Salesforce Implementation Guide For 2021 and Beyond

• Bacancy Technology
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• Salesforce

Introduction

Salesforce has become the world’s #1 CRM software, and why not? It makes organizations work faster, smarter, connect with more customers and close more deals effectively. But to achieve all these advantages, you need to implement Salesforce in your existing business system. Salesforce comes with customization solutions that can grow with your business. You can add unique features and functionalities as you grow so that your information system is always the best size for your business.

However, deciding to go for Salesforce Implementation might seem a big decision for your company. But, if your business operations face challenges like poor communication among team members, keeping up with daily assigned tasks and leads, then salesforce cloud implementation is a good investment for your company’s growth.

To help you understand how Salesforce implementation is a perfect decision for your business. We’ve come up with this short and easy 5 steps for salesforce implementation guide 2021 that assures success to your company and makes you explain how you can gain maximum benefits with it.

Salesforce Services Market Research

If we talk about the Salesforce services market size, according to reports– The global salesforce services market generated a revenue of $9,124.2 million in 2019 and is projected to reach $55,307.6 million by 2030, progressing at a CAGR of 18.9% during 2020–2030.

From small businesses to FORTUNE 500 companies, over 150,000 Salesforce customers are flourishing this secure, scalable and robust cloud platform worldwide.

Major Markets for Salesforce Services:

In the global salesforce services market, the US and UK are considered the most significant regions globally to adopt Salesforce services in their business operations. The vast IT spending, technological advancements, and early adoption of emerging technologies have made these regions the top users of Salesforce.

In 2019, North America recorded the most significant revenue, owing to the highest rate of CRM adoption, that is, crossing 65% share in 2019. The region also has the highest cloud adoption rate.

Moving on, let’s discuss why your business requires Salesforce implementation.

Why should businesses consider salesforce implementation?

Integrating a Customer relationship management software (CRM) into a business system is not an easy decision for any organization. But certain factors negatively impact the overall success of the business operations. And organizations need to consider those factors earlier and take necessary actions to resolve them.

Below we have mentioned a few questions, which are common issues faced by almost every organization. If your business is also going through the same challenges, it is high time for you to go for Salesforce implementation.

#1 Are you able to get accurate and complete customer information?
#2 Is your sales team providing accurate sales forecasting reports?
#3 Are you able to manage your organization’s information easily?
#4 Is your organization’s leads adequately managed and updated?
#5 Does your organization’s customer relationship management is satisfactory?

If most of your answers are in NO, it’s time for you to wake up and adopt Salesforce implementation services for your organization.

With the salesforce implementation, you will get the following benefits:

1. Accurate and Reliable customer information:

Salesforce will provide accurate and complete information about your customers that will help you offer more advanced customer services to your end-users. Half or inaccurate information creates barriers for sales and marketing teams, leading to zero results and a negative impact on customers. But Salesforce eliminates this issue; it detects the accurate data that supports the sales reps to connect with potential audience base.

2. Sales Forecasting:

Salesforce software lets your sales reps predict the future opportunities easily and forecast the leads prospects. It analyzes the past and present sales trends and the number of possibilities and gives better insights to generate more accurate sales forecasts and campaigns. Usually, sales time takes more time to develop the sales opportunities and tracking leads, but with Salesforce implementation, they can perform these tasks in less time and with complete accuracy.

3. Manage your organization's information easily:

Salesforce CRM will help you manage and control your organization’s information with complete security. Be it contacts, notes, or other valuable information, you can easily manage all confidential and sensitive data with this CRM. Moreover, it allows you to access your data from any of your devices, which means your information is just a click away.

4. Keep your Leads controlled:

If you struggle to keep up with your leads, Salesforce can help you out with it. It manages all your leads seamlessly and arranges them based on priority so that you can meet all clients’ requirements and make a strong connection with them.

5. Improve your Customer services:

Customer service is a critical pillar that determines the success of your business. And if you are wondering if your customer service is average or not so good. Salesforce can help you with that; it supports your sales and marketing team to perform better by closely monitoring your customer’s activities, including their feedback, likes, and dislikes. Salesforce comes up with many robust tools that let you offer the brilliant customer service your customers deserve.

5 Critical Steps for Successful Salesforce Implementation

This section of the salesforce implementation guide covers the 5 critical steps which will help you understand the important factors you are required to consider when implementing this CRM platform.

1. Plan and Prepare Project Requirements:

Planning is always considered a crucial element of any project, as it gives a clear and concise picture of how things will take place. But planning and preparing a salesforce implementation project is not as easy as it looks; for a successful project, you must consider all the essential factors. For a robust salesforce implementation plan, you need to ensure that you have:

• Define business requirements:

Before you decide to implement Salesforce CRM in your organization system, make sure you have a complete understanding of its needs. Why does your business require it? Because if you are not entirely aware of the requirements, you might end up with huge investments and no results. Therefore you need to check your business requirements thoroughly and make decisions accordingly.

• Determine the Project Methodology:

The next step after defining business requirements is to decide what project methodology you will opt for your project. Usually, there are three prominent methodologies known as “Waterfall,” “Agile,” and “Scrum,” which are often adopted by organizations. Based on your business requirements, you need to pick the methodology.

• Build a Project Timeline:

After picking up the approach, you must create a project timeline, including the time for designing, development, and deployment. If you have selected the scrum approach, your timeline will consist of smaller sets of requirements. And if you have picked the other methods such as Waterfall, then the designing and development phase includes all the needs as per the priorities.

