Evaluating your Salesforce implementation

First: Congratulations! The reason I say congratulations, even if you aren’t currently celebrating like you perhaps imagined when you started the journey, is that you landed in a system that gives you the ability to scale while providing the flexibility we will need moving forward in this discussion.

This is an exercise I really enjoy carrying out with clients, asking a simple question: What do you have in Salesforce? Depending on your background, your experience within IT or Business or your overall Salesforce experience the answers will differ widely: 

• “We have our Sale Process implemented which helps us to streamline our Sales efforts within our business”.
• “We have a 360 view of our customers! Well, it might not be a complete 360 view, but we have our customers tied to Orders and overview of support cases for these orders”.
• “We have our orchestration for our e-commerce checkout solution implemented in Salesforce to track the end-to-end process for a customer from initiation to delivery”. 

My follow-up question is typically: “But what do you really have? What is it that you have that makes customers choosing your company over your competitors, and what do you have that simplifies the life of your internal workforce to enable them to do their job in the best possible way? 

The answers here differ typically even further from the initial question, and you know what? That is totally fine! These are hard questions and if you think you have precise and solid answers on the above, congratulations again and you might not need to read further. 

Still here? Great, let us continue…

Personally, I have carried out multiple Salesforce establishments, i.e. introduction of Salesforce in a Company’s IT landscape, this is not an easy task regardless of if you are part of the Implementation team or on the customer side of the implementation. Both parties need to quickly establish a high level of trust, a stable operating model and agree on KPIs and metrics to being able to evaluate the progress and end-result. 

Perhaps you were sold on the MVP (Minimum Valuable Product) approach, where the most important processes were established initially, and a Roadmap determined the way forward? Perhaps you never got out of the “Project Phase” and is still operating as a Project while trying to juggle the day-to-day business by your users. 

When I talk to users of Salesforce, I get a feeling that the potential of the platform is rarely fully utilized, yes you have implemented your business processes and you have been able to streamline some parts of your business and removed some manual steps for your workforce. But you have perhaps, due to prioritizes or early poor design decisions, introduced new hurdles and manual steps?

It may also be those early decisions taken during the phase when your implementation partner was focused on the short-term goals of getting X into Salesforce comes back to haunt you, good intentions turn into technical debt and increased complexity of your business process you feel is so simple and straightforward! This is a frustration you are not alone with, and there are ways to both mitigate these risks early in the project and handle them if they are already present in your Salesforce Org. 

Let us leave the early process techniques for mitigating the risks of low ROI with Salesforce for another day and focus what you can do here and now with your already established implementation.