Salesforce CRM Implementation: How to do it efficiently and successfully?
Salesforce CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system provides numerous benefits to companies such as increase sales, and improve customer service as well as team collaboration and efficiency etc. In the previous blog posts, we explained the importance as well as challenges of Salesforce CRM integration. Similarly, the process of Salesforce implementation can also become quite difficult for businesses when migrating from legacy system into Salesforce cloud.
In this article, we’ll examine a number of important points on how to implement Salesforce CRM efficiently and successfully, especially when it comes to the some of the most encountered problems associated with business process and migrating data from legacy system, as follow:
Review your business current situation and define long term goals
First of all, businesses should perform a thorough assessment of their current business process to identify the areas which prove to be inadequate or require more attention, which makes them failing or affecting the whole business process financially. Particularly, businesses should focus on the processes that have been failing for years, or the ones which involve a large number of staffs. Salesforce CRM provides a 360 degree of customers’ information, so it’s particularly helpful for companies’ employees to have immediate access to necessary business data easily.
With legacy system, many business organizations have their data stored across multiple applications, so it’s quite a challenge to access and manage data in such an environment. This is one of the main problems, and also, at the same time, an opportunity for companies to formulate their CRM implementation strategy as well as long term goal around it. When setting goal, it’s essential that companies should try to align Salesforce CRM adoption goals with their long term business strategy. Here are some of the common goals of CRM adoption:
- Customer centric focus — with a 360 degree view of customer information, employees can improve and put customer service and satisfaction as one of the main priority of all business processes.
- Gathering insights from business data— business organizations should be able to utilize the business data collected by running reports and use them to make informed business decision.
- Salesforce integration for centralized data view — providing employees with access to necessary business data by integrating different applications of the enterprise system to achieve a single customer view.
- Eliminate manual task – by automating business processes through workflow.
- Better data administration.
Companies should also expect to allocate extra time for the tasks of data cleansing, de-duplicate data, as well as identify problematic area in relation to data administration. This will make data migration easier for implementation team as well as help speeding up the process.
Read more about “Tips for Migrating Legacy Data into Salesforce CRM”.
Collaboration and team-work for a successful implementation
As mentioned in previous article, business organizations, especially IT decision makers, should try to understand that Salesforce CRM implementation is not a one-off IT project but more of a transformation part of a whole strategic vision. Adopting a new CRM system requires team effort as well as collaboration across departments. Everyone, particularly the business users that are going to directly use the new CRM system, should be involved.
It’s important that companies clearly communicate the implementation plan for advanced preparation required by the involved team as well as updating the whole organization on changes regarding new business process. Further, it’s necessary to assign one (or more) member of your staffs as Salesforce administrator who will help drive and increase salesforce adoption within your team as well as working with team members who encounter issues when using the new CRM system.
Identify and Eliminate pain point
For an efficient and smooth Salesforce CRM implementation, business organizations should thoroughly define the pain points in their business process and try to eliminate them. Other than that, organizations can also consider inviting professional Salesforce consultants to assist and help them formulating a feasible adoption plan.
Consider hiring Salesforce consulting services
Another point business organizations should consider when implementing Salesforce CRM is that they need to have a clear understanding about the skills and resources required to ensure the success of the implementation. In addition to the certified Salesforce experts (e.g. Consultants and developers) who will lay the foundations of your company’s Salesforce CRM system and integrate Salesforce with other applications per your organization’s unique business requirements. In case your companies adopt a custom Salesforce CRM solution, you will also need a Salesforce expert who can provide training to your employees on how to use the custom system.
So, it’s clear that organizations need to have a clear assessment of whether their IT staffs possess the necessary skills required or as mentioned above, it’s better to hire external consultants for their Salesforce implementation. Thus, choosing the right implementation partner with experience in your industry is essential for long-term CRM success.
