Salesforce 101, or how to get started with Salesforce.com

Salesforce began its life less than two decades ago, as a web-based customer relationship management (CRM) tool.  At its core, a CRM system is similar to a Rolodex, but with far greater depth and capability.  Whether on-premise or cloud-based like Salesforce, the purpose of the system is to manage all aspects of your customer relationships in one centralized location – meetings, schedules, calls, contracts, support requests, sales opportunities, to-do lists, and more.  Over the years the functionality has continued to grow, and today Salesforce can support many additional types of business processes far beyond just CRM.

With the goal being to create a holistic view of each client, many CRM tools offer marketing and lead-generation capabilities to help build and manage a healthy sales pipeline.  While some CRM tools come with their own versions of these features, most will provide ways to integrate with third-party marketing automation providers.

Aside from process standardization and automation, one of the most important abilities of a well-implemented CRM comes from the analytical power available to you once all this data is available in one place.  For example, tracking which lead sources provide the highest opportunity close rate or largest deal size, or improving customer service by identifying the most frequent support requests and creating a proactive solution to decrease the volume of requests thus increasinc customer satisfaction.  Without a centralized system, these types of historical correlative insights are nearly impossible to achieve.

Furthermore, having centralized access to this information 24x7 eases customer service challenges.  In any support interaction, the user can see every previous interaction with that account, as well as other important details such as contracts, products, SLA, etc.  Of course, you may not want every user in your organization to have access to every single piece of data in the system – users can be segmented by permission levels so they wouldn’t be able to see data or edit a record that they shouldn’t.

Planning Your Implementation

Straight “out of the box,” Salesforce is just a tool.  Like any power tool, hammer or screwdriver – by itself it is functionally useless.  To get the proper value from the tool, the user needs experience to understand the applications, best practices, and limitations.

Frankly speaking, the default settings in Salesforce are fairly clunky and cumbersome.  The power comes once it has been properly customized to your business needs and processes.  The implementation of any software needs to be a major part of the budgeting and buying process – just buying the software alone is never the magic bullet many people expect it to be, and will often result in a costly failure.  Whether you plan to use an in-house team, consultants, or a combination thereof for the implementation, you must plan for this investment as a part of your overall CRM purchase.  If your team does not have CRM implementation experts, I would strongly recommend going the third-party route.  This consideration is absolutely critical for the success of the project and to make sure your organization reaps the full benefits a CRM like Salesforce can offer.

Begin by examining the business processes and workflows you plan to transition into the CRM.  Each step needs to be understood in detail such as triggering events, data required for decision-making, required data entry, branches to yes/no/maybe/other and the subsequent steps for each option, which users need to be involved, notified, or assigned tasks, and what the points of human interaction/intervention look like, as well of course, as knowing what KPIs to tracks, and reports are needed.  Repeat this for every process and each step.

Since we tend to understand things visually, it can be hugely beneficial to actually map out the flows of these processes using a tool such as Visio, Lucidchart, or others – even a whiteboard works well.

The next stage is to design a blueprint for your data model to serve as a reference guide once you start customizing your Salesforce instance.  Determine the different kinds of objects, fields, record types, relationships, etc. that you will need in order to represent your processes.  When creating this model, be sure to take into consideration any integrations with third-party systems that will need to be set up initially or planned for in the future, and any data you may have that will need to be imported.  A poorly designed data model can cause significant problems down the line when changes need to be made or additional services integrated.

Customizing & Validating Your System

And now the real fun begins!  Customize your system according to the maps & blueprints you’ve just spent so long creating.  Take extra care when setting up the user interfaces for all the various human interaction points.  Consider what information users will need to see on different records for different processes, and try to display only the information that is relevant to that particular step in that particular process, and for that particular category of user.  Often, less is more since it will help users stay focused and productive.  User and line of business requirements must be clearly understood as well, as different users will have different needs, rights of access, and even visibility privileges, all of which can be granularly managed within Salesforce.

If data needs to be imported, be sure to check it and verify it ended up the way you intended.  It’s always a good idea to run test imports with a small number of records before importing your entire data set.

After you have finished customizing the objects, UIs, dashboards, reports, etc, we get to the most important part of any implementation: the rollout process.  Best practices are to engage small groups of the intended users for a pilot.  Walk them through the new system and then let them try it out for a while.  How long will depend on the complexity and comprehensiveness of the processes being covered.  Ask as many questions of the users as you can to gauge what the experience is like and whether it intuitively enables them to easily handle their workflows.  Use their feedback to iterate the design as necessary.  This validation testing is critical and will often reveal changes that need to be made before the final rollout.

Rolling Out Your New CRM

Once you have finalized the system design with your pilot groups, create documentation, training materials, and walkthroughs for your employees.  Develop a communication plan for how to announce the new system, and where users can get help, support, and answers to any questions they may have when learning the new system.  Depending on the size of your organization and the capacity of your implementation team, you may want to phase the rollout and release it to different departments/groups/teams separately over the course of a few weeks.

If your instance is small, administering Salesforce should not be a burdensome task as the core infrastructure is managed in the black box by Salesforce themselves.  Administrators will typically be responsible for supporting users, lost passwords, workflow, and continually tweaking and enhancing the system.  This can be as comprehensive as you’d like -, or hands off with just semi annual touches and refreshes.   It is very easy to constantly iterate your system: integrating new features that are constantly released, improving processes based on user feedback, and incorporating additional processes.

For larger implementations, or as your instance grows, a strong administrative team can make or break a company’s adoption of the system and get more and more value from it over time.  Often, organizations will choose to partner with a consulting firm that can offer ongoing expertise and system management.

To paraphrase more than a few prognosticators of old, if I was given but ten hours to complete a task, I would spend the first nine planning, and but the final hour in the actual doing of the task. Plan, and replan.  As the carpenters say, measure twice, cut once.

-Chuck Fried