Have you decided that your business will be next in line to be graced by Salesforce’s rapid innovation? As exciting as it sounds, implementing Salesforce for the first time is quite a technical journey that requires a prepared environment. The road to seriously improved customer engagement will be paved with months of engineering, project management, training your employees, and dealing with their struggles of switching from whatever they’re already using to Salesforce.
Moving steadily and taking into account considerations before implementing Salesforce can help prevent issues later down the road.
Before embarking on this journey, all departments should be ready to go, particularly your finances, technical infrastructure, and your humans. This is critical whether you’re implementing Salesforce for the first time or are adding another product to your existing environment. Based on our years of conducting and advising Salesforce implementations, here’s common considerations before implementing Salesforce:
- Are the goals of its use clear?
Do you know the reasons why you’re choosing Salesforce beyond “uh, it’s pretty famous and has helped a lot of companies make money?” Just like your New Year’s Resolutions, your Salesforce goals should be SMART: specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. Why are you choosing the particular services you’re choosing? Can you describe what you’re looking to achieve in a way your stakeholders can understand and visualize?
For example, one major reason for implementing Salesforce is consolidating formerly siloed data. While accomplishing such a goal can be helpful to any company, what’s considered centralized yet easy enough to navigate without clutter will look different to each company depending on what data you have. Consider as many stakeholders as you can, including what your employees are looking for. What do they expect from Salesforce that they’re not currently getting?
- Are all stakeholders on board and aligned?
Considerations before implementing Salesforce aren’t only financial and technical, but also interpersonal. Have you carefully figured out each role that’ll be impacted by the implementation? Have you collected the opinions of representatives of each team that’ll be using it? The representatives, such as team leads, should also consider the views of their team members as well.
Even if a staff member or department isn’t using Salesforce themselves, they may be impacted by another team’s use. If there are a minority of stakeholders who are opposed to the implementation, listen to their perspectives.
- Will you have the time and budget for this?
Have you defined how long the implementation will take assuming everything goes perfectly? Do you have a plan of action in case something is delayed or goes wrong? Have you factored in all your costs, such as licensing, training, partnerships, or ongoing support needs? The amount of users also matters, so make sure you’ve accurately calculated the right amount of people who’ll be using it. Do you have the budget to support your implementation partners and internal staff involved?
- Do you know how this will impact your clients?
You’ve probably considered the impact Salesforce will have on your staff, but what about your clients? Since an implementation will change the way your staff works, your clients could be impacted. You might know what your staff wants in their new CRM, but the clients they’re corresponding with will also have their own needs.
Fortunately, some Salesforce consulting partners such as ourselves do offer services that assess the health of your company and/or current Salesforce environment to see how ready you are for the implementation you want. Upon reviewing your environment, we may suggest you hold off, make some recommendations (maybe one of our financial services or hospitality accelerators), or just start building out our implementation roadmap. It all depends on where you are — no matter how excited we are to work together, we won’t start until it’s safe and sustainable to do so.
Stay tuned for part 2 for additional factors to consider before an implementation!
Need another opinion on how to get ready for a Salesforce implementation?
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