Businesses of all sizes are using Salesforce more and more, and this trend is predicted to continue. Without a doubt, the real financial returns on investment that businesses derive from their CRM investment account for this popularity. However, what are the true benefits, and how can one ensure they are fully realized to optimize return on investment in Salesforce? Our team of seasoned Salesforce consultants has dived deep into these questions and put together a list of tips and practices that could help companies make the most out of their Salesforce investment.
How does one arrive at ROI?
Let’s first briefly discuss how to approach the ROI estimates in general before we go any further. When companies are analyzing the potential to maximize investment value and impact, these three areas are critical considerations.
- Revenue optimization (increasing revenue, increasing profit margin, lowering operating costs)
- Customer experience (more customer satisfaction, higher wallet share, and lower customer attrition/loss)
- Adherence to regulations and risk management (reduction in the number of high-risk occurrences, general risk tolerance ratings, etc.).
Having said that, Salesforce provides the following numbers, using a different methodology. Businesses that utilize Salesforce witness:
- A rise in revenue by 25%
- A rise in customer satisfaction by 35%
- A rise in marketing return on investment by 25%
- An increase in customer service agent productivity by 34%.
Also Read
Don’t forget to checkout: How to Optimize Salesforce Lightning Reports and Dashboards?.
Align targets with your overall strategy
When implementing Salesforce, start by considering your top business objectives. Is one taking precedence over the others? Make it your compass and start by considering how Salesforce can help you in achieving it. By doing this, you can ensure that your implementation is in line with your overarching business plan. As you will soon see, this is crucial.
We cannot establish precise steps that businesses must follow to maximize the use of Salesforce. Every business operates differently, and the CRM needs to match its workflow and data structure. Yes, that also means that you should make sure your CRM offers the flexibility you require to customize it to your needs.
Our specialists were able to compile a brief but comprehensive list of the most crucial points that came up most frequently.
Plan for today and the future
You would have heard this many times- proper planning saves time during execution. Furthermore, it makes it possible to sail more smoothly into the frequently choppy waters of the future, when staying on course requires having a clear grasp of your target. Thus, take great care while planning your system upgrades, product roadmap, and adoption approach.
Effective planning merely accelerates your arrival at the break-even point of your CRM investment. You can start generating additional value for your business by digitizing some of the manual-intensive work with Salesforce.
We outline three steps to do this:
- Using a portion of your IT budget for platform innovation and experimentation.
- Actively soliciting and rewarding ideas from partners, customers, and staff.
- Investigating emerging technology.
Adoption
Did you know that nearly a third of CRM customers struggle to achieve an adoption rate of 75%? What does this tell you? That adoption is king!
Therefore, getting support for your solution is what matters most. Here, training is quite important, particularly when it comes to onboarding your users. However, don’t neglect to offer ongoing, professional technical support to make sure that minor technical issues won’t jeopardize your attempts to maximize return on investment.
Think about the end-to-end user experience.
Given the virtually limitless depth and breadth of Salesforce’s functionality, it’s critical to customize the end-user experience to promote quick adoption.
Make sure to maintain a consistent user experience and make it as effortless as possible. This applies to user interfaces, processes, workflows, and reports, among other things.
Using automation where it is practical is one way to ensure this is done correctly. It pays to double-check your plan from top to bottom before deploying it. It should be noted that this can also need interfacing with external systems. In this case, Salesforce’s MuleSoft integration solutions can help minimize human labor.
Ultimately, everything revolves around the experience your customers have. For example, allowing self-service for pricing, contracting, quoting, and product ordering for your employees and potential partners can significantly improve the customer experience. Providing real-time content customization is another option. All of this is possible in Salesforce.
Ensure Data Quality
Data is at the heart of a successful Salesforce deployment. You cannot expect high-quality information to come from such data sources if proper data is not entered.
To ensure that high-quality data is being entered into Salesforce, establish an internal standard for data security, consistency, and integrity.
