Research shows that anywhere from 30-60% of all Salesforce or other CRM projects fail. For the majority, the issues lie in not knowing how to set up a Salesforce CRM. While a powerful and effective sales tool, Salesforce implementation requires forethought and planning to allow your CRM to live up to its potential.
We talked with one of NuGrowth’s CRM Administrators, Patrick Bellish, about some of NuGrowth’s best practices for how to set up Salesforce the right way.
1. Designate a point person
Patrick and his team first recommend designating a point of contact in your organization. This individual will manage the overall setup and be the “go-to” internally and externally for Salesforce-related questions and concerns. “This person should be high up enough to deal with billing information, yet also have buy-in to the ROI of Salesforce as a tool,” Patrick said, “This individual will be the point of contact for Salesforce support, users submitting requests, adding additional user licenses, Salesforce help support cases, and everything in between.”
From there, identify individuals from each team (i.e., sales, marketing, account management) as stakeholders. These stakeholders should work directly with your Salesforce point person to advocate for the needs of their department and aid in educating their team on how to use the system.
2. Define roles and goals
While it can be tempting to dive right into Salesforce, customizing and building things out, we caution against it. “Take your time and set things up the right way to save yourself a lot of headaches down the road,” Patrick said, “My best advice is to map out as much as possible before you start anything in Salesforce.”
We suggest you start by outlining company hierarchy and identifying “power users” who will be highly involved in Salesforce daily. From there, have users define each department’s goals – how will they use Salesforce, and what do they want to get out of it? Finally, we recommend that teams determine what data is essential to users and what should be viewable vs. protected.
3. Determine customizations
It’s ideal to identify the customizations you need early on. As Patrick says, “Map out what you need and determine the gap between what Salesforce offers natively out-of-box, versus what will have to be custom, versus what may be too much of a heavy lift to build custom (time and resource-wise). For the last category, you can look at third-party applications on the Salesforce AppExchange.”
4. Gather and prioritize requirements
Once you know what customizations you need, prioritize the most valuable to tackle first. At the same time, you should analyze current processes, determine pain points, and add solutions to those issues to your priority list. Tackle areas that make the most significant impact first, making lower-level priorities easier to handle.
5. Design and build
Now is when we suggest you start building out solutions. Patrick and his team advise designing a prototype of layout and any custom code attached to it before you build. Once layout and code are approved, you can start building out solutions in the sandbox test environment. In this environment, focus on validating application functionality and addressing any issues. Next, move to beta testing and then release in a live environment.
6. Train and deploy
“Hold training sessions for your overall team and targeted sessions for each department before go-live,” Patrick says, “In training, you can gain feedback from users and implement changes before everyone is in the system. Once you’re live, keep open communication to address issues and questions.”
Get the Experts to Set Up Salesforce the Right Way
Patrick is one of the excellent members on our Salesforce team here at NuGrowth. As a Salesforce partner for over a decade, we bring an expert team knowledgeable in Salesforce implementation, refresh, and ongoing support services.
Let us help you build the custom Salesforces system you need. Get in touch at 614.304.3920 or http://nugrowth.com to find out more.
