Avoid These Common Mistakes In Your Next Salesforce Project Discovery
Nov 17th, 2021
After investing in a Salesforce implementation, creating educational resources, and scheduling mandatory training, there are still users who aren’t doing it the right way. It’s affecting adoption and the higher-ups are beginning to hear more and more complaints about Salesforce.
If the implementation did not involve the level of detailed analysis necessary to accurately capture business processes, then the result will be an implementation that feels disjointed to your users.
Here’s how to align your implementation with business needs:
Identify which groups have the hardest time adopting Salesforce. Talk to the most vocal critics of the current implementation. The temptation is to think they’ll never be satisfied, but the truth is that they want to be productive and have opinions on how to make the solution designed for them work for them.
While conducting interviews, identify the pain points and frustrations. Some of them may be ‘user errors’ and others will illuminate real problems that need to be solved.
Now that the pain points have been discovered, what would the perfect process look like? Maybe there are one or two steps in the process that can be removed or refined.
Build the proof of concept and socialize with your users. Collect constructive feedback, refine, and deploy. After deployment, follow up with your users to see how changes are improving their adoption. Implementation never ends, so keep on refining and improving.
Does your process call for frequent ‘pit stops’? For instance, do your users frequently need to:
If your users spend more time out of Salesforce than in, they’ll start to wonder why they are there in the first place.
Users are smart. They are ultimately looking for efficiency and speed. If it’s easier to track information in Excel, they’ll be creating more and more workbooks. No matter how much benefit the platform provides to the business as a whole, if users are not given the most efficient way to use Salesforce they will not adopt it!
Identify tools that can make integration easier. Integration tools like MuleSoft make it easy to connect Salesforce to external applications and data sources. Learn more about MuleSoft here: https://www.mulesoft.com/
Using a spreadsheet for Time-Tracking? There is probably a great solution on the App Exchange.
https://appexchange.salesforce.com/
If important data that needs to be referenced easily will continue to live outside of Salesforce, Salesforce provides a way to do it without using up precious storage.
External objects behave like custom objects but map to data that is stored outside Salesforce. Learn how to create and manage external objects here.
It’s tempting to blame the user when the problem is implementation. By focusing on the business processes and chasing down ways to increase the time users want to spend in Salesforce, you can create meaningful and positive change in adoption and perception.
Author: Grand Ongstad, Salesforce Consultant
I could not have picked a better partner to help navigate us through the road blocks that popped up. They remained responsive to us the entire way through. I spent many phone calls bouncing process ideas and solutions off our consultant as we collaboratively developed solutions. Not just a vendor, but the definition of a true partner. We will continue to utilize EightCloud as a resource in our Salesforce instance."
- Justin Larsen, Abatement Technologies
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