Salesforce is a journey
Don’t expect to implement, sign off and move on. Start with one business process and then move onto others. Salesforce have three big releases a year – you need to have a process in place for preparing for, and implementing these new features. There is nothing worse than seeing a Salesforce org that is missing loads of great functionality that has been available for two years.
Focus on the User
Your number one measure of success is user adoption. It doesn’t matter how cool the features are, or what a great integration you have built if no-on uses it. Limit the number of fields you have. Make sure your business processes flow neatly from one object to another. Make sure that the system helps your users to do their job and is not used as a tool to micro manage them. They need to love it to log in.
It’s a platform.
You might have purchased Salesforce for your sales or support process – but it is a great platform to build any of your business processes on. Expenses and Holidays are great ones because you know your users will want to login to set them up! Expand this out to your recruitment and new starter process, your purchasing and 121 process. You can even open up your system to customers and partners with portals. Giving all your users a single platform to carry out all their business tasks is a great thing to do!
Chatter
I love Chatter. It’s such an easy way to bring your team together to collaborate. But focus on Object Chatter – each lead, opportuntity, case or custom objects – they all have Chatter feeds. Don’t email someone “What’s happening with the ACME opportunity?” Chatter from the record and everyone following the record gets a nice history of what’s happening. Use free apps like Chatter Auto Follow and Chatter Swarm to make sure the right people follow the right records – i.e. the Sales Director auto follows Opps when they get to Negotiation stage.
Your Chatterati (heavy Chatter users) are your most engaged employees. Create offline prizes for question and answer of the month to drive up usage amongst others and raise the profile of your Chatterati.
Executive Engagement
If your Execs use Salesforce then everything else will follow. They should ask questions in Chatter and answer questions in Chatter. If users know that is where they operate then future questions will come that way. There are some neat iPhone and iPad apps for Chatter and Dashboards that can make it really easy for execs to stay on top of their business when travelling and waiting for meetings. I’d also suggest getting one or two of your Exec to go to Cloudforce in London, or better still Dreamforce in San Francisco. It is so powerful for your Execs to see the CEO’s and CTO’s of companies like Burburry and Facebook talking about how Salesforce is letting them take their business in new directions. Inspiring stuff.
Things to make you go Hmmmm!
I finished off with some things to watch out for that can derail an implementation. Too many fields, and then making those fields required when no-one fills them in. Making lots of people administrators because they can’t see certain things. Throwing up new Objects on a whim.
Your Salesforce org is a thing of beauty – it needs to be looked after properly and this requires an element of rigour and process.
If you want to hear more about Salesforce.com, from a range of speakers, why not come along to the next
Forcewest?