Implementing Salesforce is a decision that is guaranteed to change your business. Whether that change is good or bad is entirely dependent on whether or not your implementation is successful.
To help you ensure your Salesforce implementation is successful, I’ve pulled together a list of 10 things you need to keep in mind that will be sure to help you stay on track and lead a successful implementation.
Rule #1: Clearly Identify Your Business Processes
The reason you implement Salesforce, or any business tool, is to meet business requirements. It is for this reason that you’re considering Salesforce in the first place, so you’ll want to make sure that you’re laser-focused and chasing the right objectives rather than getting distracted with all the shiny features.
You need to engage your stakeholders early and often. Ensure you fully understand their pain points, the outcomes that they’re looking to achieve, and how they would like to see these metrics displayed in analytics. Understand what menial tasks take additional time for your business users to help identify areas to automate.
Rule #2: Design BEFORE You Touch the System
As exciting as it is to get your hands dirty and start building, don’t pick up a single tool until you know exactly where you’re going, what you’re doing, and how you plan to get there. Clarity from the outset will lead you to a more successful implementation. Think of it like this – you wouldn’t get in the car and start driving until you had a clear understanding of exactly where you were going, right?
“If I had an hour to solve a problem, I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions.” Albert Einstein
Take it from a seasoned Salesforcer – as exciting as it is to jump straight in and start building, sometimes not truly understanding the problem and properly designing the solution in its entirety before starting build can lead you to some not-too-good builds that don’t fit the bill. The only way to truly mitigate this is by taking the time up front to ensure your outcome meets a very specific set of requirements that align with your business success metrics.
Rule #3: Leverage Record Types Instead of Creating New Objects
Carefully consider what the purpose of a new custom object will be before you build it, and consider if there is a standard object that should be leveraged for that same purpose. Quite often, new implementations will be taken off track almost immediately by creating a custom object where one is not required.
Consider this scenario: You’re a property development company that is looking to keep track of the brokers you work with. You’re already using accounts and contacts to track the property developers that actually execute the developments, so you decide to create a custom Brokers object.
Sure, this works in the short term, but then you learn that you could’ve just created another account and contact record type and leveraged those. Now you’re losing out on a number of valuable features like the prebuilt reports, out-of-the-box record sharing that accounts offer, and the ability to integrate with a number of very popular third-party tools. Yes, you can build workarounds, but if you could have avoided it by simply leveraging accounts in the first place, it would have saved a lot of time and ongoing maintenance.
Rule #4: Keep on Top of Salesforce Changes and Product Retirements
Implementing a product or feature that is on its way out can lead not only to a difficult implementation but also have a major negative impact on adoption. Salesforce tends to deprecate features when there is a bigger and better replacement – see Workflow Rules and Process Builder folding in favour of Flow. It’s always a better idea to use the newer, better tool than the older one, as you’d be avoiding technical debt from the outset.
Salesforce introduced a new product in March of 2023 – Nonprofit Cloud. Simply put, this new cloud offering allowed nonprofit customers to purchase an off-the-shelf application that existed entirely on core, as opposed to needing to manage the NPSP as was historically required. Salesforce was also clear that the NPSP functionality would remain, but that Nonprofit Cloud would be where all the future enhancements would go.
If you weren’t fully across this change, you may have rushed in and installed a new NPSP implementation, not realizing that there was a much better alternative available to you. It is for this reason that it’s critical to stay on top of updates and changes to Salesforce products (which are very common).
Rule #5: Document Everything as You Go
We all love LEGO (if you read that and shook your head, you’re lying to yourself!). There’s nothing quite like opening a new box, opening the manual, and getting stuck into a new plastic project. That experience would be quite different if we were given a kit without the instructions. A joyous experience just became a daunting, frustrating one. Don’t be the reason someone has a sad LEGO experience in your Salesforce implementation project.
As you design, document. As you build, document. As you’re preparing for training and UAT, document. Make sure every decision and new build item is carefully documented so there’s no question as to why things have been done a certain way, or if business requirements have been taken into account, or how your configuration has been built.
Think of it this way – you’d be better off over-documenting than under-documenting. You also want to make sure you document as early in the process as you can, to prepare for that ‘hit-by-a-bus’ scenario.
Rule #6: Only Automate When Things Can Be Done Manually First
This is a common mistake I’ve seen so many times in my time working with Salesforce. So many get so excited about the ability to automate and take menial tasks away from users that they forget to build in the ability to do it manually first. You may be asking why that matters, and I ask in return: are automations foolproof? If your answer is no (which it should be), then you’ll need to make sure there is some way for work to continue if an automation fails or needs to be temporarily paused.
Another reason this is important is that if you design for automation first, you’ll often not be validating the actual requirement properly. During your implementation, you should aim to ensure your business users are able to perform their BAU (business as usual) tasks using the new tool, but not necessarily aiming for heavy degrees of additional automation in the first phase.
