Customer Relations Management (CRM), or Point of Contact (POC) management in a broader sense, has always been highly significant to me in the past decade of my career.
When I worked for the Public Affairs Section at a US Consulate, developing and maintaining great relations with our key POCs from government agencies at different levels of various functions, cultural, educational & research institutions, NGOs, business organizations, etc, was forever an integral and essential gateway to the success of various forms of public engagement programming.
I was once a department head and programs manager for a language training school, and we had been trying to provide the best learning experience to all our customers (individual learners and corporate clients) so that they would be willing to enroll in higher-level courses or recommend us to their peers. Word-of-Mouth (WOM) marketing has been quite powerful for a young and small start-up company with a limited budget.
When I worked as a university lecturer of translation & interpreting and established myself as a Mandarin-English consultant conference interpreter on a part-time basis, I had to promote my professional service effectively and efficiently to new potential clients while keeping a good tie with existing ones for more opportunities all by myself, because I was in a one-man team as a freelance interpreter.
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So, with all those real needs in mind, I’ve just finished the Salesforce Sales Operations Professional Certificate courses on Coursera. The first thing I can’t wait to share with you is that I wish I could learn about and study this course earlier. Not just in navigating and utilizing all those Salesforce functions but also in the systematic logic and flow of interacting with and managing the data of the greatest asset of any business – people as points of contact, through a cloud-based and teamwork-enhanced SaaS system. This course also equips me with an overview of the whole sales process framework, which is helpful to me who has been updating and refreshing my business knowledge base recently. It is also extremely useful to those who haven’t yet got a formal education background in business.
Salesforce is a legendary American cloud-based software company headquartered in San Francisco, California. If you’ve never heard about it before, I believe, it is, more possible than not, your problem.:) The company provides customer relationship management (CRM) service and also provides enterprise applications focused on customer service, marketing automation, analytics, and application development. It is the biggest and most-trusted cloud-based CRM solution provider.
This certificate program includes four courses:
Sales and CRM Overview – This course is the first of a series that aims to teach you the foundational skills in Salesforce that will prepare you for various entry-level sales roles, including the sales operations specialist position.
Opportunity Management in Salesforce – This second course will give you a foundational understanding of how to help sales and marketing teams optimize the lead management process. Specifically, this course shows how a sales operations specialist would support a marketing associate and sales development representative to make the lead management more effective and efficient. You will learn the basics of data management, how to upload lead data into Salesforce, and how to effectively train team members to manage leads using the different tools available in the Salesforce Sales Cloud. These are crucial skills for anyone interested in entry-level sales jobs.
Lead Management in Salesforce – This third course will give you a foundational understanding of how to help sales teams optimize the opportunity management process. Specifically, this course shows how a sales operations specialist would support account executives and empower them to progress opportunities through a sales pipeline and close sales deals as effectively and efficiently as possible. This will require the use of new tools in Salesforce, including products, price books, quotes, contracts, and orders. Learning how to leverage these aspects of Salesforce is a crucial skill for anyone interested in entry-level sales jobs.
Reports, Dashboards, and Customer Success in Salesforce – This fourth course goes into more depth on how a sales operations specialist would use Salesforce Service Cloud to support a variety of different customer service needs. You will learn the basics of effective customer support, and you will leverage a variety of new tools available in the Salesforce Service Cloud to effectively manage customer relationships. This course also goes into more depth on how a sales ops specialist would use Salesforce Reports and Dashboards to support a variety of needs, from a sales team manager to track, improve, and to forecast the overall performance of a sales team. You will learn how to use filters to produce custom reports in Salesforce and then discover how to visualize that data effectively through the use of charts and dashboards.
The design of the courses is very student-centered, with lots of real-world examples, guided hands-on practices, and excellent instructors who explain everything clearly and thoroughly. So, even if you don’t aspire to be a sales operation specialist, as long as you need to connect with many human beings efficiently, I highly recommend the courses as a beginner-level education in managing relationships.
The course is really informative and I am still processing what I’ve learned so far. If you are curious or want to know any other aspects of my learning experience, please just let me know. You can also go to the official page of the courses on Coursera for more detailed information: Salesforce Sales Operations Professional Certificate