5 Questions to Help You Maximize Your Salesforce Instance
“We need to get more value out of our Salesforce licenses.” Have you ever said or thought this before? If so, you’re not the first, and certainly won’t be the last. In fact, there are many Salesforce users that make this statement every day.
While Salesforce can help you become more productive and efficient, finding the path to success can sometimes be difficult and even discouraging. Understanding the nuances and complexities, customizing the configurations to meet needs, finding a way to work Salesforce into a budget, and creating an effective adoption plan, are some of the key obstacles to overcome to ensure you’re finding more value from Salesforce.
As IT expenses grow, budgets shrink, and the need to squeeze every ounce of value out of investments becomes critical to survival. Predictions indicate enterprise software will have the most growth, jumping 9.5% in 2018 to $389 billion. Global information technology spending, including SaaS products, will reach $3.7 trillion in 2018, up 4.5% from 2017.
So, this begs the question: How do I get the most value out of Salesforce?
Here are 5 questions to consider when trying to maximize your Salesforce instance:
1.) What are you buying?
a. It is important to understand what Salesforce is, how it works, and how it can benefit your organization before putting any money down. Salesforce is the world’s #1 customer relationship management (CRM) platform for sales, service, marketing, and more. It has products like Salesforce CPQ, Pardot, Sales Cloud Einstein and many more which help you generate pipeline, automate processes and close deals.
2.) What functionality is most important to you?
a. The Salesforce product catalog consists of a wide array of features and functionalities like contact management, lead management, case management and many more. Determine which functionality is critical to your business and understand how Salesforce can improve your business process or fill in a gap.
3.) What is your adoption strategy?
a. An adoption strategy is critical to having long-term success with Salesforce. The adoption strategy is JUST as important as planning the design, development, implementation, and testing of Salesforce.
4.) Do you have a budget established?
a. Create a budget. As IT spending increases, there is a critical need to be wiser with current and future expenses. Without a budget, spending can get out of control, especially with add-ons, renewals and true-ups.
5.) How will you measure success?
a. Plan out key metrics to gauge if Salesforce is truly beneficial to your business. When used correctly, Salesforce can help you measure sales growth, customer satisfaction, marketing ROI, and more.
There is a high probability that not all the features of Salesforce will benefit your business. With this in mind, take your time considering which features you really need and which ones you can go without. Rushing through this could result in unnecessary add-ons and wasted money. Once you figure out the features and functionalities, you still need to determine what functionality is required to sustain the business and what restrictions/usage limits per edition are applicable in your case
There are many resources spread across the vast information highways of the internet, but unfortunately, most of these will not be specific to your situation. Having a trusted advisor who will evaluate your current AND future state is vital to helping your company scale while reducing the road bumps.
Whether you’re in the early stages of the Salesforce lifecycle, the middle, or evaluating if it’s the best software for you, Anglepoint has an experienced team to help you navigate through the terrain and answer any questions you might have. Contact Anglepoint today to speak with a Salesforce expert.