Implementation of Salesforce is a challenging job for many organizations, and it should also be done well in order to reap the best benefits of it. Therefore, it is advisable to get a consultant for Salesforce implementation projects if you do not have the internal expertise and needed resources for handling large Salesforce implementation projects. While choosing the right partner also, you have various options to choose from. You have to get a skilled expert consultant as a freelancer or go for a registered partner for Salesforce consulting for the implementation.
Freelancers may offer higher flexibility and reduce the cost by being a reliable contact point. Still, they may be struggling with large project implementations with a lack of resources. Compared with these freelancers, the registered consulting partner for Salesforce may be more verifiable and reliable in large projects. In addition, certified experts may have the expertise to tackle various Salesforce projects irrespective of that extensivity. Registered Salesforce partners may also bring a skilled team on board with qualified professionals who can resolve various challenges during the time of implementation. Let us further discuss a few important points to note for Salesforce implementation projects. Even if you rely on a freelancer or a registered partner, these checkpoints are applicable.
Establishing a timeline for your project
While setting up project timelines, you have to consider a few crucial things to ensure success. It all starts with the possible dependencies. First, ensure that you have a perfect understanding of what the objectives of your Salesforce implementation are. Any such initiatives one tries to take any time of a standard Salesforce implementation must not overlap with any other big projects which run simultaneously. Finally, you need to take stock of the Salesforce project implementation team’s crucial members and ensure that they are not tied up with or committed to other critical projects, and they can dedicate their time to the Salesforce project.
You should also try to consider a solid timeline that is optimal for your Salesforce project implementation. Having this approach will help to minimize the distractions when you go live. Once after settling with a realistic timeline for the project, you may further try to set the important project milestones on your project calendar as mapping various processes, alpha-beta tests, the kick-off of the project, etc. If you plan to work with a Salesforce consultant, you may try to make all these deliverables clear beforehand and keep all the things moving as per the set timeline.
Set the success metrics
There are various approaches to define the Salesforce project success. For example, you may be trying to reduce the case resolution time by 30%, trying to reduce the churn rate of customers by 10%, trying to improve the lead conversion rate by 20%, and so on. However, defining the goals and objectives clearly will give you a tangible target to measure the success of any of your Salesforce implementation projects.
Define the communication channels
It will be ideal to have the project managers oversee all your implementations to address all the concerns that arise during the project to keep it on the right track. The implementation teams require their communication channels between the constituents and the implementers, and the team itself. Provider like Flosum ensures this at the very first point. You have to ask some important questions like
- How do we document any distractions in the set project timeline based on the facts?
- How to implement things so as we are not meeting up with any unforeseen obstacles?
- Whether we worked out what we know may take a longer period to accomplish so that the project does not hold up in between?
Building the implementation team
On choosing to adopt the services of a reliable consultant for your Salesforce project, this person or small team will act as an essential part of your project implementation team. However, in this case, too, the consultant may not be the only part of the project. For all the Salesforce projects, during implementation, there should be various members as project owner, project manager, system administrator, power user, etc. Many of these roles may tend to overlap based on the size of the project, but all these have unique functions.
- Executive Sponsor of a Salesforce project is the project champion who will stay responsible for the overall success of the given project. Responsibilities of this specific role may also cover the job of advocating the project to all the stakeholders at various levels, ensuring appropriate alignment, providing a strategic direction to it during the project implementation, and motivating all the other team members to work towards the set goals, etc.
- The project owner is the person who acts as the leader of the project for implementation. This role may be responsible for defining the project’s scope in line with the organization’s business process. They should also be overseeing the project through its course of progress until completion. This role may go to the business head most of the time, which receives the final implementation.
- The project manager also plays a critical decision-making role during Salesforce implementation. The responsibility of a project manager may vary based on the nature and size of the implementation project. A project manager is also responsible for holding all the users and stakeholders accountable for the responsibilities. In addition, the project manager ensures to keep the project administration on track. On choosing to join hands with a registered consultancy for Salesforce implementation, the project manager will also act as the single point of contact between the provider and the implementing client organization.
- The system admin role is responsible for managing all the daily activities of the Salesforce system through the implementation and make sure that all the features and functionalities are made available. System admins may be from various levels of the organization and can be chosen from any department. So, they need to be familiar with the structure of the organization and the business objectives. In addition, they should be excellent in their communication skills too.
- Finally, Power Users will offer valuable feedback to the project implementers at various stages of the process. They also help the project owners and project managers to make sure that the system they try to implement meets the expected degree of functions and needs of the real uses. Power users should be the tech-savvy person who is capable of understanding and pinpointing the potential challenges and the risks in Salesforce project implementation.
The success of Salesforce implementation may be depending largely on how the end uses tend to use it. The Salesforce platforms may be very powerful and have the ability to transform any of the given business processes from the ground up to higher levels. So, the change management practices are also supposed to go a long way in ensuring appropriate user adoption. However, the key element in Salesforce implementation is implementing reliable solutions which the real constituents may want to use. One should also try to define the actual user group as the sales team, marketing team, teams for project management, finance team, operations team, customer service, customer success management team, development team, etc. It is not a comprehensive list of user groups as there can be more. Frequently, a constituent base may also belong to more than one of the categories mentioned above in many organizations.
All these culminate into a go-live checklist to perform the Salesforce implementation by minimizing any negative impacts. After running all these steps, you should also conduct a comprehensive quality check on deploying it into production to ensure that you get it done most desirably.
