Successful Salesforce Implementation and It’s Benefits

A complete understanding of business processes, employee experiences and the customer's journey is required in this transformation process. You as clients can better understand the people who matter most to you, build brand love, innovate and continuously experiment more. In this article, let’s discuss the steps for a successful Salesforce implementation and its benefits.

Define Vision.

You may start with identifying your key business processes. You need to be specific, it can be any organizational process that you want to be more effective when supported by a new system. It can be either application management, donation management or anything. The most important thing is you identify the process that plays a vital role in your organization mission and vision and prioritizes your processes based on mission-critical workflows.

For instance, if you’ve done the theory of change work, identify the processes that are most crucial to achieving that change. Also, note the data required to measure your outcomes against it. Looking at the bigger picture will help you identify where a Salesforce system will have the biggest impact. Salesforce can help you manage virtually all the processes in your organization, so you may want to prioritize what to address first.

Find your Salesforce Team:

In Salesforce implementation, selecting the right team is half the battle won.

Executive Leader: You will need to buy-in from your executive leadership. The success of a system implementation depends on a lot of the Executive investment. It is very critical as the process may be undermined or stalled if its initial direction is not approved from the beginning.

Project Manager: A project manager oversees the whole process and ensures that the deadlines are not missed. He is also your single point of contact for project updates. To make sure that organizational feedback is factored into your system’s design, you need a well-versed Project Manager and subject matter expert(s). Make certain that they have availability and deep knowledge about your business processes.

System administrator: Finally, you need to designate the person or team who will administer the system after deployment (System Administrator), which may be the same as those who manage the implementation. You should be able to identify and reach out to the key people in your organization who will need to participate in the project. Ensure they have the capacity to take ownership of the system and also ascertain who will administer and provide support for the system after it’s deployed.

Mapping data and integration:

You should start mapping out each process step by step once you have chosen the process to be addressed. You need to focus on the objectives, resources, and people involved. Once your Your Salesforce integration partner provides questionnaires to help you outline these processes, take inventory of your systems and data that needs to be incorporated into the system, and validate your findings with subject matter experts for your programs.

Identify tools that need to share data with your system, such as those for mass email. Discuss early with your implementation partner in what format the data will need to be collected for migration to your new system. You may also want to “cleanse” your data to make the process.

Plan Your Timing Carefully:

Managing time carefully is another very important criteria for implementation of a new system. The process requires a dedicated time from your staff that they may not have during your busiest seasons. You should co.ordinate with your implementation partner. For instance: you should not implement a new system during your application period if you want to manage an application process through Salesforce, as it’s unlikely the staff with the most knowledge of the process will have time to spend in project meetings.

Think About Licenses:

Your nonprofit is eligible for 10 free licenses from the Salesforce.com Foundation and deeply discounted licenses after the first 10. The Salesforce.com Foundation is based on a simple idea: Leverage Salesforce.com’s people, technology, and resources to build collective knowledge and enable action to improve communities throughout the world. This integrated philanthropic approach is called the 1/1/1 model. Through the Salesforce.com Foundation, Salesforce.com donates 1% of their employees’ time, 1% of the company’s equity and 1% of their product to nonprofits. Consider how many people will need licenses to your new Salesforce system. There might be users that only need access to limited features. Depending on the access needed and the system design, different lower-cost Salesforce licenses may be an option.

Prepare For Training:

As we discussed in an earlier section, you will need to have both a project manager for implementation and eventually a trained system administrator on staff. It will be very helpful for these team members to have some technical aptitude, and to have exposure to Salesforce, so that they can more effectively participate during your implementation. Most implementation providers and Salesforce.com provide training on using your system and Salesforce in general. Also, consider how you may prepare for your staff to adopt your new system. We recommend keeping it simple and emphasizing the relevant features for each staff role. You can create in-house training material and conduct training.

Embrace Flexibility and Make It Sustainable.

We recommend approaching your implementation with flexibility. One pitfall nonprofits run into is trying to do everything at once. We encourage you to pace yourself and have an ongoing budget for maintaining and enhancing your system. It’s like building a house and making improvements to it as needs change. Salesforce is an agile system that is intended to adjust as your organization does. Think of iteration, rather than a one-time permanent installation.

Benefits Of Salesforce Implementation

Once Salesforce Implementation is done, you may have to know how should you use Salesforce in order, so that your employee can use Salesforce and improve their performance. There are a number of benefits which the organizations can get, after Salesforce implementation:

Limited read-only access  

Salesforce helps in providing a platform to publish articles on various channels, Fields can also be controlled and access to information to any specific user can also be provided. The four channels provided by Salesforce to publish articles are a partner, customer, internal app and public knowledge base.

Knowledge sharing on public or customer or partner portal

The Salesforce knowledge app is used to publish or share any relevant information. Salesforce communities help in publishing and sharing the knowledge with partners or customers.

Multiple Language Support

Through Salesforce you can get multiple language support through which you can use various articles and publish them in different languages and overcome the hurdle of a language barrier for a global presence.

Content Storage and Organization

With the help Salesforce, you can easily store, organize and manage content. You can make your content readily available for your use as per its authenticity.

To summarize

Salesforce can tremendously improve workforce productivity and customer satisfaction. However, implementing Salesforce properly can be complex, time-consuming, and expensive for an organization without prior experience. With the experience of an implementation partner, you can deliver quality Salesforce Consulting services quickly and cost-effectively, at minimal risk to our clients.