A good salesforce should be scalable, flexible, and intuitive. With a salesforce in place, you can oversee sales, finances, administration, marketing, and more. You can also connect different departments, meet and retain customers, boost revenue and identify growth opportunities.
Since Salesforce can help grow your business, you must prepare well before implementing it. Doing so will empower your team to adapt to necessary changes as they work towards achieving a common goal. This blog reveals the key consideration before implementing Salesforce.
Hire a skilled salesforce administrator
A salesforce administrator plays an important role in salesforce implementation. The person will oversee any aspect of the implementation. They will perform future team improvement, so they need to understand the logistics of salesforce upgrades. From the beginning, the administrator must understand the access levels the users will possess.
The idea is to distinguish between what the users should see from what they should not see. The administrator will oversee the Salesforce security to safeguard the customers’ data and the business environment. You can hire several accounts and sales managers to operate in a standard business environment.
Confirm the strength of your data
The cleanliness of your data is an important consideration if you want to upgrade your current salesforce application. Your financials, databases, spreadsheets, and record entries should not have superfluous or irrelevant data. Before upgrading, ask your project leaders to define new data models and how the old information can fit into the new system.
Any redundant information in a system could hamper the efficiency of your Salesforce. Failure to detect any hiccups in the system could make the new system fail to resolve the challenges of the old system. If you are starting a new business, the principles will remain the same. Using data that is not clean can be costly in the long run as you may need to reimplement other systems in the future.
Involve all the stakeholders
Ensure the involvement of everyone relevant to the project-the top management, and end users. All stakeholders or their representatives should participate in different stages of salesforce implementation and ongoing management. The key stakeholders involved include:
- Decision maker. The role of a decision-maker is to execute decisions on different aspects of the project, such as timeline and cost.
- Team leads. Team leads are the people appointed as team representatives and end-user advocates.
- End-users. These people regularly use the system; they could be systems operators or internal employees.
- Project manager. A project manager keeps the project on track while ensuring proper coordination of the team members. They ensure that the team works towards the achievement of common goals.
Define goals and set a budget
Involve the key stakeholders when setting goals. The goals should relate to how you want Salesforce to bring changes to your business. The goals must be specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time-bound) SMART). When setting goals, consider the challenges your end-users and teams face. Consider the tasks that consume the most time and how you can simplify your workflows.
Ask yourself what you will achieve by implementing Salesforce. After setting the goals, create a workable budget by considering the costs of consulting, licensing, and software ownership. You should also consider the number of users, training, customization, and data migration costs.
Facilitate user training
Salesforce implementation requires consultations and continued maintenance. Buyers are interested in saving money and often forget the reason for project implementation. No return on investment or functionality can justify poor employee training.
Training applies to users at all levels in the hierarchy. If users don’t understand how to use the system profitably, your business may suffer huge losses. Failure to effectively train users may cause those users to reject the system causing your business to pay for the new utility. It pays to spend resources and time on best practice training and user edification.
Analyze your needs
Analyze what you need to attain optimal salesforce optimization that will work for your enterprise. Involve the key stakeholders to select functions that will support your vision and achieve your business goals.
Create a list of all the requirements and the desired outcomes. Bring your teams together to evaluate the list. You can classify the requirements into low-priority, medium, and high-priority. Low-priority items are those that are convenient to include but are not necessary. High-priority items are the items you need to complete the salesforce implementation process.
Needs analysis can be challenging for many enterprises, so you can hire a Certified Salesforce Consultant to help. Depending on your requirements, a consultant can identify the high-priority items for successful salesforce implementation.
Simplify the salesforce implementation process
To avoid getting overwhelmed, keep the implementation process as simple as possible. Create a workflow that will make the lives of your employees easier. It will make Salesforce support your efforts rather than complicating them.
For a first-time implementation, begin with the basic functionality and progress from there. Depending on your needs, you can customize the system or add more features after handling the basics. Handling complex issues too early could overwhelm your team or cause the users to reject the system.
Here are some tips to simplify the implementation process:
- Track the features you would like to add in the future. Customizing the system later will lead to better utilization of that system.
- Mind the end-users; they may need to fill out different fields to use and adopt Salesforce.
- Maintain a list of follow-on items and enhancements to avoid going outside the project’s scope.
- Push the users to adopt the new system before adding fluff.
Conclusion:
Implementing a salesforce requires hiring the right talent, confirming the data strength, and involving all the stakeholders. It also requires defining goals, training users, analyzing business needs, and simplifying the implementation process. Considering the above issues will create a flexible and intuitive salesforce to propel your business to the next level.
