You’ve deployed Salesforce in your company. Yet almost daily, you seem to realize one more challenge you are facing with optimizing your usage of Salesforce.
The data you are looking for is nowhere to be found. The customer interactions that you know took place aren’t documented. The awesome features you keep hearing about from Salesforce aren’t available in your company. It’s all a mess and getting on track feels overwhelming.
For what it’s worth, none of this is unique to your company. We work with clients all the time walking in similar shoes. What’s important now is taking the right steps forward to make things better. Below are three steps to take when your company struggles to gain the most from your Salesforce investment.
1. Focus on Adoption and Utilization
• Measure utilization and focus on high-value areas for improvement.
• Provide time for your employees to complete regular training, which is free on Trailhead. The more folks with standard platform knowledge alongside an understanding of new or upcoming standard features, the better the business stakeholders can plan and prioritize future enhancements.
• Gather user feedback. Make sure they feel part of the process and that everyone has a voice.
• Communicate to your users by sending out regular updates that include what’s coming and what to be excited about.
2. Setup a Process to Continually Improve
• Ensure monitoring is in place to measure ongoing success.
• Set up a mechanism to capture and prioritize enhancement requests.
• Set expectations for delivery. Consider whether you can support agile sprints or perhaps less frequent releases that align with the Salesforce release cycle.
3. Establish Governance Processes
• Maintain ongoing stability and consistent user experiences by formalizing who can make changes in production and when.
• Establish owners of the platform, with clear lines of who owns strategic direction, portfolio management, enhancements versus delivery, and platform stability.
There’s no going back in time to change any missteps potentially made when initially deploying Salesforce. All you can do is move forward from here. Once you follow the steps outlined above, determine where your quick wins are in the short term, and develop your longer-term roadmap, you will surely see and feel the compounding business gains that will continuously follow.