Even with its cutting-edge features and capabilities, your Salesforce system can’t function like magic without consistent, accurate, and up-to-date data. In order to maximize your return on investment, you should consider data to be a strategic asset that you should always strive to preserve.
Customize to business needs
Products from the Salesforce stable undoubtedly have a wide range of features. Even while Salesforce offers a lot of flexibility in terms of configuring individual business rules and extending data models, there are sometimes situations where it becomes necessary to build on top of these products due to industry regulations or specific business needs.
To improve the user experience, we also recommend a thorough clean-up of your data. This includes:
- Cleaning up all fields, rules, profiles, roles, and so on.
- Automating future quality validation and control to maintain ongoing hygiene.
- Eliminating dead code, which includes unneeded methods, classes, and lines of code.
- Optimizing code in accordance with Salesforce practices.
Apps from the Salesforce AppExchange may also help provide you with the additional features you require. For instance, using customized software makes it much simpler to execute document automation and can offer you more flexibility in terms of meeting your demands.
To ensure compatibility with upcoming product updates, it is crucial that every customization choice be carefully considered and that Salesforce implementation requirements are followed, regardless of the path you decide to take.
Think multi-cloud
We couldn’t stress more the value of investigating the options of every Salesforce cloud you may find relevant. Ensure that you adopt the solution in a way that allows for easy integration with both internal and external systems and offers a 360° view of your customers. Enabling end-to-end integration can be achieved by implementing the solution across several clouds
Here are some pointers.
- To enable marketing journeys across all consumer segments, use Marketing Cloud.
- Manage complex sales processes with the Sales Cloud by using simple product catalogs, while also boosting visibility and streamlining the order and quote management processes.
- Reach customers in real-time via the channel of their choosing and deliver support more quickly and accurately by utilizing Service Cloud.
- Enable eCommerce using Commerce Cloud.
- Assess how industry-specific data models, prebuilt entities, and business processes may be leveraged by utilizing industry-specific products such as Financial Services Cloud, Health Cloud, etc.
- Evaluate how Salesforce can be connected with other systems using MuleSoft to eliminate siloed data and build an integrated enterprise.
Nearly 40% of Salesforce users today use multiple cloud products. It’s critical to think about the ones that will benefit your business.
Define everyone’s role clearly
The likelihood of errors or security breaches increases with the growth in the number of users having access to Salesforce. Therefore, using role-based permissions in Salesforce to effectively manage who can access what information pays off. Make sure every worker only receives the information they require to perform their duties.
Clearly defined roles will facilitate employees’ task completion. Ensure that every employee is aware of the tasks assigned to them in Salesforce, including their add and edit rights.
Set goals and track them
Does the tool you’re using benefit or hinder your work? Setting objectives with each tool is crucial to learning. For example, if you introduce a new automation feature, simply measure the time your employees save using it compared to the manual process within 30 days of implementation. Perhaps you would be better off spending your money on anything else if there isn’t much of a change.
However, keep in mind that the tool you use can affect another important area and therefore still be worth the cost. We recommend monitoring progress in the following areas:
- Customer engagement rates
- Business intelligence
- Financial sustainability
- Quality of service provided to your customers.
Act for today, plan for tomorrow
Now that your initial solution is operational, users are becoming more and more excited about it. And if you haven’t already, start planning your enhancement journey.
Salesforce reports that 43% of customers aren’t even using half of the features that are included with their first purchase. That’s a serious dent in the ROI. You must therefore think about the following:
- What is your roadmap?
- What is your approach to success and ongoing improvement?
- Which other Salesforce technologies, or those that work well together, can offer value and help you boost Salesforce ROI even more?
- Which functionalities are currently available to you but aren’t being used?
To get the most out of your Salesforce, stay current on upgrades, train staff regularly, and maintain clean data.
Conclusion
It should come as no surprise that even Salesforce recommends working with a certified partner for your deployment. Hiring one could be beneficial, especially if use cases are complex.
To harness the true power of Salesforce and fast-track your company’s growth, it would be prudent to use the appropriate methodology from a top-tier salesforce implementation partner.
Get in touch with us to step up your game today.
