IT

Top Salesforce Implementation Mistakes

fregtgrwSalesforce has proved itself to be a powerful tool for businesses. The scope of growth and potential to see a rise in revenue and customer base is huge, making it a must have tool for the sales and marketing divisions of companies belonging to a variety of background. Now, when a platform comes with such a huge potential, it is bound to be tagged along with a number of features. It becomes necessary for companies to know what they are getting into and to have a clear understanding of the platform straight from the day when they decide to implement it, failing which the chances of making mistakes rises.
Although you would be able to avoid most of the implementation blunders just by partnering with experienced Salesforce consultants, if you are a company that is self-taught on Salesforce, there are issues that can be easily ignored while Salesforce implementation.
Here are some of the things that you should do differently to avoid making the same mistakes that companies with lesser working knowledge of Salesforce make on the platform –

1. Quality of Data

At times the biggest mistake that companies do is not filtering their current data and uploading them on Salesforce. So before importing data on the platform, take time to remove duplicates, complete the incomplete information, and set a standard to dates and references section.

2. Train the users

Assuming that you recently implemented Salesforce CRM in your system, the chances that your team knows anything about it or is even comfortable working on it is very slim. Take time to train the people who will be working on the tool, explain them their roles and the features they would be focussing on.
At this stage itself, you should divide teams who would be responsible for the different Salesforce job, e.g. give responsibility to someone to import the right data and make someone the reporting spoc, who will be responsible for exporting the sales and customer reports, etc.

3. A custom place

Have a separate place for every field. Instead of importing data in free form tables, have a custom field for a particular type of data. This way, you would be able to generate custom report and dashboard specific to the information that you are seeking.

4. Have strict quality guidelines

The platform has very strong in built validation tools, make sure you use them correctly to weed out unnecessary information and correct the ones which are wrongly presented or used. Invest time here to avoid cleaning a mess later.

5. Let Salesforce do the hard work

Salesforce can be easily integrated with any software, so instead of you doing the data entry in every second place, let the platform do it. It is much more than only an online contacts manager – Salesforce has some amazing inbuilt workflow automation tools. So use it to create workflows, approval processes, and scripts that guide how to handle difficult scenarios.

6. Get the platform on Mobile

Instead of having Salesforce sit on your office laptop, take all the reports, data, and information wherever you go by downloading the Salesforce app. All you have to do is configure it on your device, so take out some time and do that.

7. Launch it in stages

Instead of setting up and implementing every single feature at once, make a list of features or processes that are the essence of your business and launch them after an in depth study. By launching the implementation process stage by stage, you will make it easy for the users to understand and grasp the concept as well.

8. Get Salesforce in sync with your business process

Once you get an understanding of the platform, find ways to import and create tables and data format that you use in your business. Suppose you make sales quotes and distribute them among 10 different vendors or you have specific metrics that you use to measure efficiency and performance, identify them. And once you do, incorporate them in Salesforce instead of making everything from the scratch.

So here were the 8 very basic things which you should avoid while implementing Salesforce. Although they seem very common, but they are also the ones which are most easily ignored when you are busy focusing on the technical parts of the powerful tool. Keep note of them today to avoid cleaning messes later.

Contributed byhttp://www.floatintotheclouds.com/

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