How to Prepare for Your Salesforce Implementation

When preparing for a Salesforce implementation one of the most critical steps prior to the implementation is often overlooked. This single step can cost organizations a considerable amount of money as well as time to correct errors. What is this extremely valuable step? Preparation and planning. When you plan and prepare for your Salesforce implementation, you’ll achieve greater success and ultimately get more out of your Salesforce investment. After collaborating with some of our architects and consultants, they provided insight as to what that they recommend in order to prepare for a successful Salesforce implementation.

Create a Governance Committee

You’ll need to assemble a team to spearhead and sponsor the implementation efforts. Depending on the size of your organization will depend on how large your team is, below is a recommendation on who you should ask to join your committee.

All project teams should have the following participants:

• An Executive Sponsor: The executive sponsor is someone who strongly believes in the power of the platform, and knows the value it will bring to the organization. They should be influential and be able to champion and support the project from conception through go-live, and beyond.
• System Administrators: Your system administrators will be at the heart of your implementation. Not only will they need to have enough knowledge and understanding about Salesforce, but they’ll also need to have an in-depth understanding of your business processes, as well as the requirements from your managers and users.
• Project Manager: A project manager will be a helpful resource to make sure that your project stays on track.
• Power Users: Your power users will be helpful because they’re thinking about the end-user. They’ll make sure that the needs of the end-user, as well as management, will be met. Power users can also help with troubleshooting issues, and testing out solutions. Their feedback is very valuable in the process.
• Trainers: Whether it’s a team or a singular trainer, they’ll be responsible for documenting processes and gathering and creating the appropriate materials to distribute to end-users. They’ll want to be thinking about adoption, how they will support your users, measure adoption, and encourage adoption.

Create a Unified Vision

No matter how large or small your organization is, you’ll need to identify your company’s vision and goals. When you go through this exercise it’s important to realize this process will be ongoing, once you implement Salesforce, you’ll still need to maintain your Salesforce org, therefore your goals will continuously evolve. Some examples on how to define your vision:

• How does Salesforce fit into your organization’s mission?
• Define the initial objectives, and future objectives separately.
• Be sure to prioritize and document these objectives.

Align Metrics With Your Outcomes

Once you complete your implementation you may be wondering was it successful, well yes you did complete your implementation but does it meet your organization’s goals? Take your vision and your objectives and determine what metrics and outcomes you can use to truly determine the success of the implementation. If you have poor processes and users are manually processing business tasks, a simple metric would be are your users using Salesforce or are they still doing things the way they were in the past. Of course, not all metrics will be as simple as this, but aligning metrics to your goals will truly help you understand whether or not your implementation was successful as well as help identify areas of improvement to ensure you’re getting the most out of your Salesforce investment.

The pace of change is fast, be prepared

The pace of change will never be slower than it is right now, choose the right partner for the journey.

As your planning for your implementation be sure to create a detailed project timeline. When you’re creating this timeline consider including the time required to design, build, and deploy. You’ll also want to create a way to clearly prioritize these requirements, this allows you to clearly call out what requirements will be completed in the first phase of your implementation. It allows you to more clearly set expectations with your committee and organization and allows for input on requirements that may need to be prioritized or deprioritized. If your timeline is dependent on external factors such as your current system no longer being available, it is really important to nail down those must-haves and communicate them to the organization.

Create a plan for decision making

No matter how much planning you do, you need to be agile, to account for business and environmental changes that are out of your control. Not to bring up a sore subject, but we all experienced this type of change, with COVID-19. Businesses need to agile, they need to be able to move quickly and execute quick decisions. To do so with Salesforce, you need to make sure you have a plan in place to implement change in your organization. What are the channels that you’ll go through first, who needs to approve, how will the change be communicated, and how will you train your users and let them know about this change.

If you need help planning for your Salesforce implementation feel free to contact us.

About Roycon
We’re an Austin-based Salesforce Consulting Partner, with a passion and belief that the Salesforce platform’s capabilities can help businesses run more efficiently and effectively. Whether you are just getting started with Salesforce or looking to realize its full potential, Roycon specializes in Salesforce Implementations, Salesforce Ongoing Support, and Salesforce Integrations, and Development. We’re the certified partner to guide the way to increase Salesforce Adoption, make strategic decisions, and build your Salesforce Roadmap for success.