RevOnyx Consulting, a leading business consulting firm, has earned a stellar reputation for its specialized expertise in Salesforce consulting. As a Salesforce partner, RevOnyx offers comprehensive solutions to help businesses harness the full potential of Salesforce’s powerful customer relationship management (CRM) platform. Their team of certified Salesforce consultants possesses an in-depth understanding of the platform’s capabilities, enabling them to design and implement tailored solutions that align with their clients’ unique requirements.
Jeremy Steinbring, the founder of RevOnyx Consulting, is a seasoned entrepreneur and business leader with a passion for driving organizational excellence and fostering growth. With a wealth of experience in the corporate world, Jeremy’s journey began with a deep-rooted belief in the power of transformative consulting services. Drawing on his expertise in business strategy, technology, and organizational development, he laid the foundation for RevOnyx Consulting with a clear vision to empower businesses and enable them to reach their full potential.
And today, he will share the best practices for Salesforce consultants that he swears by when overhauling his clients’ operations. So let’s dive into our chat with Jeremy!
1. How Would You Describe RevOnyx’s Role?
My focus at RevOnyx is to help startups really navigate their systems from a holistic tech stack perspective. We place an emphasis on revenue operations, strategy, how the tools connect, and becoming a deployable systems Swiss Army knife.
2. What Are the Hardest Salesforce Challenges Your Clients and You Are Currently Dealing with?
A lot of startups don’t have a full team of RevOps folks. They bring RevOnyx in to play QB for everything going on and get them to the point where they can make their first hire in Revenue Operations. So it’s that interesting niche, coming in at the point where they have 30-50 employees and helping them scale to 200 when they have the ability to have their own in-house team.
Speaking of challenges, right now everyone is asking: “How do we save money?” For the last two to three years, everyone kind of had a blank check for systems and tools. Departments could buy Match My Email, Gong, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, etc. without blinking.
But now that the market is contracted, folks are realizing that more and more tools overlap. I’ve been helping my clients consolidate those tools from a technical perspective, and also finding ways to save them money. Often, this is challenging because each product has a lot of offerings to increase the stickiness.
When you’re a Salesforce consultant, it’s crucial to help customers navigate the landscape and decide which tools are the most reliable, and then implement them properly to create the best solution.
Salesforce-Specific Frustrations and How to Overcome Them
Einstein Activity Capture is probably my least favorite Salesforce feature. You have to log into Einstein Analytics in order to even report. The biggest concern that people have, as it relates to EAC, is as a sales leader, I have my SDR team, and I want to see how many phone calls and emails they’re sending. If you can’t do that for a system as robust as Salesforce, it becomes a major gap. And obviously, it’s created space for products like Match My Email to step in.
Another issue that starts plaguing clients before contacting me is the routing of inbound leads and opportunities. There’s not really a good way without a custom solution. Again, Salesforce is the place where all of the information lives, but because of all the channels and marketing automation tools, there are just so many different funnels. And so that’s something that typically comes up with most of my clients and requires a custom-built solution or tool.
3. What Are the Top Mistakes You See Salesforce Power Users Make?
I feel like most folks struggle with being attracted to all the shiny bells and whistles. There’s a different tool for everybody, but those flashy tools often don’t work as reliably as you’d expect them to. I’ve helped several companies move off of those tools because either the product just doesn’t work right, it doesn’t sync activity data correctly to Salesforce, or it’s difficult to manage.
One of the biggest reasons I recommend Match My Email is because it gives users the ability to troubleshoot themselves in a simple way. With other tools, you have to rely on an admin or the system’s development team, which creates a lot of friction when all you want to do is send an email. And in the current ecosystem, where everyone’s doing email automation and connecting to outreach tools, the volume becomes hard to maintain and route to the right lead contact or opportunity account – without a reliable tool.
With Match My Email, you can actually verify the correctness of your setup without talking to me as an admin or their support team.
4. What Does Your Typical Optimization Game Plan Look Like?
The first step to any solution is knowing that you have a problem and understanding what it is. Typically, when I start with a client, they usually already have a project or a key initiative they need help with. Maybe it’s a new process, a new tool, and we’ll start preparing the work for that.
Then, at the same time, all of my clients recognize that we need to do an audit of the tech stack and understand the business. Most consultants tend to dive right into the technology without understanding the business and the process. It catches clients in this loop where you have a technical resource, and they’re asking you: “What do you want? What do you want built?” Most of the time, the clients don’t know. They might have an idea, but it’s your responsibility to guide them down the right path.
The only way that you can do that is by asking really great discovery questions, and understanding their business and their goals so that you can align the technology to support them.
Then, I do a systems map architecture. I’ll pull up Lucid Chart and create blocks for every system they have, and add connectors so they can visualize their tech stack. Most startups have 20-40 interconnected tool. But if you were to ask anybody: “Hey, how does our HubSpot connect to Salesforce? Or how does Match My Email integrate with Salesforce?” – no one knows. There are a lot of assumptions and guesswork at play.
Getting everything down on paper is a great way to help them visualize the complexity and start having them think about the system as a whole. How can we simplify? How can we consolidate? How can we make this easier for users?
This naturally creates a roadmap for post-project initiatives. What are we doing next, how are we going to continue to improve? Because we can’t just build for now, we have to build for the future. This ends up saving my time and my clients’ money because we don’t have to constantly reinvent the wheel whenever pricing and packaging changes. Instead, we build the right foundations and iterate.
