How do you Implement Salesforce?

Now that you have invested in Salesforce, you may feel like you are ready to take over the digital world. And of course, it’s possible if you have the right knowledge and strategies to get started with your Salesforce implementation. The purpose of this blog is to ensure that you hit the right steps- whether you are implementing Salesforce for the first time or considering doing so in the near future. 

Step 1: Hire an Implementation Partner

Ideally, if you are implementing Salesforce with the help of your in-house team, you don’t need extra support from a Salesforce consultant. There is a common notion among organizations that  Salesforce implementation is an easy stage where you don’t need prior coding experience.  But think again. If this is your first time having hands-on experience with Salesforce, it will be an incredibly tough journey to accomplish. Salesforce is a scalable platform and when your business grows, you may need to add functionalities over the existing ones and your in-house team may get caught up in the process. Underestimating a Salesforce implementation project can create technical debts and decreased productivity issues. By hiring a Salesforce Implementation Partner you get someone who has years of experience not only in implementing Salesforce but also with strong marketing and industry knowledge. They will help create the entire Salesforce roadmap and take care of the process end-to-end. After hiring a Salesforce implementation partner, they will analyze your existing business processes and map the Salesforce implementation accordingly. A great Salesforce consultant will always add value to your implementation project rather than taking care of the technical aspects. Here is how you can choose the right Salesforce partner for your Salesforce implementation project. 

Step 2: Define your Stakeholders

Conduct a detailed analysis of your potential Salesforce users once implemented. These stakeholders should be given their set of responsibilities and roles in every stage of the Salesforce implementation project. This can include your project managers, executives, marketing and sales team members, and every key individual vested in the Salesforce implementation. Choose one person who represents each team. Make sure that all teams are included in the stakeholder structuring. 

Step 3:  Define Goals

Define clear goals before starting the Salesforce implementation. Take some time to discuss with your key stakeholders to answer the following questions:

• What are your short-term and long-term goals as a business?
• What is your end goal for implementing Salesforce?
• What are the pain points that stand in the way of achieving your goals?
• Which existing business processes need to be revisited?
• What results do you expect from the Salesforce implementation

These goals will help you prioritize your implementation and set a clear path to move forward.

Step 4: Data Migration

Before migrating data from different sources to Salesforce, take all necessary steps to ensure data quality. Conduct data cleansing and data replication to check for data accuracy and duplicate records. Map data objects and fields across all sources of data to Salesforce and incorporate new duplication rules to avoid duplicate data in the future. The data maintenance roles and responsibilities should be clearly delegated to the respective owners. They must hold responsibility for the overall data integrity and foresee any sort of unpredictable data issues.

Step 5: Testing

Now it’s time to review functionalities built in the Salesforce solution. Your QA team must test all the functionalities and check if it’s flawless and is compliant to Salesforce security requirements. After finishing the functional testing and unit testing, the testing must move on to advanced testing techniques like user acceptance testing, sandbox testing, and production testing to check the Salesforce deployment performance. This is also a good time to conduct a demo to your business team, implementation partners, and all the stakeholders involved in the project. This will give you a better understanding of how well your Salesforce solution is working in alignment with their requirements. 

Step 6: User Training

With proper user training, the end-users will be able to get accustomed to the newly implemented Salesforce solution and improve their productivity.  Conduct individual training by offering resources and documents that are easy to understand and exclusive for each user group and department. 

Role-based training: This training is provided for each team based on how they will use the Salesforce platform in their day to to day tasks. Each training session should be tailored to specific team requirements so it can vary from sales to IT to admins. 

Skill-based training: There will be several individuals and teams who are tech-savvy and possess advanced knowledge compared to others. Skill-based training material should be created keeping in mind their existing technical capabilities. Use this time for team building as well. It can go a long way in improving Salesforce user adoption

Step 7: Have a Post Implementation Plan

Keep up the momentum after the full rollout of Salesforce. Always have Phase 2 in mind as Salesforce is evolving every year. Prepare your team and processes to handle the upgrades released by Salesforce. Don’t fall behind on newer Salesforce versions as this will create a lot of frustration among your users and an eventual decrease in user adoption. This is a great time to further increase user engagement and continued efforts to build user adoption. Be highly responsive to queries posed by the end users and be quick on your feet to provide support whether it’s resolving a bug or any other kind of performance issue.

As you’ve read above, there are a lot of steps to consider while implementing Salesforce and it can be overwhelming. But with choosing the right Salesforce implementation partner, your Salesforce journey will be an exciting one. Talk to our consultants today to learn more about our Salesforce implementation services.