Anything that they had to do manually previously should be moved onto the platform in a manual way until users are used to doing things the new way on the system. This also gives an opportunity to make sure that nothing is being missed or done incorrectly, and gives opportunity for the business users and admins alike to get to know the tools available to them better before recklessly applying them.
Rule #7: Monitor Adoption, Foster Collaboration Ideation
It’s one thing to own a Ferrari – it’s another to actually take it out for a drive. You could build the most impeccable system on the face of the earth, with no system in history ever aligning better to a business’s processes and intelligent enough to predict needs before they come up. The issue is that if no one actually uses that system, what’s the point?
This is why adoption is one of the most critical factors for any Salesforce implementation. Adoption is the metric that truly determines whether or not all the hard work you’ve done to date will benefit your business.
There are a few things you should consider when implementing Salesforce to help aid user adoption from the outset:
Firstly, make sure you involve key users in the design process. Your users are the ones who will be using the system, so you want to make sure they’re taking ownership from the design phase and ensuring the system does what they need it to do.
Secondly, keep it simple! We talked about reducing the excessive automation from the beginning. I would further that by saying that you should try to minimize the other fancy bells and whistles. Complexity is the enemy of success, and simplicity will drive you toward greater user adoption.
Thirdly, make training relevant and available to your users. If your users aren’t quite sure how to use specific features of the system, then they’re much less likely to actually use them. Users who have access to relevant training before they’re set loose on the system will be much more confident in what they’re doing and more likely to adopt the system entirely.
To help keep track of adoption, Salesforce offers some additional Adoption Dashboards that you can use to assist in the tracking of user adoption.
Rule #8: Schedule Regular Health Checks and Revisions
Your Salesforce implementation is like your most intimate relationships (stick with me here) – if you aren’t giving it the attention it deserves and making sure it is healthy, you’ll run into problems! While most of your implementation will chug along smoothly with next to no input, it’s very important that you keep checking up on it to ensure its general health, that it is serving your business processes as they evolve, and that your security is up to date.
Your business evolves, as it should. Your Salesforce implementation has the capacity to evolve as well, and it should too. The beautiful thing about a platform like the one Salesforce is that it can evolve alongside your business, but this doesn’t happen automatically – you need to constantly assess the landscape to make sure you’re staying on top of things.
Salesforce offers a number of tools to assist with keeping on top of your org. You can leverage out-of-the-box Reports and Dashboards to keep on top of your data and key business success metrics. You can then use built-in tools like Health Check to keep your org running like a well-oiled machine. You should also review the outputs of features like the Setup Audit Trail.
We have put together a detailed guide on how to perform a full health check in your Salesforce org, which you can read about here.
Rule #9: Plan to Backup Your Data (Shared Responsibility Model)
We’ve spoken about the Shared Responsibility Model at length in this post, but at its core, it is a framework that Salesforce leverages to clearly identify which parts of your agreement it is responsible for, and which parts you are. For example, Salesforce is responsible for the infrastructure management (servers, data centers, etc.) while you are responsible for things like data protection and management.
Let me be clear – you are responsible for your data, including having a backup plan in the event of data loss. This means that if something happens and your data is lost, you need to have a plan in place so that interruptions to your business are kept to a minimum.
Own from Salesforce is a suite of backup and restoration tools that you could consider using, and they have a good reputation in the ecosystem. That being said, there are many other options, and you should always do your research to make sure you’re making the right decisions for your business.
Rule #10: Spend More Time on Training Than You Think You Need
We’ve had a similar point raised already (rule #5), but this point is unique and just as critical. You need to offer more training than you think is actually required to ensure your users are confident, attacking the right parts of the system, and have a good opportunity to ask questions rather than just being fed a curriculum.
While it may seem a bit redundant to spend so much time on training, it will certainly be something that has a long-term impact on the success of your Salesforce implementation, especially if you record those sessions to be shown to newcomers and kept as a refresher.
Echoing the earlier point: if you build the best system on the face of the earth, but it isn’t adopted very well due to lack of training and therefore confidence, it won’t have the same impact you’re hoping to achieve.
Bonus Rule: Keep It Super Simple!
This is less of a bonus point and more just an opportunity to reiterate an earlier point: keep things simple! Complexity is the enemy of execution, so make sure your implementation is kept relatively simple in at least the short term. Too much complexity and added functionality can be daunting, and change management is a major factor in the success of a Salesforce implementation.
The simpler your Salesforce implementation is, the less your users will need to wrap their heads around from the outset and the more confident they’ll be navigating the system.
Summary
Implementing Salesforce will always be such a critical step in helping a business gain immense value with the tools that it offers. If you’re leading or involved in an implementation, then it is your responsibility to get things right, as it will have a lasting impact on the users that you’re building for.
If you’re new to Salesforce implementation, is there anything else you’re looking for guidance on? If you’re a seasoned Salesforce veteran, what advice can you offer to those implementing for the first time?
