Salesforce

Its the end of June. We won't be complete until end of summer

Make sure you have the system requirements well defined. Make sure executives understand the importance of this to the success of Salesforce or any CRM. If you don't understand the requirements, you won't make the best decision for your needs. That can cost you a lot of money and wasted time.

Executive involvement is critical. Make sure you have a good handle on the metrics you would like to ultimately manage. Work as a team to document your business requirements. Whiteboard often. Understand Salesforce's best practice capabilities. Have a central person identified to handle all report and analysis requests (ie - don't allow multiple people to create reports; have one person create reports and distribute them to decision makers via the Salesforce dashboard or whatever form). Make sure you understand critical dates and develop the project plan accordingly.

Just from an organizational standpoint - we standardized our data prior to moving to Salesforce. But we essentially standardized it wrong. That's created a big disgusting mess for us know that I'll have to deal with as the Admin. Be sure you think through use cases prior to doing something like that - seek outside opinions on how the data will work best, especially depending on what else you're going to integrate with Salesforce.

I can speak about the experiences I had with the previous company. The company and the professional services firm rushed into implementation, and as a result there were tons and tons of duplicates in the system. Data migration was a mess. We had to refrain from using some of the core functionality of Salesforce until we got the data cleaned up. Without clean data, any system is useless.

Regional vendor had the technical chops to implement As with most projects, defining and aligning business processes prior to implementation is key

Check your Consultants out before they start an implementation project. Be sure they have actually done at least several successful implementations in the areas you are asking them to implement. Check references for their strengths and weaknesses. Clearly define the scope of the project and hold regular weekly meetings to make sure both sides are adhering to that scope.

I implemented the system myself. Frankly, I would have liked more help. I expressed dissatisfaction with the process and with the fact that I was not getting any real help from Salesforce, and eventually they assigned me a quality consultant who was excellent at advising on best-practices / features that we might not have considered using etc.

However, I was only assigned this resource because I complained loudly enough. It's not a standard part of their offering.

One of the consultants screwed up the field names and there are still field name inconsistencies throughout the system. Premium support contract actually covered this and would have been a much better option.

The main implementation was before my time. Other projects have been pretty straightforward. Reliability is good.

We tried implementing ourselvesand my satisfaction with that was a “4”. That increased to an 8 when we got outside help. You should plan on having continuing need for Salesforce administrative help as, even after initial implementation, what you need and want from the product will grow, expand and change with the business Spend some time at the beginning of the implementation to really understand what you want to report on after its implemented. Spend significant time understanding your work flows within departments and between departments. Resist the temptation, and sometimes the pressure, from upper management, to build a system that captures every bit of information imaginable. Remember that much of that data will be input by high paid sales people and it takes a lot of time. So only plan on capturing data that 1) is truly important to the business rather than a curiously 2) that is reportable and actionable and 3) someone in the organization is on the hook for looking at the reports and taking action. In other words, focus on capturing and reporting on KPIs for the functional heads. Technical implementation is one thing but adoption is critical so have a good plan there. It’s important for each user to understand why time spent inputting data helps THEM as well as the “business”. Lastly, for most businesses its important to start capturing data earlier than you think is required as eventually you are going to want to look at trend data that you simply won’t have if you don’t capture it.

If I were to do it again, I would hire an outside team to analyze my business needs and determine the right path – otherwise you end up doing it piece meal. I have not found someone I really trust yet. There are lots of shops that are good at Salesforce, but most are not good at integrating with mobile devices.

If you do need customization, finding good Salesforce developers is extremely difficult - both people to come work for you and professional services firms. You can find firms, but finding good ones is hard. Try and stay as vanilla as you can, configure before you code. Get at least one person in your organization well trained on administration using Salesforce training. Treat configuration like code. Always test in sandbox. Practice good change control i.e. what configuration changes were made at what time, and limit who can make configuration changes.

It was a mixed experience (with Blue Wolf). In the initial phase of project, the project manager and Business Analysts they brought in were not up to snuff. We had a lot of churn on their team initially. We also worked with a firm called Catapult on integration. I would rate them an 8/10.

Avoid the leads object if you can as: - Conversion to account contact exclusively is a pain - Cannot group leads very easily if data entry errors - Difficult to run reporting. - Becomes a messy object – no robust transitions. Start with your process first, then translate into your system, find ways to capture data, and run reporting to see if you have made an impact.

It took a little longer than planned, but I blame us. Get the portal no matter what. Don’t get the free stuff – it’s a dissatisfier. Let them (Salesforce.com) do the implementation. I am not that impressed with the partners.

You really need internally trained people. A new implementation needs business analysts, consultants and a lot of involvement from the business owners. There’s so much that you can use, you need someone to hold you back too and think about how smart it is to do it. This should be the role that a business analyst or consultant plays. This was a problem for us with our services implementation. We just built stuff and didn’t think hard enough about what was required. For a new, smaller company, you need a Salesforce.com expert but they can be a really good administrator in the business function versus a business analyst in IT. It is probably smart to have a business analyst if you can afford that role.

It is important to ensure that your business processes are well defined. You also need to define who owns the data who owns certain objects – this is so critical. Data quality in Salesforce.com is so hard. Identifying the owners i.e. person or department is important. It is hard as data ownership transfers during the life of customer. If everybody owns the data, then nobody owns it. Accounts and contacts is a key area. I have seen people using Gamification for managing data (e.g, Bunchball, Hoopla).

No idea - before my time at this company. I do recommend you go broad on the number of users as will help drive adoption.

There’s some things you just have to learn as you go along Plan your organizational use before you start building, and minimum requirements as well. The admin should pre-load in an account set, and the less you can put on individual reps to populate the database, the better.

Building in incentives to have people use Salesforce.com it very important to help with adoption. New hires follow veterans so it is important that veterans use the system. We have to sell value the value of the system to the sales team i.e. why it matters to them. It is important to attack that right away. I have seen a little bit of what vendors like Bunchball are doing to gamify the adoption of Salesforce.com and I would like to try out one of those programs. We are running a lot of internal training. It is also important to have a single point of contact or a small team of experts that people can go to. I get little Salesforce.com questions all the time, but answering them helps people move forward. This is especially important for smaller companies.