5 STEPS TO
Introduction
So you’ve implemented Salesforce and have begun your Salesforce journey!
Congratulations – Salesforce is the number one CRM system and you can now manage your current and future customer relationships more effectively.
Simplify
Before you get defensive, no - one is accusing you or your businesses project team of over complicating things when you implemented Salesforce. And the partner or person that set up Salesforce was acting as instructed so you can’t blame them (well maybe you can). But when we are brought into administrate Salesforce for a business that has had the system set up in the last 18-24 months this is always the first thing we hear people say. Whether the users are in sales, marketing, projects or administration; page layouts are often too long and cluttered, and users see far too much irrelevant information.
Assuming you have ‘Enterprise’, you will have access to ‘Profiles’ and the advanced security settings that come with this edition.
Running around asking management and day to day users which fields they do and don’t use is as an effective use of your time as getting involved in a Facebook debate on religion.
So instead install Qandor’s Field Trip app (free on the Appexchange):
The next step is to make sure that your profiles are correctly assigned and that page layouts are changing based on the logged in user. This will make sure that people only see the information relevant to them on any given page, saving a whole lot of confusion and page scrolling in their day to day routine.
Below is the current page layout for an opportunity page. The fields and buttons are relevant to the project manager and his team but not all are relevant for the sales user.
Project Manager View - Project management specific fields and buttons
Editing the page layout for a sales user allows them to display only the information they want and need to see. Sales Manager View – No more clutter!
Data
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Data
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Data
You thought you were going to get through a systems administration guide without having to read more about the most boring topic on earth? Wrong! Data quality is a huge part of your CRM success story and is easier than most people think to stay on top of!
Where to start? The old data wasn’t great, the new data is already out of sync, and your users feel like they can’t save a record without having to enter your customers, uncles, step sisters birthday in case marketing ever send that ‘distant step sister’ campaign they talk about once every year.
1. Set your rules up (in Dupecatcher) and strike a balance between ease of use and data quality. Go too strong either way and you’ll upset this delicate space/time continuum, and the world will end.
A no brainer is to download a duplicate catching app for the front end of Salesforce;
We recommend DupeCatcher, and best of all it’s free!
2. Go easy on the mandatory fields. Just two paragraphs ago we spoke about the ‘balance’ between user adoption and data quality. Here is where that battle is won and lost. Talk to marketing and management about the 5 most important pieces of information you need from your prospects and customers. Make sure these are mandatory and that sales are told the importance of gathering this information.
3. Work smart not hard. If you are going to require that users capture ‘Country’ as a required field then stop building that 196 dropdown menu immediately. Don’t give people a text field either so you’re running report filters on USA, U.S.A AND “urited snates of amerkia”.
Download ProvenWorks app – Country Complete.
Country Complete gives users a full list of countries to choose from. No mistakes. Ever.
Automate
Wherever possible use Salesforce to automate tasks and communication for both customers and employees. Talk to the different departments and figure out what processes are long and manual. Then use workflow rules to automate these steps.
Marketing are trying hard to produce as many leads as possible for sales to convert. Sales like to devote their time to the customers and accounts who spend big bucks on your products and services. The result can be that many of your smaller value leads get ignored and hiring more sales employees for those small deals might not be cost effective.
Explore
Salesforce is huge. It’s a full time job staying on top of features from new releases, Apps on the AppExchange and the product eco system that revolves around your Salesforce.com system. Should you be using Pardot or data.com? What are the new communities capable of for your partners and customers? Who else in your industry uses functionality you’re not aware of? Could a few simple APEX triggers solve a massive business issue? These are things we stay on top of every day for our customers.
Well you have a couple of choices here. If your business is able to allocate a dedicated Salesforce administrator then he/she should be attending webinars and events, learning new skills and attending training and certification sessions as often as possible. An in house expert is great but if they have no exposure to other instances of Salesforce then they have a horse blinkered view of what’s available and possible. The AppExchange is a great hunting ground for solutions and a good place to start.
Monitor
We love this part. Reporting is at the very heart of Salesforce and CRM as a whole. What good is all this information if you can’t then accurately use it to make good business decisions?
This is your typical scenario: Reports are made by management, users and system admins, and therefore stored all over the place. There are 5 different reports built in 5 different ways displaying the same information and the sales guys are fighting over who generated more new business last year. Marketing, sales and management all disagree on the metrics and filters for reporting.
Summary
We doubt that any of the steps we have covered come as a massive shock to those of you who took the time to read it. In fact these are simple steps for success when maintaining any worthy CRM system and not just Salesforce. Through our years of experience we have learnt that…
If you have any questions or need help regarding Salesforce please do not hesitate to contact the consultants at CloudSocius who will be happy to assist you.
Simple = Success
Clicks not code (when possible)
Constant maintenance and administration are vital
