The 8 key considerations to successfully implement Salesforce
After implementing Salesforce for many businesses over the last six years, including our own, our team have identified eight key considerations to ensure a successful implementation that most businesses do not know.
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What is Salesforce?
Salesforce is a comprehensive cloud-based CRM (Customer Relationship Management) platform that can revolutionise many aspects of your business, from how your sales team manages their database, improving your marketing with data and streamlining customer service.
Many businesses do not realise that Salesforce needs to be tailored to your organisation’s needs to get optimal use out of the platform. Whilst Salesforce is easily customised as it is built around ‘clicks not code’, it can quickly become unmanageable without an experienced guide to design your solution and embed it within your business.
That is where an official Salesforce implementation partner (like Fullcrm) can help you embed Salesforce within your business to get the best results.
Here are a few tips from our guide
> Prioritise and plan carefully:
For a successful implementation and to ensure user adoption – it is essential to consider and prioritise the areas that will have the most significant impact on your business.
To do this look at the areas that you know will provide the greatest value to the largest group of users. We recommend holding deep-dive sessions to determine the problems you are trying to resolve.
Where to begin?
- Start by listing out all of your ‘problem statements’ such as: ‘We cannot effectively track our leads’
- Then consider what the Return On Investment (ROI) could be if Salesforce resolved each problem.
Comparing the ROI’s of each statement will help you determine and set the priorities.
We often find the solution to the most pressing and obvious challenge becomes the foundation of the CRM.
> Know your clients’ needs at the beginning:
Salesforce’s capabilities can revolutionise your business if tailored correctly. Knowing your clients’ needs and factoring them into the implementation is often something that commonly is overlooked and significantly impacts success.
Why should you consider your clients?
Taking your clients into consideration during the implementation process helps you align the solution to outcomes that your business is required to fulfil, rather than basing it on assumptions or just your user’s requirements.
Take into consideration your business operations:
- What are the essentials your clients will demand from you that need to be built into your CRM?
- What is not required?
By identifying your clients’ essential requirements, you can allocate more resource and a higher priority to the right customisations required for the implementation.
> Data is critical to the implementation – yet often overlooked:
Data is critical to the success of any CRM system. Data and its interpretation drive insights that you can use to improve your business’ strategy.
Clean and consistent data is an asset to any business and provides useful information about past, current and expected performance.
Unfortunately, we often find businesses do not consider their data until the end of the implementation process. We believe this to be a big mistake as a solution built on flawed and insufficient data will completely undermine the system’s functionality.
Your data must be considered at the beginning of your implementation journey as it underpins everything about the system and processes that will be created. Thinking about your data at the start of the process ensures your solution focusses on capturing all the information your business needs to make well-informed strategic decisions.
How to best approach data:
- Start looking at migrating data early on in the design phase
- Invest in a data cleansing exercise
- Expect to do a couple of rounds of data cleansing
- Load up data before testing begins so that the data migration and the system are both tested at the same time
- In some cases, the less costly exercise is to manually enter the data rather than go through a data migration process
These are just a few consideration points from our full guide on how to implement Salesforce successfully.
If you want to find out the other vital considerations to ensure your Salesforce implementation is a success, make sure to fill in your details below to receive our complete guide.
