture on Salesforce's Service Cloud platform that is delighting both staff and customers.

Watch Now: LavaBox's Marketing Automation Presentation

Watch LavaBox's marketing automation presentation, filmed at the Auckland Salesforce user group. LavaBox's Managing Director, Justin Lanigan explains how to align marketing and sales to create better buying experiences.

5 Lead nurturing campaigns to convert your prospects into contracts

Lead nurturing empowers marketers to craft tailored content journeys that take prospects down different routes based on their actions (like clicking through on email links) or data profile in Salesforce (like their lead score or industry vertical). These campaigns deliver content that supports the sales process and influence prospects throughout the customer journey. Below are five lead nurturing campaigns that help move prospects from "new lead" through to "contract signed."

Connecting the dots between purchasing data and sales activity

We hear a lot about “big data” - large sets of customer information that can be analysed and leveraged to help organisations sell more effectively. It seems a foregone conclusion that this kind of data analytics is only for the big players. But any B2B company, no matter how large or small has potential customer insights locked in their disconnected Salesforce CRM, Accounting and ERP systems. So how do smaller organisations connect the dots between customer purchasing data and sales activity?

Planning your Pardot implementation

Beginning the journey towards implementing marketing automation technology is exciting and, as with all things new, contains a few unknowns. Here at LavaBox we've been around the Pardot block a few times and have some useful suggestions to help you plan for your implementation.

Salesforce Lightning Professional v.s. Enterprise Edition - a Partner's Perspective

Deciding which Salesforce Lightning edition to run with is a big decision. Your edition affects more than your organisation's monthly license costs and the features you have access to. It impacts the entire architecture of your system. That is, how your business's processes are brought to life on the Salesforce platform.

It's time to screw up paper contracts and go digital

You need a document signed. Maybe it's a contract. A disclosure statement. It could be anything. You attach it to an email and send it to your client. Your client prints it out and completes it. They sign it, scan it, attach it to an email and send it back. You print it and give it to your admin team. They double enter the data back into your system and file it. What a horrendous waste of time.

How to Drive Team Adoption (without becoming the CRM police)

It's easy for a CRM to become an expensive cloud-rolodex. CRM systems only deliver on their transformational potential when everyone from CEO to the sales floor are actually using the system in the right way. Below are the keys to getting everyone on the CRM bus from the outset:

Using Marketing Automation Across the B2B Customer Journey

There's a tendency to think the only use case for marketing automation is at the front of the sales funnel. In reality, marketing automation can become the glue that ties the entire customer journey together. From lead generation and nurturing, through to re-engagement, solution selection, customer onboarding, and proactive account service. Let's take high level look at how marketing automation can enhance the customer experience and drive revenue throughout the customer lifecycle:

Insights

Crafting the B2B customer journey

Think about everything that happens to your customer over their lifecycle with your company. The customer journey from first touch point through to brand advocate is a chasm of complexity covering...

How marketing automation transforms cold calling

Cold calling doesn’t work too well with complex sales for a few reasons. First, you have to get lucky - calling a prospect who actually cares about the problem you’re trying to solve at the moment you’ve contacted them. Second, you have to educate them - around who you are, the problem they have and how you’re uniquely positioned to help them solve it. Third, you have limited time - they didn’t ask for the call, and understanding your complex proposition probably isn’t on their list of priorities that day.