Pandemics and technology breakthroughs may fundamentally change the way we do business except for one thing – customers will always remain at the heart of a business organization.
A well-implemented CRM platform has the ability to provide a superior customer experience. Salesforce is arguably the world’s best-valued CRM, boasting of an incredible customer base and a widely used set of cloud-based applications for all industries and services. It constantly keeps innovating and updating its CRM platform, helping businesses to power their marketing and sales processes like never before. Recently, it even announced AI-based CRM analytics for sales, service and marketing teams in every industry. By doing this, Salesforce is driving AI-powered analytics directly into the workflow and helping businesses personalize customer experiences.
Did you know that according to this report, around 43% of companies that use CRM are failing to use even half of their CRM platforms to the fullest? Salesforce, when implemented strategically and with the right mindset, can help companies boost revenues and manage complex business challenges. The possibilities are endless with Salesforce CRM but everything from team efficiency to personalized customer interactions is compromised with an incomplete or faulty implementation.
So what exactly does Salesforce implementation entail? For one thing, it involves centralizing all key business activities and communications. It also involves unifying the operational, analytical and collaborative aspects of the CRM.
When implemented well, Salesforce CRM can decrease costs for your company and elevate your customer experience. Here are NINE key best practices to get your Salesforce implementation up and running.
1. Define your goals and identify what you need from Salesforce CRM
Before setting up and customizing your Salesforce CRM, define your goals and identify what value you want to extract from Salesforce. Is customer service a top priority or is automating the marketing process an urgent business need? What about the need to make your sales team more efficient by improving lead scoring? Do you want to reduce case time resolution or increase your lead flow? For example, some businesses prioritize data management and this includes taking stock of business data and organizing it better, apart from identifying which data is valuable for tracking purposes. In fact, Salesforce cautions that most companies underestimate the value of cleaning up, mapping and loading data. Defining goals and creating a roadmap is a good way to achieve implementation success.
When charting out your goals, ask each department to make a list of tasks, processes and workflows. This will help you to identify the gaps in your sales and service teams. Matching CRM benefits and functionalities with actual pain points in your business operations can give you a clear roadmap of how you can implement Salesforce CRM to benefit your business. This will also help you create a high-functioning model that will help you derive maximum value out of the Salesforce implementation.
2. Align all stakeholders
Almost all the best practices listed here are of no use if your stakeholders are not aligned with your CRM implementation strategy. This goes beyond management buy-in and includes sales as well as IT departments that invariably work with similar data and need a CRM structure for maximum success.
You will find that by lining up your patrons, they will understand the objectives, business goals, priorities and the desired outcomes pertaining to a CRM.
A program roadmap will serve as a timeline for CRM capability rollouts to each business group. This should be communicated to all stakeholders to eliminate surprise and to support adoption.
Do all of them have the same goals when it comes to Salesforce’s CRM platform?
These goals could be anything from increased revenue to innovation. Stakeholders may initially resist change, especially if they have worked for years with the current systems or if they have had experiences with technology failures in the past. User adoption strategies start early in the Salesforce CRM implementation process and it involves identifying stakeholders as early adopters. After implementation, it is well worth continuing to grow adoption among stakeholders and the teams.
3. Bring in the CRM experts
You need a CRM platform to have an edge over your competitors and stay relevant in a customer-driven market. When opting for a CRM platform, it is important to put the investment in this technology to full use and to focus on producing stellar results While Salesforce is relatively easy to implement and use, things can go awry if your company does not understand the software. If you do not know how to take full advantage of Salesforce CRM, it is a good idea to have experts in your corner, especially if you have not used Salesforce before.
A qualified and experienced Salesforce expert can help you customize your CRM and align its functionalities with your business goals. An expert can also help you avoid costly mistakes by setting your company up for a successful adoption of the CRM platform and making sure that all employees use it effectively. Successful CRM implementation involves training employees, organizing scheduled check-ins, and getting key team members to be evangelists and advocates for the CRM adoption.
An expert, for instance, will understand the complex needs of your business and advise on the editions and features you need to facilitate your growth.
4. Have an implementation plan and create a project timeline
Do a thorough analysis of your company’s key team members, including departments and managers who will be heavily involved in the Salesforce CRM implementation. Rally the potential Salesforce users. Understand their pain points so that you can work on improving current business processes and making sure that everybody is prepared for change.
A solid implementation approach is the backbone of your company’s successful CRM implementation strategy. You should establish a project timeline for a very simple yet significant reason. Your company may already be deploying many huge, important projects all at once and Salesforce implementation could potentially overlap these projects. Most companies either choose between the Waterfall or Agile approaches when it comes to CRM implementation. The Waterfall approach is a linear approach. The agile approach is a more cyclical one. The larger project is broken into smaller iterations or sprints. All modifications and developments are done in parallel and in real-time. Depending on which approach you choose, you must prioritize one that aligns with your company’s business goals and immediate needs. For example, if you want to complete a full project irrespective of time and budget, then the waterfall approach is the right one for you. However, if you want to grow with the project as it progresses and evolves, the agile approach works better. Asking tough questions and bringing sound reality checks to the implementation plan is your best chance at success.
Right from the time of Salesforce implementation, your team of experts should work out timelines in terms of launch and project completion. The team should also work out what to do if changes to the project or new requirements come up, requiring alterations to the timelines or even the system design.
If you also want to cover your business needs, you should choose between Salesforce configuration and customization. Configuration refers to changes within the CRM system by using in-built features and tools. Customization refers to adding new features or functionalities to the default setup. This extends to customizing code requirements and adding capabilities by extending the APEX code, without forgetting to factor in the end-user feedback.
