By: Cesar Duarte

Not long ago, CIO Magazine reported a high failure rate for CRM projects, ranging from 18% to 69%. Those numbers may alarm you, but, no worries, Appluent has you covered! Once companies implement Salesforce as their trusted CRM platform, they quickly learn how to avoid mistakes, and in turn produce more successful projects. 

 

Before starting a Salesforce implementation, take note of these key pieces of information:

  1. CRM platforms support company strategy, not the other way around. Strategy is the first priority, whether you are looking to implement Sales Cloud to run your sales and commercial processes or deploying Experience Cloud to engage, connect, and customize your customers’ experience.

    What’s the problem you are trying to solve? What are the goals your company has? Do you have the key stakeholders involved? Who is driving the project and strategic goals? Are you looking to have Salesforce supporting your transactional activities only? 

    No problem, through Sales Cloud, your organization will be enabled to better track and manage those activities. 

    Need to improve collaboration? No worries, Chatter and Slack will boost your organization’s collaboration and productivity.

    Need to build a sales data-driven organization? Sure thing! Einstein Analytics and Tableau CRM are available to assist the data-driven journey.

  2. CRM (Customer Relationship Management) is about getting to know your customers and finding ways to better serve them! However, profit is equally as important. Even though Salesforce can support the sales processes, the idea is to coach Sales Representatives, not to over-control them… In the end, people buy from people.
  3. Revenue results speak for the project delivery success. If marketing and sales don’t work together as a single and unified team, you may have a broken process. Customer acquisition costs are known to be high. In this case, organizations should focus on maximizing the customers’ long-term value and not just closing more sales. With repeated business, time and money is saved on having to search and bring on new customers. 
  4. Salesforce provides out-of-the-box functionalities that can assist sales representatives in building relationships with customers. So, use them! Let’s allow the technology to support your reps on those repetitive activities allowing them more time to build and continue relationships. You can make managing tasks and events, workflows, approvals available to your sales force.
  5. Document your sales processes and ensure your organization adheres to those playbooks. Salesforce provides the tools and mechanisms to ensure your reps follow standardized methods. If there are exceptions to the methodology, which happens from region to region, then start with a process base and work on it over time. Managing by Exception (MBE) is not rare, especially under agile projects.
  6. It’s critical to have all your business representatives entering the leads and opportunities in Salesforce. Having a solid data foundation, will help your organization maximize the benefits of Salesforce tools.  Not to say, what is not managed, cannot be improved.
  7. Salesforce also provides you with the ability to build and have a 360-degree customer view. Whether you are starting small by adding custom fields and creating a customer profile, or working on integrating several internal and external data sources, Salesforce has you covered! However, you must ensure data management policies and procedures to ensure data quality.