• Find a Salesforce Implementation Partner:

Implementing Salesforce is not an easy task for any developer or team. You require a team of professional salesforce developers. Hiring salesforce implementation services will help you to achieve your objectives better and lead to success. An experienced salesforce team comes with system administrators, project managers, developers, designers, and salesforce consultants that assist you with the best salesforce implementation solution.

2. Setup & Customize Salesforce CRM:

After successfully deciding the requirements and hiring the right salesforce implementation partners, the next step is to set up and configure the Salesforce CRM into the system based on your needs.

Salesforce comes up with various clouds, including Marketing Cloud, Sales Cloud, Service cloud, Vaccine cloud, Commerce cloud, and more. Every salesforce cloud includes unique features and functionalities that support your business teams and automate marketing, sales, and customer services activities to achieve the overall business goals effectively. You can implement all the clouds at once or one by one, as per your business demands.

The salesforce consultants will help you to set up your CRM with suitable configuration tools. Moreover, they will assist in transferring the data from the former CRM to the other systems. They will customize the salesforce cloud with the features that automate your business process. With code customization, you may customize everything at once or introduce necessary things for a time, including custom reports, calculators, automated batch processing, or branded custom UI.

3. Testing and Launch Salesforce CRM:

After the customization, the next process is to test it, to confirm that the features and functionalities are working smoothly or without errors. The QA engineers will help you with the testing part; they will thoroughly check the entire Salesforce CRM to ensure that it is fully compliant with your business requirements.

After successful testing, it’s time to deploy the Salesforce CRM; for making it live, it is essential that the entire configuration shifts to a complete sandbox environment, which gives a clear idea of how it performs if large data volumes occur. Moreover, you are required to create a go-develop checklist, which includes all the points that you’ve configured, the integration, and the entire data transformation of the production environment.

You also require user training that helps your workforce understand the new salesforce solution and learn how to use it to support their sales, marketing, and customer service efforts to increase overall productivity. You also need to create a change management process that tells your stakeholders what to expect, invest and empower for success.

4. CRM Adoption:

CRM adoption is a critical step to consider; once you are done with salesforce implementation, it is essential for you to onboard your users. For successful adoption, you require to measure and encourage it among your in-house team. Here, Salesforce consultants or admin will help users adopt the Salesforce seamlessly by filling the knowledge gaps. If a person helps your in-house team with every bit of detail of Salesforce, the graph of salesforce adoption will definitely rise.

To motivate the salesforce adoption, you can also go for other activities like rewarding the best adopters. This method will surely boost users’ salesforce interests, ultimately benefiting you and your business operations and bringing more productivity and revenues.

5. System Support and Maintenance:

To help out businesses achieve their goals quickly and efficiently, Salesforce comes up with advanced features. Once your Salesforce CRM is live, you need to keep it updated and refined, as it impacts your user adoption rate. To keep your CRM system active and functional, you must hire a salesforce support services provider.

The salesforce support and maintenance team will keep your system updated with all the essential features and functionalities that add value and respond to user requests painlessly.

How can you implement salesforce in your business?

Salesforce is one of the critical CRM that has come up with lots of advanced features and functionalities. Many organization misinterprets the salesforce implementation with just license purchase, but it does not end here. License purchasing is the initial step that gives your authority to use salesforce with your business systems. The second critical step is to know your requirements; if you do not have any idea what exact thing you require from salesforce, you cannot adapt or customize it according to your business needs. This eventually costs you a lot of money and time.

Then how can you implement salesforce? In this salesforce implementation guide, we have mentioned two critical ways by which you can implement this CRM.

Before suggesting the ways to implement, it is essential to know what team you will require to perform this task. Your team majorly includes-

• Project manager
• Salesforce consultants
• Salesforce developers (if required)

Many companies do not have a dedicated in-house salesforce team; they prefer to outsource or hire a salesforce development company like us.

Moving on, let’s discuss the options by which you can implement salesforce-

1. By your own

This is one of the simple options which many companies thought to follow. But personally, we do not recommend this option. The reason behind it is salesforce is one of the vast CRM platforms which comes up with tons of products and platforms dedicated to different departments. If you are new to salesforce, you won’t understand the complete salesforce in a one-go, which ultimately gives you a loss at last.

However, salesforce comes with an admin-friendly interface that looks easy to use and convenient for anyone, but you take a risk implementing such a huge CRM on your own. Maybe you successfully implemented salesforce today in your business system, and it runs well, but what are the chances that it will run the same tomorrow or in the future as well.

When your business grows, or new departments will add to it, you are required to change the existing functionality of your CRM platform to keep the functioning smooth and aligned. Here technical expertise plays a vital role, so you see, salesforce is not a one-time job; you are required to keep it updated and streamlined as per your business movements.
Your lack of experience leads to underestimating the project and ultimately slows down your business productivity. Hence try to avoid the practice of implementing salesforce on your own.

2. Hire a Salesforce partner

It is one of the most recommended options by the experts of Salesforce world. Leveraging the knowledge and experience of a professional salesforce development service provider will offer you immense benefits. A white-collar salesforce development company holds a rich experience of salesforce. They know which feature of functionality will perfectly suit the specific requirements of the clients.

Hiring a professional salesforce implementation service provider will save you from falling into a pitfall. The experts have agility; they can easily split roles among project managers, apex developers, and other specialists and perform the salesforce implementation in less time.

Another best thing about hiring a dedicated team is that they have experience with the best practices. They know how things work. They simply listen to your requirements and help you with the implementation that exactly matches.

Above all, the salesforce development partners has an amazing experience working with different industry verticals and projects, which will benefit you in some ways.

So here we have seen both the salesforce implementation options for your reference. We highly recommend going with the second one, as it not only gives you professional assistance but makes your salesforce implementation worthwhile for the future as well.

Final Words

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)