Strategies for Maximizing your Salesforce Investment

By RafterOne
strategies-for-maximizing-your-salesforce-investment

Read on as Jill Penfield, Sr. Manager, Architects / Lead Experience Cloud Architect at RafterOne talks about different strategies to maximize your Salesforce investment.

Lately, I have been hearing a lot of buzz around the importance of maximizing your Salesforce investment. This is a long-overdue buzz. Let’s be real – Salesforce isn’t the low-cost option and I truly do believe you get what you pay for. However, it’s like buying a Tesla. The value isn’t just in the car “today,” the value is in every update. Maybe today you have to drive yourself to the local grocery store, but with the next update your Tesla can drive you, and while you sit in the car, it can also order and pick up your groceries, and cook your dinner!  

So, how has the Salesforce landscape changed? Back in the day when I was a Salesforce Admin, I was “enough.” I was a solo administrator for a medium-sized company and was able to keep up with all the requests that come along with a Sales Cloud implementation. Knowing what I know today, I can confidently say that even as we grew as a team and an organization, there was no way we could keep up with, nor specialize in, all that the Salesforce platform has to offer.  For example, Salesforce has been announcing that it’s time to start moving all of your process builders and workflows to Lightning Flow, as they will end of life-ing those automation tools!  There was no way I could have run the day-to-day administration of the platform and undertaken a huge project like that.  Over the next few months, keep an eye out for more information on how we can help you with your migration! 

Maximize Your Salesforce Investment  

To get the most out of your Salesforce implementation, we are asking our customers to look beyond the implementation and consider their strategy for success. Success is adoption. Success is continuous improvement and feedback loops. Success is forward-thinking. You will struggle to be successful if you think that “winning” is a one-and-done implementation. Don’t get me wrong, your implementation is important – it’s your foundation, your ticket “in.” However, an investment in a robust and ever-changing technology will always need nurturing.  

With all this being said, here’s our recipe for success when maximizing the value of your Salesforce investment:   

1. Take Advantage of Salesforce’s Multi-cloud Offerings

I know this is old news and Salesforce has been multi-cloud since the days of sales vs. service. However, there are SO MANY more clouds, and within those clouds, there are additional specialized products. If you have read any of my other blogs, I am big on layers, and Salesforce is all about layers. But it’s a big job for one administrator to be fluent in the setup and best practices of all the clouds and products available today. Today, almost 40% of Salesforce customers are multi-cloud and/or multi-product. Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Manufacturing Cloud, Experience Cloud, Field Service, CPQ, Billing, Digital Engagement, etc. It’s important to consider what products will add value to your organization.  

2. View Success as Ongoing

So, you have gone live with your initial implementation, your users are crawling out of their “new process” anxieties, and things are starting to run smoothly. Guess what? This is a great start, but you aren’t done, yet (at least, you shouldn’t be). Yes, you can take a breath and bask in your successful rollout, but you should also start planning for your enhancement journey. 43% of customers aren’t even taking advantage of even HALF of the available functionality within their original investment. This is such a loss! So you should be considering the following: How are you building your roadmap? What is your strategy for continuous improvement and success? What additional Salesforce (or complementary) technologies can bring value? What features do you have access to right now that you aren’t utilizing? 

3. Adoption is King 

Did you know that 32% of CRM customers struggle to achieve a 75% adoption rate? Yikes! I’ll state the obvious: if your users aren’t…you know, using what you have rolled out, you have a big problem. Adoption is extremely important. Low adoption can hurt productivity, decrease data accuracy, waste money, and overall, just prevents you from maximizing your investment! Have you considered your plan to ensure and improve upon adoption? How are you getting feedback from your users? How are you driving people to utilize the functionality? How are you determining where there are gaps that are affecting usage? Who will be keeping an eye on the metrics that represent adoption? Adoption is very important overall, so it’s vital to have a plan. 

4. Planning is Winning

As you can see from 1-3, the name of the game is ABP… Always. Be. Planning.  

  • Plan for your product roadmap.  
  • Plan for your enhancement 
  • Plan your adoption strategy.  
  • Always have a plan, not just for what you are going to do, but how you are going to do it, and how you are going to measure its success. Without a plan, your implementation can become stagnant, which is so unfortunate considering how much you have invested!  

There is a lot you can do with Salesforce, and with technology in general. By properly investing in not just the product, but your strategy, you will gain momentum and adoption!  

You most likely can’t put this all on your administrator or internal team. 63% of companies deploy outsourced, always-on management and ongoing innovation of their Salesforce implementations. Instead of having a power admin (and maybe a developer) that is focused on siloed tasks and initiatives, just hoping to cross enough things off the list to get more budget, by outsourcing some of those initiatives you can focus on optimizing your current usage and building on that foundational success.  

Lucky for you, we have a Customer Success team dedicated to helping our customers plan for success, boost adoption, and supplement in-house teams to close the skill gap. If you’re interested in learning more, please fill out the form here to talk to our Salesforce experts and understand how you can take the next step in maximizing your Salesforce investment!