The global business environment will experience massive changes in the coming years. New brands are emerging and implementing multiple business expansion and CRM tactics. All these initiatives get driven towards gaining increased brand visibility, more sales, more customers, better CRM, and converting more leads into loyal customers. And here, it is essential to opt-in for an advanced CRM solution. If your company wants to implement a CRM solution, you can say yes to Salesforce CRM.  

The Salesforce CRM rules over the global customer experience as well as relationship management domain. It is a clear winner when it comes to a Salesforce review. Today, it’s market share is about 20%. Customers and companies have access to the Salesforce CRM in various editions, and it is also made available for specific industrial verticals as well. The solution gets hosted by Salesforce data centers, secures customer data, and also makes proper use of it. 

The implementation process

From a company or customer perspective, Salesforce deployment is easy. And the success of this execution gets based on the selection of the product, the required integrations with various other systems, the implementation approach, support, and user training.

Other than the CRM application, the cloud-based Salesforce platform offers companies and business houses with a steady series of enterprise applications. It is available all through the services, commerce, insights, sales, and marketing sections. The implementations are alike for all these sections. Hence, companies must get in touch with an expert Salesforce implementation service provider, who can help them with this process correctly. That way, the solution receives implemented successfully within an affordable expense and within very little time as well. You can browse online and search for an implementation service provider and make sure that you choose a leading name to stay away from scams.

The three simple steps to follow

Companies can implement Salesforce CRM in three easy steps. They are as follows:

  • Introducing the Salesforce CRM 

The very first step in implementing Salesforce CRM is the agreement that exists between multiple customers and stakeholders. It is also essential to consider the Salesforce execution partner as well. It would be best if you also considered the team accountabilities, the project objectives, the business advantages agreed by the project team, the deliverables, and the timelines. It would be best if you did the business mapping against the product functions. There might be a functionality gasp that you can document when you are planning a customized implementation. Companies also need to analyze and document system integration. There might be a few changes in the project deliverables based on the integration requirements and product functions. 

  • By creating the Salesforce CRM

It is the second step, and it includes the following steps:

  • Training users.
  • Developing and generating the test platforms. 
  • Product administration activities. 
  • Complete testing. 
  • Loading information. 
  • Complete customizations and configurations. 
  • A pilot system gets executed, which initiates the production platform conversion.

All these processes get executed with dedicated teams for the Salesforce execution partner, along with weekly deliverables. The deliverables here finished test platforms and pi9lot roll out. It also includes the critical user and administrator training.

  • Executing the Salesforce CRM 

It is an essential process, and it comprises of the following steps:

  • Loading the complete production of seed information.
  • Generation of customer reviews. 
  • Full system generation conversion initiatives.
  • Go-live assistance as mentioned in the project plan
  • The systems get placed on live-mode production. 

These are the three steps that you need to complete for implementing Salesforce. The platform back-up is a recurring activity and gets offered by various consumer requirements. Usually, users can have support internally. Also, the users can engage the assistance partners daily.

A few challenges you need to know about 

While the three steps make Salesforce implementation easy, companies at times face some problems as well. Some of the common issues that you need to stay aware of are:

  • Preference for changing the product functions over the business process

There are times when consumers ask for changes in the product functions to cater to present business requirements. It is here that the customers ask for a vast number of customizations to the product negating the advantage of the usual CRM solution execution. It can result in multiple situations like:

  • The customization process takes a considerable amount of time and gets very costly.
  • It negates the advantages of the essential product functions in the business.
  • Maximizes the maintenance costs to the customer as the customizations require to get revisited after any product upgrade. 
  • There’s ample personalization that might result in Salesforce implementation failure. 
  • Excess real-time integrations

Most end-users get inclined to see the information in real-time, across multiple systems. Hence, there’s a need for maintenance for integrated systems as well. It can bring in some complexities leading to the business process shutdowns. Usually, there are three kinds of integration’s

  • Near-real time, which is message based. 
  • Real-time, which is UI based.
  • Batch that is based on the timely data loads.

Usually, it’s the Salesforce execution partners authenticating the entire integration needs. Some various integrations and touch-points develop this.

  • A know-how gap with the subscription software as against the purchased software

There’s a gap in the customer’s understanding of subscribing to the cloud software versus purchasing an on-premise software. The Salesforce implementation partner needs to educate the customer in such situations. A few reasons for opting in for software subscription are:

  1. Reduced support expenses. 
  2. Zero upfront capital investments and monthly subscription expenses. 
  3. Fast execution time frames. 

Even though the user doesn’t own the CRM software in the subscription model, they have complete access to it. The customer is the custodian of all the data. 

  • Data quality concerns 

The seed data gets loaded in the production CRM format as implementation. The data loading time depends on the data accuracy as against the data volume. Hence, the customer needs to check the seed data quality to avert all the deployment delays.

These are some of the pertinent points about Salesforce implementation. It helps you to go ahead with the implementation process with complete knowledge.