5. What’s Your Baseline Tech Stack?
At the very least, clients will need contract and document management. Any tool that integrates seamlessly with their CRM to send contracts because no one wants to send paper PDFs, sign them, and send them back.
Activity capture is another really big one, especially with Salesforce. This is a pain point. Their activity module and activity capture don’t work very well. It does not give you the reporting capabilities that you need. That’s where Match My Email has really been able to help me position it as a third-party tool that doesn’t break the bank, but gets the job done in a reliable way.
Plus, sales and marketing-related tools like Zoominfo for prospecting, Clearbit for data enrichment, and others. That’s what you need for the essentials.
6. How Does Match My Email Help Your Clients? Why Do You Choose to Recommend It?
I’m a huge fan of Match My Email because of the simplicity of it. A good tool doesn’t need all the extra bells and whistles – it just needs to work the way you expect it to, so it feels like a natural part of your system. In terms of activity capture, Match My Email checks all the boxes.
Similarly, Einstein Activity Capture is just a placeholder. When you’re a sales leader, you want to understand how your people complete their tasks and how that reflects on your revenue. And unlike EAC, Match My Email allows you to understand your team’s performance and create relevant reports seamlessly.
If you’re not sure about something, you can troubleshoot Match My Email on your own as a user. You don’t have to wait for an admin or the support team to help you. You can easily get on with your day. So from a user adoption standpoint, Match My Email is great because it all works in the background.
This means one less tool your team has to learn, while getting the visibility you need to make educated decisions.
7. What Are Your Salesforce Golden Rules?
Hit the ground running faster with simpler tools. How much time would a new SDR have to get trained on systems if the tech stack were a lot simpler, a lot more user-friendly, and maybe had 15% less functionality? They’d be able to get up and running so much faster, be able to start selling and actually focus on doing their job.
Secondly, practice good data hygiene and explain to your team why updating Salesforce matters by tieing it to KPIs and explaining how it affects your decisions.
Finally, set yourself up with a good Salesforce setup from the get-go. 50% of the time, we see orgs that have gone way too far. It becomes less painful to start from scratch than transition. This is often the case for startups where they’re moving so fast that they overlook the proper CRM setup, and you don’t see the damage until it’s too late.
8. How Do You Ensure User Adoption and Navigate the Objections from End Users?
With high turnover rates in the startup and sales world, having to train new employees on a lot of tools at once is a big productivity problem. Even as a seasoned vet like myself, there’s just too much information if you use 30+ tools.
From a user adoption standpoint, tools like Match My Email are great because they’re simple and easy to use. As long as your admin knows to activate the user, the email just works. And because it logs to the proper record in Salesforce just about every single time, there’s really not a lot that they need to do.
Another obstacle is being biased towards tools and being stuck in the old ways. People learn to love certain systems or processes, and they get stuck. I try to get rid of my bias and look at every problem as a brand new one that requires a brand new solution because every company is different.
Accommodate Different Learning Styles
Technical documentation helps – a lot. However, be mindful of different learning styles. Some users are visual and need a video. Others need to physically try the it out and be walked through it live.
Often, we build a Notion doc, but we also add Loom videos. For most of the functionality I build in Salesforce, I find that Loom videos (even if they’re four to five minutes long) are easier for people to understand. I can explain the context while walking them through it.
The way that we express and the way that we teach this information is correlated to how well they adopt the new process.
9. What Are the Top Tasks Teams Should Automate to Make the Most of Salesforce?
First, they’ll want to automate activity capture; logging emails to the right accounts, keeping track of calls made, emails sent, and so on. This helps with reporting and getting data clarity.
Secondly, contract signing and document management is a must. And finally, marketing and sales automation can help you run more productive campaigns. As companies grow, they’ll naturally look into tools for customer experience and others, but these are the basic tasks that need to be automated away to free up reps’ time.
10. Where Do You See Salesforce Going in the Future?
AI is obviously coming, but I’m a major proponent in putting humanity back into technology. We all use these tools to make our lives easier and I have no doubt that it’s part of the future. But I think we’re using a lot of silver bullets to try to solve some of our fundamental problems. Solving them starts with the people, the process, and understanding what it takes to move a prospect through the customer journey.
A lot of times, especially in the startup world, people are just wearing so many hats that they’re like: “Listen, I just need a break, I need a quick win.” It’s tempting to go after the silver bullet – the technology.
The problem is, it’s not going to actually fix the root cause. Part of what I do is explain that it’s actually easier to have a more simplified tech stack, but you need a really solid process and one that can change very quickly.
Obviously, the future is bright. Technology is growing. But that being said, we’re still people. People make people decisions, and technology can’t help you solve for that. It’s important to recognize that we are just people selling to people. How you make somebody feel on the phone is a lot more important than how quickly AI was able to fake-personalize an email being sent to a prospect.
So, do the work and plan it right. That way, you’ll have systems – technological or people processes – you can rely on today and in the future.
Conclusion
We are thankful that Jeremy was able to give his insight and knowledge concerning Salesforce. He remains focused on adapting to the evolving needs of clients and embracing cutting-edge technologies to stay ahead in the consulting landscape. With Jeremy Steinbring at the helm, RevOnyx Consulting continues to inspire growth and transformation for businesses worldwide.
