So you’re thinking about implementing Salesforce in your business?
We are SO excited for you! Salesforce is an incredible and beautiful tool, and the customization possibilities are virtually endless. As you daydream about everything that Salesforce can automate and take off your plate, about the growth it can enable for your business, about all the cool things it can do that you don’t even know about yet – it can become a bit overwhelming.
So where do you start?
There are some foundational questions that you and your business can and should be able to answer before you even speak with your Salesforce implementation partner. Below are some examples that should get you and your team brainstorming. Use these questions to help you to formulate a roadmap of your vision and goals and to help your Salesforce Partner understand exactly where it is that you want to take your business.
WHY do you need Salesforce?
- What part of your business process can be automated?
- What are the most repetitive tasks your team members have to go through every day? Are there canned email responses that can be templatized and set to automatically reply or send based on certain criteria?
- Which elements of your business have become unmanageable, outdated, or unsustainable?
- Are you still having a team member manually respond to every email that comes in? Does the lifeblood of your business reside in Excel spreadsheets? Do you have a customer response time greater than 48 hours? Are customers calling customer service agents to get common questions answered?
- What are the ongoing pain points your team experiences?
- Do your Sales Reps get blocked in the middle of a massive deal because they’re waiting on approval from their manager? Do Leads fall through the cracks because there are too many to manage or you can’t tell which ones have the highest probability of closing? Is your data a hot mess because there are no controls around duplicate record entries?
- Where are the known inefficiencies in your business processes?
- Do deals get bottlenecked waiting for executive approval? Do clients attrit due to a lack of consistent communication or unclear onboarding process? Do customers have to repeat their issue over and over again with every agent they talk to?
- What are your business goals for the next six months? A year? 5 years?
- Are you looking to massively scale, or do you just want to get your business off of Excel?
- What problems would you like Salesforce to help you solve?
WHO do you want to be impacted by the implementation?
- Is it your Sales Reps? Your Support Team? Your Field Service Technicians? Your customers?
- How many users will need access to the system?
- Does your business need Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, or both?
WHAT do you want/need your system to do?
- What other systems are you using that you need Salesforce to integrate with?
- What systems are you using that you want Salesforce to replace?
- Will you need to migrate the data from that system into Salesforce?
- How much data storage do you need?
- What parts of your system/processes do you NOT want to be impacted by your Salesforce implementation?
- What sort of metrics do you want/need to be able to report on?
- The information you want to track and report on will guide the objects and fields that you build into your custom Salesforce instance.
HOW will you define success?
- What are the key metrics by which you will gauge a successful Salesforce implementation?
- What results will qualify a high return on your investment?
- What are some things that you can’t do now that you’ll be able to do with Salesforce?
WHEN do you want to go live?
- Is your current system scheduled to expire or sunset?
Example Salesforce Implementation Goals
Once you’ve gone through the exercise above and answered these critical questions, you’ll want to write down your actual business goals. As a reminder different groups within your organization may have different goals, so be sure to include different stakeholders from these groups throughout your organization.
- Example 1: The Executive Team wants to be able to improve sales and track the top performers.
- Example 2: The Support Team wants to be able to track customer issues.
- Example 3: Sales Managers want to have better visibility into their own pipeline with reports that show key information for their sales.
- Example 4: Sales Representatives want to be able to easily find and access sales collateral to cut down on administrative work.
Prioritize Your Goals
This is just a shortlist, but Im sure you realize that once you engage each department the list of goals will grow pretty long. It’s going to be critical for you to prioritize your goals. And selecting with goals may be challenging, but if you involve the stakeholders from each department, they’ll understand why goals are prioritized in a certain way. One thing to consider is moving up some of the goals that will give your team some quick wins. When the end-users start to realize the value of the platform they’ll more likely be more supportive and invested in the implementation, likely increasing the adoption and good feeling toward the initiative.
Next Steps . . .
Once you’ve got all those questions answered, and defined your goals let’s talk about how to Ensure a Successful Salesforce Implementation with an 8 Step Checklist.
No matter where you are in your journey, we’re happy to help you get there. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out!
Emily Scott
Project Manager
Emily Magone is a graduate of Seattle University (Masters of Executive Nonprofit Leadership) and Western Washington University (Human Services) with over a decade of domestic and international program and project management experience in the nonprofit and small business sectors. Emily is a small business owner herself and is a Certified Salesforce Administrator as well as an Associate Human Resources Professional, and military spouse of an active duty Air Force service member.
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.