Salesforce is one of the best platforms in the market that can help unite all your teams and drive substantial growth.
However, the Salesforce platform is usually a highly complicated application with many features, making its implementation quite a challenge. The implementation process can become even more cumbersome for bigger companies as customization will involve many different processes.
But worry not, as this article explores the key points you need to consider before starting your salesforce implementation journey.
Before you start the Salesforce implementation process, you first need to understand why you are using the platform in the first place. In other words, you must define what you want to achieve through the Salesforce platform, what problems you want to solve, and how the tool will come in handy.
More importantly, be sure to set realistic, achievable, measurable, and specific goals. For best results, you may want to divide your project into smaller goals to create an implementation roadmap so that you can track your results with ease.
Salesforce implementation is complex, and your team may not have enough skills to customize it. That’s why you need to outsource Salesforce implementation services to help you launch the project seamlessly.
Having the right Salesforce implementation partner means they will review your business needs to tailor specific solutions to improve your workflow.
It is essential to determine who will be the end-user of your salesforce platform. This can be a marketing, sales, commerce, service, IT, or finance team.
While you may feel the need to implement the Salesforce platform for more than one department, the needs of each department may vary. The good news is that determining who Salesforce is meant for will help you customize the platform according to the needs of its end-user. This avoids having features that a team does not need.
Not everything will go as planned during the implementation process. That’s why you need to understand the risks you may encounter and let your implementation partner educate you on how to eliminate them.
Some of the risks you may want to avoid include:
Establishing a timeline for your implementation is very important. It helps you plan everything in advance. Thus, ensuring you do not spend all your time on the Salesforce implementation project.
Having a timeline also ensures that the implementation does not disrupt the operation of other projects in your business.
Salesforce is a complicated platform. Thus, it can be easy to miss out on a detail that can affect the success of its implementation. Therefore, educating your team before and during the Salesforce implementation process is essential.
You can access valuable training materials online. However, consider hiring a professional to ensure your team gets practical and relevant skills to optimize the Salesforce platform. A good trainer should be keen to identify any weaknesses on your team. They can then develop strategies to help you deal with them.
After a Salesforce implementation is complete and working, you will need to determine if the platform is helping you achieve your intended goals. Simply put, you need to set measurable performance metrics to gauge the effectiveness of your platform.
If, for instance, one of your goals is to lower the customer churn rate by 30%, then your base performance metric should be the churn rate. That way, it will be easier to tell whether or not the platform is helping you achieve what you want.
