Everyone knows the fact that Salesforce is one of the top CRM systems available in the market now. Many business enterprises are finding themselves more powerful and functional in transforming their business operations with Salesforce. This makes it compelling to folks, including you, to move onto this platform, but the confusion where to begin, right?
Here in this article, we are trying to put forth step-by-step guidance to help the business entrepreneurs and decision-makers develop a flawless process for Salesforce implementation with guaranteed success. Up from planning to the stage of implementation, we will discuss the fundamental steps involved.
Step 1: Establish the timeline
There are a few things to consider when you are establishing a timeline for Salesforce project implementation. First, check out the dependencies and ensure that you have a clear idea about the other initiatives you are taking up at that particular point in time. This is very important to make sure that your Salesforce implementation does not overlap with other major projects. Make sure that you have enough key team members during your implementation, and think of an optimal timeline for the Salesforce project to minimize any business disruptions.
Step 2: Set the key metrics for Salesforce project success
There are various ways through which you can define your Salesforce project goals. For example, your goal may be to reduce the processing time by 30%, or you have to increase your customer churn rate by 20%, and so on. By defining your goals and metrics in clearer and easily understandable terms, you can better tangibly propel goals for everyone involved to digest and further gauge the success of the implementation against these metrics.
Step 3: Define the channels for effective communication
For every Salesforce project, a project manager oversees all the implementation, addresses the concerns, removes the roadblocks, and keeps the project on track as planned. Any Salesforce implementation project is teamwork, which requires a clear communication channel between the constitution and the implementers, as well as the users.
There may be many questions popping up in between as to how the changes are being documented? How we implement things in order not to run up against obstacles? Are we on any other work that will take any longer time to not hold up the project? Etc. All these questions needed to be communicated through the proper channel and answered in a timely manner by the concerned. So, it is important to define a proper communication mechanism throughout the Salesforce project, for which providers like FLOSUM can help you.
Step 4: Build the implementation team.
Below mentioned are the major roles in the standard Salesforce implementation team, which you need to consider while setting up a successful team.
Executive sponsor: This person is the champion who is responsible for the implementation and success of the project. The responsibilities of the sponsor include:
- advocating on behalf of the stakeholders
- Make sure that the project is well aligned with its strategic direction
- Heading the committees, and
- Motivating the project team members.
Project owner: This role is ideally of a project team leader in smaller projects. The project owner is responsible for defining the project’s scope and objectives and making sure it is in tune with the organizational goals. This person should also oversee the project implementation through its completion and head the business unit through Salesforce implementation.
Project manager: Responsible for holding all the team members accountable and keep the project on track by consistently checking it with various other teams. This person needs to keep an update of all statuses. When you are partnering with a Salesforce consulting for implementation, the project manager will act as a single point of contact between the enterprise and the consultant.
System administrator: This role is meant to manage the daily operations of the systems and technologies involved in the project. A system administrator may come from any level of the enterprise, from any department, provided that they have a thorough understanding of the business processes and the organizational structure and technical skills. The person who takes up this role also needs to have excellent communication abilities.
Power-user: A power user provides valuable feedback at each stage of the project implementation to ensure that it meets the expectations of the implementers and users. Power-user should be an insightful person who is tech-savvy and capable of identifying the potential challenges and shortfalls quickly during the implementation.
Step 5: Define the constituents
The success or failure of any Salesforce project may ultimately depend on the end uses. There is no doubt that Salesforce is an incredibly powerful platform that can transform any business from the ground up if the users handle it well. Change management in terms of the Salesforce project can go a long way in terms of its user adoption.
So, the best way to start with any Salesforce project is to figure out whom you are implementing it for. Define the end uses as your sales team, marketing team, operations team, finance team, project management team, customer service team, development team, and so on. This list may go further based on your business’s nature, and sometimes the constituent base you define may consist of multiple teams from these categories.
Step 6: Define your process requirements
Once you covered all the above steps well, the next thing to look into is identifying the individual roles and understanding the pain points they may experience during the project implementation and use. You need to conduct interviews with these teams to get an idea about what they think about Salesforce implementation. For example, you can talk to the sales team members to understand how they struggle to qualify leads due to lack of information and so on.
Based on these interviews and insights gained through it, you will identify the pain points and possible workable solutions for it. Interviewing the key team members is a very simple but highly powerful way to figure out which business processes you need to focus on through Salesforce implementation projects and your expected outcome.