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The Simplest Salesforce Implementation Guide for Enterprises

Table of Contents

Salesforce is not just a CRM application. It is a business tool that can unleash unlimited opportunities. Gone are the days when you have to invest in giant infrastructure to host any CRM application. Today, organizations are focusing on cloud ecosystems to ensure agility and with Salesforce businesses can do just that. 

As exciting as having Salesforce in your tech stack may look, it is challenging to implement Salesforce properly to get the desired outcomes. Even missing a single crucial detail during Salesforce implementation could derail your efforts. 

To avoid it you need a Salesforce guide that is crisp, handy, and always available by your side to ensure that you’re moving in the right direction. 

Fast-track Salesforce Guide: 

Build Your Team  

It is well-known fact that to implement an application as big as Salesforce you need a Project Team. It is natural for one to assume that for a successful Salesforce implementation, you need to invest in a huge team. Thankfully, we’re here to tell you that that is not the case.  

Build Your Team

There are 4 key roles that you need to fill in for a successful Salesforce Implementation and those roles are: 

  • Executive Sponsor: the champion who acts as the influencer of the project. They support the Salesforce initiative from the planning stage till the time it goes live. They also ensure their full support even after the deployment to make the project a success in the long run. 
  • The Project Owner leads the implementation from the front. They understand the business process of the organization and aligns it with the Salesforce CRM to get the desired outcome. 
  • System Administrator handles the Salesforce application on a daily basis. They tweak, adjust and pivot during the adoption phase and even after that, they keep an eye on how the CRM application is being utilized.  
  • Power Users must be involved from the planning phase to create a process and customize the CRM as per the requirement of the users. This way you can align the organization’s vision with the user’s requirement. 

It is important to note that you need not hire different people for different roles. The same person can double up as other roles too. 

Define and Prioritize Your Goals  

Businesses know the outcome they want out of the implementation. But it is a must to segment your goals for each stage to simplify the execution. 

You can also start by defining the goal that would contribute to the vision of your company. Every group has a different requirement, so the goals for each of these groups should be different. 

Define and Prioritize Your Goals

For example, the Sales Manager wants a sales trend report to identify the gaps. The Sales rep wants to minimize the administrative tasks and wants access to relevant information to convert lead into a customer. The Marketing executive wants access to an email report to assess the performance of the newsletter. 

Likewise, every group or department has its goal and it is a must to define it before implementing Salesforce so that it can be aligned with the organization’s needs. 

Once you have defined the goals, it is important to prioritize them. Rather than executing multiple tasks at once, it will help you to focus on one task at a time and see success with it. Juggling between multiple tasks could result in failure and worse, could demotivate the team. 

So, focusing on one goal at a time and achieving could motivate employees. And when the time comes for scaling or adding more features, they will be happy to contribute and coordinate. 

Develop Your Rollout Plan  

You may be confident that the rollout will be a success. Here’s the truth, no matter how successful it turns out to be technical, unless your employees use the application and make most of the crucial features, the rollout is a failure. 

Develop Your Rollout Plan

It is essential to plan for each stage in advance to ensure a successful Salesforce Rollout  

  • Stage 1: Import the accounts to the Salesforce environment, eliminate duplicate data, and clean the database. Introduce the mediums using which you will train and onboard the employees. 
  • Stage 2: Analyze the performance of new leads and existing ones. Gain insights on the performance of Sales and Marketing. Use solutions like Digital Adoption Platform to gain insights on how the application is being adopted by the employees and how effectively the defined Salesforce process is used. 
  • Stage 3: Start analyzing how well your employees are using the Salesforce application post the training. Identify which type of training content is working. Finally, start checking when and where they are dropping off vs When and where they are engaged within the application. 

Doing all this will help you to monitor Salesforce performance and its impact while enabling you to improve the existing process and create new ones. 

Developing a Training Strategy 

A training strategy will act as a GPS that will guide your employees in the right direction and will help employees to understand how they can use the application to achieve their goals. 

At first, it could look overwhelming to develop a training strategy – so start with a simple one that is easy for you to manage as well as for your employees to follow. 

Developing a Training Strategy

Now that you have a mindset in place, it is time to understand different types of Salesforce users. The requirement of the Sales team would be different from that of the management team and the reason for using the application would be different. 

Then there will be some users whom you can segment even further based on their interaction with the CRM application. 

You can segment the users by using a Digital Adoption Platform that helps you to analyze how your employees are using the application. 

This segmentation can be based on location, language, time zone, departments, and job role. 

Once this is done, you can create relevant training content for each user type. Create help material that can enable them to efficiently complete their day-to-day activity and accomplish their goals. 

One of the simplest yet most impactful training methods that can help you achieve your training strategy is a Digital Adoption Platform that guides employees from one step to the other seamlessly. But a DAP is not limited to Walkthroughs or On-screen guidance, it is much more than that. 

It can house all the relevant training content like PDFs, PPTs, Videos, and Workflows to ensure that the employees master the Salesforce application with the preferred knowledge content. 

On top of that, it ensures process compliance and data cleanliness. 

What’s Next?

Once the adoption rate is increased you can start focusing on ensuring that employees use the Salesforce features and processes to their fullest extent. Post this, you can always plan to expand and deploy the additional applications within the Salesforce CRM. 

Irrespective of where you are in your Salesforce journey, a Digital Adoption Platform can fuel the implementation process. 

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Krishnan Kaushik V

Krishnan Kaushik V

Krishnan is a Marketer and Content Crafter. He has an in-depth understanding of Digital Adoption, Transformation, and Enterprise applications that helps business to generate business outcomes. In his former life, he was an IIoT & Automation engineer. You can find him trying new recipes, riding a bike, and wondering about the most complex object on the face of the earth i.e Human Brain.

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