You’ve assessed several solutions in the market before making the decision to invest in Salesforce. You’ve understood its scope and its benefits and found it to be a good fit for your specific business needs. Now that you’ve chosen it and the Salesforce Implementation has taken place, it is time to prove the investment was well worth it.
As the project owner, it is important to know how the new Salesforce Implementation is impacting the business and whether it is adding value or not?
The assessment can happen immediately after the deployment, but you won’t be able to gauge its impact. Ideally, you should start measuring the impact after a quarter (post-implementation) since by that time your employees will be familiar with the product and start producing the results.
An assessment is an opportunity to understand the trend and to analyze where the Salesforce adoption stands. Every organization is different and as a result, will measure different KPIs to gauge the success as that factor is dependent on the industry, competition, and company’s priorities.
Here are the 4 Key Performance Indicators that can be measured to analyze the impact of Salesforce Implementation:
- Performance Test
- Sales Cycle Time
- Data Quality and Process Compliance
- User Adoption
Performance Test:
Analyzing how your employees are performing with the newly implemented Salesforce application is of paramount importance. It is necessary to understand the peak load levels, average load levels, and use of a variety of other features.
Also, it is important to find out the completion rate of different tasks, login rates, drop-off rates, and the effectiveness with which the employees use the application post-Salesforce training.
During your analysis, you should identify different user groups and map their workflow. This will help you understand how effectively your Salesforce application is being used and the roadblocks that they face.
All these tests can be performed by using a Digital Adoption Platform like Apty as it will help you draw detailed insights into each user segment. Further, the AI engine of Apty recommends changes that could be implemented to make most of your Salesforce implementation. Following it you can improve the engagement rate and retention rate.
Sales Cycle Time
When you deploy a powerful application like Salesforce, the process should get faster, since the whole journey of the prospect is visible on the single platform.
The collaboration between SDRs, BDRs, and the Marketing team must become seamless over time which should eventually reduce the Sales cycle.
Further, it becomes easy to prioritize the lead and identify whether they will convert or not. The Sales personnel could go through the converted list and find whether there is any overlapping trend between the current prospect and existing customers.
This will help them to expedite the process of qualifying the lead and guiding them in the right direction to become the customer.
Mundane tasks like filling in the Lead or Opportunity details could be automated by using chatbots like Apty which help the Sales reps to fill the fields without even opening the application. The bot conversationally asks important questions and the user has to answer them from their mobile.
Reducing the sales cycle is not only the key to close more deals in record time but also the key to focusing work on high-quality leads. This way the outcome of your Sales and Marketing teams is improved drastically and acts as an important success factor.
Data Quality and Process Compliance
The biggest metric to determine the success of your Salesforce Implementation is to find out how effectively the data is being entered. You have to understand the quality of the data, whether the data is a dummy or true, how long it takes to enter the important data points within the application, etc.
Having answers to all these questions in the initial phase helps you to strategize well to ensure data quality and enable process compliance.
Every industry is different and the way data is processed within a particular industry is different because of the specific different guidelines and rules that apply.
Moreover, each organization prefers to receive the data in a particular format as they tend to follow some best practices. Both industrial and organizational norms have to be followed by the users to maintain data integrity.
It can be achieved either by applying customizations within the Salesforce application or by using a tool like Digital Adoption Platform that ensures data integrity and process compliance.
User Adoption
To make your Salesforce implementation successful, you need to find the user adoption rate within the organization. You need to know whether the users are familiar with the functionalities that they need to perform their job or not.
Ideally, the user adoption should be at 75%-90% within the first quarter. You need to analyze what type of training and digital adoption techniques was opted by the organization.
According to industry experts, if your adoption rate is somewhere around 90% then you are doing a good job and must stick with the training and onboarding strategy that you have in place. If it is less than 75% it is time you start using effective training tools or methods that can replace the traditional form of training.
It is common to couple the late adopters with early adopters to expedite the results but it can be time-consuming for users which is not good for any organization.
So, what else can be done?
You can use a Digital Adoption Platform which doubles up as a training method that can help the users while they are using the application.
Tools like DAP are modern training methods designed to train your employees within the application while they do their job. It guides the users from one step to another via walkthroughs and guides them to accomplish their tasks.
It also contains a variety of knowledge content like PDFs, PPTs, Knowledge base links, and videos within the application that could be referred by the users at any point in time without being dependent on anyone.
Apty is more than a normal Digital Adoption Platform. It not only helps you to do what is expected of DAP but also enables you to understand your employees before creating the workflows and training content. It goes a step ahead and helps your organization to process compliant with its extensive features.
Getting a taste of success immediately after Salesforce implementation is not possible. Using the right KPIs is essential to assess the initial impact and improvise the strategy to make the most out of your investment.
