Salesforce is surely one of the world’s most loved CRM platforms with near ubiquitous penetration in enterprises across sectors. Across the world, the platform accounts for impressive figures like 4.7 billion marketing messages and 35.7 million customer service interactions every day. Businesses find Salesforce to be a great asset in critical functions like connecting, nurturing, engaging, and retaining customers for repeat business. The platform comes with an incredible list of features, extensions, and third-party applications. There is a sprawling landscape of partners and a proven portfolio of use cases that deliver successful business outcomes. All that makes it an obvious choice for CxOs considering CRM platforms globally.
That being said, getting the best return from Salesforce investments is not an easy endeavor. The platform has numerous features, and integration options with a host of other technology solutions from both in-house and 3rd party providers. Gaining an edge in the competitive customer experience journey does call for businesses to have a clear understanding of the roadblocks they might have to navigate to get the most out of their Salesforce platform.
Top 3 challenges in getting the most out of Salesforce investments
Let us explore the top 3 obstacles that stand in the way of businesses when they try to extract ROI from their Salesforce investments:
Striking a balance between customization and configuration
When Salesforce is brought into the picture, enterprise leaders face a dilemma. They need to choose between adapting to configurations in the platform and initiating customizations to integrate the platform into how they run the business.
The solution to this challenge is to first understand that both approaches can exist in parallel with the right balance of functionality and resilience. If some approaches in customer relationships have worked wonders, then organizations can play around with customizing Salesforce to incorporate that approach if it was not a standard workflow within the platform. However, while doing so, it is extremely important to ensure that there is no harm to the platform’s stability from the implementation architecture perspective. It must be able to handle the desired workloads at scale for the custom-built new feature or capability. Salesforce is indeed a very flexible platform.
Thus, there shouldn’t be a problem in customizing it in most cases. If standard workflows were not providing great results before Salesforce, then the best approach would be to accommodate configurations in the Salesforce platform to run the necessary initiatives as it comes with a greater assurance of results.
Data management
Data is the beating heart of modern customer experiences. When a business decides to implement Salesforce, it is extremely important to have their core data streams integrated effortlessly into Salesforce. This includes their existing databases, legacy sales and marketing data sets usually maintained in spreadsheets and data from other business systems like lead generation, ERP, finance, etc.
Moving into Salesforce will require one or more carefully designed and implemented data migration initiatives. Enterprises will need a well-crafted migration roadmap to ensure that no important data is lost or corrupted in the migration journey. Business disruptions need to be at a minimal level and no data discrepancies should be tolerated in the migration exercise. This will ensure that the Salesforce platform can drive better results for the business from Day 1 post-implementation.
Lower user adoption
Salesforce allows businesses to transition their sales, marketing, and other critical customer experience operations to a world-class platform. These solutions are best utilized at scale, including across locations and geographies. Along with this transition, comes the need to ensure strict compliance with usage standards, regulatory oversight, data privacy laws, etc. in different regions. The use of Salesforce will help in this compliance but for users, the transition may be a bottleneck. This is especially true if the change management is poor. Employees sometimes find themselves lost among the new workflows, missing out on key compliance approaches, etc. This will lead to poor user adoption of the Salesforce platform.
To solve this, enterprises need to ensure that there are awareness programs in place to help users learn and experience the different facets of the platform. In addition, they could be provided with dedicated support communities both from within the organization as well as from external Salesforce communities. The transition to Salesforce should be a calibrated endeavor. Stakeholders from different teams should be provided an opportunity to be a part of the implementation exercise from the beginning. This will help in adding cultural, and operational styles of different teams while configuring or customizing the Salesforce implementation.
Salesforce is easy when you have the right partner
Salesforce is a great product without a doubt. However, every company has an operational DNA that has helped it to grow from inception. The best practices followed in sales cycles, the unique approaches in marketing and client outreach programs, the way campaigns were executed, etc. would have had an immense impact on how the business operated from its early days. Hence, their journey into Salesforce will need to navigate a fresh path to realize the best benefits.
Businesses need to approach a Salesforce implementation as a strategic move to strengthen not just a particular function. Instead, the focus should be driving experiences that customers will love. This will allow the enterprise to pick Salesforce offerings that are best tailored for the end result. To do so, they need a technology partner experienced in handling Salesforce implementations and customizations at scale. This is where Trinus can be a huge asset. Get in touch with us to explore ways to make the most of your Salesforce investments.