12 Questions You Should Ask on a Salesforce Enrichment Demo

Life is full of unanswerable questions. But your sales ops shouldn’t be.

Sales pros today spend just one-third of their time actually selling. The rest is spent on data entry, tracking down contact info, meetings and more. Over half expect to miss their quota.

If you’re considering a Salesforce enrichment solution, you already know the best tool will give you the sales data you need to put your sales expertise to efficient use. It’s as simple as that.

But how can you be sure the Salesforce enrichment tool you’re considering is the best fit?

When it comes time for demos, asking tough questions is a good place to start. With targeted questions, you get a close look at the Salesforce enablement tool’s integrations, implementation, use cases and ROI.

Use these questions not only to understand how the tool works, but also to get a sense for how it will work for you.

Let’s dive in with the 12 most critical questions.

Integration Questions

Start with the basics. Before bringing in brand new tools, you need to know if the Salesforce enrichment tool will fit in with your current operations.

For ongoing sales development, integration means more than an API or plug-and-play tool to go along with your current platforms. It also means ensuring your processes will be supplemented, not interrupted.

Asking these questions will lay the groundwork for a more successful implementation.

Where does this tool fit in with Salesforce?

Some sales intelligence tools operate as a web app or plugin, others as an API and others as an enterprise dashboard. Salesforce enrichment tools should be featured on the AppExchange, which features enterprise SaaS that integrates directly with Salesforce.
But just how well does the tool integrate with Salesforce? To assess readiness of a Salesforce enrichment tool on the exchange, consider asking:

• Is it Lightning Experience ready?
• How many custom objects, applications, and tabs does it offer?
• Is there an API?
• Which editions (Professional, Enterprise, Developer) is it compatible with?
• Is the tool limited to prospecting, or will it auto-enrich my Salesforce database?

How is this tool going to integrate with our marketing automation?

Sales intelligence tools shouldn’t only integrate with Salesforce, since both your sales and marketing operations extend beyond the platform.

More specifically, look at how the Salesforce enrichment tool will connect with your existing marketing automation stack.

The effectiveness of your marketing tools — from Constant Contact to Marketo and Pardot — are dependent on the up-to-date info there.

So how much of a pain will it be to update your contacts in these tools with data from the enrichment tool? The most efficient option is to find a tool that can connect to any platform either through an API or through an integration platform like Zapier.

Where do you get your data from?

Before moving forward, you should understand where and how the vendor sources their data. Ask questions like:

• How many companies do they have access to?
• Which regions are covered?
• What does gathering data look like? Is it through mining or partnerships?
• What is the implicit accuracy of this data?

Implementation Questions

Once you have this foundational understanding, you can dig a little deeper.

Start imagining what implementing the Salesforce enrichment tool would look like after you’re onboarded. It’s here you can assess the vendor’s strength beyond the data. The guiding question here can be: where is there a potential for bottleneck?

What does the implementation process look like?

Let the vendor walk you through the onboarding and ‘getting started’ phases. Consider the words they use — do they focus on you or the product?

In many cases, the tool that will work the best will also be the most straightforward to implement. Even if the tool is built for out of the box use, how well can they explain implementation in each use case?

How do you support customers in setup and training?

This is your first look into the culture and customer service of the company. Again, even for out of the box solutions the rep should be ready with a clear answer.

Ask for specifics, like:

• What does your customer support team look like?
• If I have questions day 1, how can I get answers?
• Do you offer team training?

How much time until I can start using the tool to enrich sales efforts?

This can be short and sweet. With an easy setup, it could be minutes. With a custom enterprise solution, it could be weeks. Either way, you want a clear idea of your timeline as you begin communicating internally.

Operations Questions

This is your chance to get into the weeds. The vendor should be able to go beyond features and value propositions, translating them into how they will benefit your operations.

Use these questions as an opportunity to talk about how you want to work with the tool, not just how the tool works. Focus on what’s important to you and your sales team.

Can we control which contacts to enrich?

Since you’ll typically be spending money on each record, you will most likely want to focus only on sales-qualified leads.

Of these SQLs, are you able to define which leads to enrich? Will you have to do this manually or can you set up rules to define enrichment? Can you exclude SQLs that don’t fit your ideal customer profile anymore?

Ideally, you can access the tool and only enrich leads that are company from this specific country, this specific job title, manage this number of employees, and so on. Better yet, you can base this criteria on Salesforce fields.

How do you suggest we put this tool to best use within our context?

While this is a broad question, the vendor should be able to point you to specifics, not paint in generalities.

This is where you can get into specific use cases. If they don’t offer it, ask about lead scoring, more successful cold calls, improved existing relationships, and so on.

Liked what you’ve read?

Check out the full blog post on Lusha’s blog.

Originally published at https://www.lusha.com on October 17, 2019.