5. Create a budget
Salesforce implementation strategy always impacts the final investment cost, which is why opting for less cumbersome methods keeps your cost within budget. Even if you plan the right CRM implementation budget, there are always curveballs along the way. Just when you have everything planned, you may be blindsided by the need to pay for extra data storage. Training, licensing costs, software ownership and leasing costs are some of the expenses you may incur.
Make a list of requirements when planning your Salesforce CRM implementation, and rank these requirements by priorities. Fit these requirements into your implementation plan and invest wisely. For example, investing in training and support never goes wasted. Your implementation is as good as the people who drive it. Here are some of the common costs incurred during Salesforce CRM implementation:
Salesforce licenses and consulting
Spending on an implementation partner, if you plan to go for one
Data migration
Customization and integration
User training and Salesforce adoption
IT maintenance
End-user support
While it is advisable to have hard limits to your budget and to be committed to your course of action, many companies fall prey to the sunk cost fallacy. This is when you end up continuing to spend money on a product or strategy as the money is already spent, even if there are more benefits to exiting that strategy. If you are hiring an implementation partner, it is a good idea to bring him or her into the budget planning right from the start so that there is course correction when needed.
When budgeting for your Salesforce CRM implementation, look beyond the bells and whistles, and consider only the must-have features and tools. When planning implementation, the price of Salesforce CRM varies depending on the number of users you have and other factors like data migration, integration and personalization.
6. Real-time integrations – integrate other platforms into it
Salesforce allows you to integrate other apps and software into its platform so that you can have best of both the worlds for your users and elevate customer experience.
The integration process also helps optimize your software and grow your sales. You can integrate the apps you were using before, including their data, right into the Salesforce CRM. There are many benefits to this, the primary one being that you do not need to build your data all over again. Integrations consist of real-time integration (data is gathered, combined and immediately processed), near real-time (it happens periodically) and batch integrations (storing all the data in a single batch and moving it only once a specific amount is processed.)
The benefits of seeing data in real-time are many but it is not easy to manage data on a large number of integrated systems. Right from the start, it helps when implementation partners or key implementation team members verify and oversee all specific integration requirements, including their various touch points, and ease into the process gradually. By preparing well in advance, you can make sure that employees complete their training and adapt to the new system. Easing into the CRM implementation process also allows you to understand the platform and break into it. The idea is to give it time to do its work and generate measurable results.
7. Provide training and create a digital adoption strategy
Nucleus Research pegs the investment returns for CRM to range from $5.60 to $8.71 for every dollar spent but this benefit goes down the drain when employees are not trained to use the platform properly or worse, if they fail to use it.
Training covers a lot more than just getting your employees to start using the platform. It also means creating programs for your end-users and constantly communicating between team members about how your implementation goals are progressing. Identify key success factors for the Salesforce CRM implementation and highlight them in your training programs. Training sessions are also about user adoption so that they optimize the software to the fullest. Digital Adoption Platforms are good ways to train employees. DAPs are software layers on software applications and they guide employees through the use of the software.
Driving adoption is part of a larger change management strategy, which is vital to ensure that end-users accept the shift to the CRM and the implementation is successful. Digital adoption and training also help users stay engaged during their training. These strategies make sure that employees continue to use Salesforce consistently and adapt to it quickly.
Training includes testing employees on what they have learned and facilitating collaboration across the platform. Training teams across departments can ensure that all teams can coordinate efforts to derive the best out of the CRM platform.
8. Set yourself up for data success
CRMs are meant to capture, organize and use huge amounts of data and bring them into one central location. When you have the complete data in your system before implementation, you have a much better chance of driving user adoption and boosting efficiencies. Reviewing and cleaning this data early on in the process of CRM implementation can help you with tracking and for future data collections.
Most companies do not invest time and effort in cleaning and leveraging all that business data. They do not mine the data and create actionable strategies. It is crucial to get the right data into Salesforce and analyze it. Plan a data integration strategy at the beginning, which also includes existing data sources, data needs and unique record keys. Without a proper data plan, you will never get value out of your investment.
Reviewing, cleaning and ensuring consistent data is vital, no matter where you are in your Salesforce journey. You need to identify data that is valuable for tracking. Most companies underestimate how much work this takes and how crucial it is.
9. In-house, third-party party implementation or hybrid?
When implementing your Salesforce CRM strategy, you can consider either handling the implementation in-house, hiring a Salesforce CRM implementation expert, or going in for a combination approach.
It is significant that 90% of companies that use Salesforce hire implementation partners. Smaller organizations can opt to handle it in-house, which means that the costs are lower. Handling it in-house also ensures that there is greater adoption at a community level. The downside to doing it in-house is that it takes much longer to see results than it would with an expert who has handled different companies and CRM implementation scenarios. Experts are also able to gauge the budget and come up with better solutions.
With official implementation partners, you will spend time and effort building quality systems with the right tools. Customization is easier with third-party implementation partners. End-to-end customization support can be a huge investment. You will also need to look for the right partner for your industry and your company. Implementation partners take less time with the implementation process while providing key business insights. They can also help with change and drive adoption of the Salesforce at an organizational level.
Some companies use the hybrid implementation model. This is when you rely on an implementation partner for planning, building and data migration but go in-house with the training. The flip side of this approach is that being new to Salesforce CRM, you will not be sure as to which parts of the implementation process to outsource and which to do in-house.
When you invest in a Salesforce CRM software, you are taking a monetary investment that drives intelligent engagement and tremendous sales growth. The key to getting it right is to drive a higher adoption rate and to ensure reliable performance.
For a smooth and successful Salesforce CRM implementation, it is important to understand your workflows and processes right from the start. When done right, Salesforce CRM implementation can boost sales efficiency, facilitate collaboration and align marketing and sales teams. AND create a great experience for your customers.
