The Complete Salesforce Implementation Guide

Moving a business onto a CRM is no easy task. It is a time-consuming, resource-intensive process with a million considerations to make before you can reap its rewards. But when you do, those are significant.

Choosing the right Salesforce managed service provider is vital. A certified partner like OMI will provide support from consultation to integration and post-launch support. Experience is crucial, with industry know-how on things like business process consulting, product development, and different levels of customization and integration.

There’s a lot more you can do to make sure your business is ready and positioned to reap the best benefits of a new CRM program. Let’s take a look at some of these tips and steps, starting with the why.

Why You Should Implement Salesforce

The case for implementing a CRM is an easy one to make. Every business wants to build deeper connections with its customers – to earn their loyalty and build a positive brand image by meeting their needs proactively.

Every company would like to make gains in efficiency wherever possible, cut costs, and leverage assets and capabilities to their full potential. Salesforce makes all this possible.

A successful Salesforce implementation brings enormous benefits to your business. You get a complete view of your customer, with timely, actionable insights delivered in an easy to digest format, giving you the ability to make data-driven decisions when required.

Salesforce enables you to optimize your processes using technology like AI and automation – the power to get more done in exponentially less time and even less effort. It also facilitates smoother, simpler, and more effective collaboration between your teams.

The tricky bit is how to implement Salesforce in such a way that you translate the platform’s powerful features into functional solutions for your specific business – getting the Salesforce implementation strategy right. 

Salesforce Implementation Preparation

The Salesforce implementation process will largely depend on the organization. Organizational culture, operational setups, and needs and expectations will vary widely from business to business. But by preparing well, and adhering to Salesforce implementation best practices, you give your business the best chance to reap the full benefits of the platform.

Let’s take a look at some of the things you definitely want to include in your process to make sure you prepare adequately.

Define Goals, KPIs, and Business Objectives

The success of your Salesforce implementation is largely dependent on how well it aligns with your organizational goals. You therefore need to determine, from the very outset, what these are. What pain points do you want to address? What gains would you like to achieve?

One way to do this is to think backwards. Start with the results that you expect. For example, think about what types of reports you want to see, what insights you mean to leverage, and what processes you want your Salesforce implementation to support. 

Having your goals, KPIs, and business objectives thought through and documented provides clarity during the implementation process. It helps you set priorities, and keeps you on track and focused during the implementation process. It also enables your implementation partner to better understand your needs, and to set and manage expectations.

Define Stakeholders

A common mistake is to approach CRM implementation as if it were simply the installation of a piece of software that solves a set of problems. Experienced Salesforce professionals will tell you however, that the software itself is just the tool that facilitates your CRM program. 

In fact, the software installation part, from a big-picture perspective, is probably the easy bit.  Getting your entire organization fine-tuned to the change and working seamlessly with the new technology? Therein lies the rub.

So how well your implementation works ultimately hinges on people. They are the ones who will drive the processes. As early as possible in the process, work out who the stakeholders are in your Salesforce implementation, and get them involved.

These include both internal and external entities that are sometimes not direct users of the program. Depending on your industry you might, for instance, have regulators who won’t necessarily log into your internal systems. All the same, you will have to set up your CRM so that it facilitates compliance.

Think about partners like suppliers and distributors, whose systems you may want to link with your new setup. And then there are, of course, your internal users – different departments that will have different concerns, but will nonetheless depend on data generated across teams in order for them to function optimally.

Collect and Organize Existing Data

At the end of the day, your Salesforce platform uses data to do its job. To get the best results you have to feed high-quality data into it in much the same way a high performance engine engine requires high quality fuel to run efficiently.

Set aside enough time to review your existing data and ensure that it is ready for your CRM implementation.  This can be a time-consuming, painstaking process,  but it will reap dividends and save you lots of time, resources, and costs in the long run.

Look at your data sources and see where your data lives. Determine which data is still relevant, what data might be duplicated across your different systems – like contacts and email addresses, and where inconsistencies may occur.

If you are running on an old system, you may find that you have some outdated data – things like fields that are no longer relevant or conflict with additional systems that you introduced later on. 

Clean, consistent, and high-quality data will ensure that your automations work properly, cross platform integrations are seamless, and the health of your databases is optimal. 

Decide on Required Reports

Giving some thought to what kind of reports you want to see from your Salesforce system also helps to inform the implementation process and to clarify any limitations before you begin.   Going about this process with your stakeholders in mind, you can more easily determine how the system will service special needs.

Your marketing team might want to track leads better across email, mobile, social media, and the web in a unified process. Sales reps might need to quickly access customer data from different platforms in order to anticipate their needs and effectively cross- or upsell. You might want to better coordinate your order, invoicing, payment, and supply chain systems.

Understand the Costs

Once you have a more rounded appreciation of what you expect Salesforce to do for you, it becomes easier to determine the Salesforce implementation cost. At the basic level,  this will generally be determined by the organization’s size. 

Additional to that will be the cost of the modules that you choose to include. These are usually unforeseen expenses that arise due to custom requirements and additional features that you may need.

Also bear in mind that apart from the initial implementation cost, there are additional expenses of keeping the solution up and running. Again, all of this is dependent on the organization size and the specific setup.

For planning purposes, expect to additionally spend about a third of your licensing cost on implementation, and a further 25 percent on maintenance.

Define Implementation Risks

Having to abandon your CRM project midstream can be costly both in terms of time and financial resources. Another worst case scenario is completing your implementation, and then discovering that you do not get the gains you expected, or even worse, the new system disrupts operations rather than enhancing them, and the changes have to be rolled back.

Thinking about the risks and their implications if things go wrong can help you better prepare to mitigate those factors. What are the consequences of going over budget? What happens if you’re unable to complete the project in time? What if the new platform does not catch on with your staff as quickly as you expect? What if your staff are unwilling or unable to change to the new system and prefer the familiar?

Consider the flip side as well. Will you be able to scale up should the system work too well and spur unprecedented growth? And on the subject of scaling, how easy will it be to add integrations and customisations down the road?

Invest time and resources into investigating these questions. Learn all there is to know about the Salesforce CRM and its capabilities. Set up a strategy for cleaning up your data before the process starts to ensure you stay on schedule. Plan for training, support, and post implementation maintenance.

Closely consult with your internal stakeholders to make sure everyone is on board, and make growth forecasts to make sure you don’t become a victim of your own success.

Set Estimated Timeline and Budget

As with any well-prepared plan, your Salesforce implementation plan should be time-bound. The exercise of setting out your budgetary constraints and roadmap beforehand is also instrumental for identifying the feasibility of the tasks involved and assigning responsibility for specific areas.

This planning activity helps keep the process on track, and when the time comes to discuss your expectations with the Salesforce partner, makes it easier to communicate your requirements and limitations, to prioritize, and to plan.

Hire a Salesforce Partner

One of the biggest pluses of Salesforce is that it is not meant to be a one-size-fits-all solution. It is a comprehensive platform that should be adapted to fit your organizational set-up. 

However, many of the tweaks and customizations that may be necessary to get it working exactly the way you expect require some expertise. You would therefore be well advised in bringing an experienced partner on board to help you with your implementation.

Ideally, at this point you will have determined your objectives, who the critical stakeholders are, the data sources, and you will have thought through what reports and results you expect to see.

Having this information on hand prior to your discussions with the implementation partner really helps smooth the whole process. The implementation team can quickly understand what your business processes are and determine which ones are good fit to apply the Salesforce stack to. 

Communication is clearer, turnaround times are shortened, and potential issues can be identified and resolved before the actual implementation process commences.