Salesforce implementation is sometimes not enough to actively move the business forward towards success. Despite the huge number of possibilities provided in the basic version of the platform, it is necessary to take into account the individual marketing measurement strategy in the company, the specifics of the enterprise, and the principles of its interaction with customers.
If even after implementing Salesforce, some factors and tasks remain not closed, these moments need to be analyzed. In 95% of such cases, the problem is solved using Salesforce optimization. The use of advanced methods of interaction within the company and with clients helps to cope with any complex processes and find the maximum number of points of growth and development.
How Do You Know That Salesforce Optimization Is Needed?
Implementing Salesforce allows you to free your hands from many routine tasks and concentrate your efforts on what really matters. In addition, the platform helps a lot to build the right relationships with the target audience and customers of the enterprise. But over time, even the most perfect system becomes obsolete. New technologies, tools, and opportunities appear. You either use them and develop in step with the times or give up the obvious advantages and stay behind competitors.
The most interesting thing is that even those who have been using the platform for a long time may face such a problem. In fact, the company pays for a product that sometimes does not meet the current requirements, and it is precise with this development of the event that Salesforce optimization is a necessity. Ideally, the platform should be optimized as regularly as you go through a vehicle check-up or visit a doctor to diagnose a health condition. In any area, it is normal to be regularly checked to make sure that everything is working as it should and correct any shortcomings and problems in time.
The situation is exactly the same with the Salesforce ROI. Ideally, platform performance testing, introducing new models, and disabling unused tools are done annually. But if you still doubt the necessity of this procedure, check with a number of factors that clearly indicate that the time has come for Salesforce optimization:
- The system has become challenging to use. It takes too many clicks to create a report, task, or get the information you want.
- More and more errors appear in work, system performance decreases.
- The platform is no longer relevant to existing business processes.
- There are more and more automatically generated documents that are of no practical use to the company.
Even if the company has its own IT department, which, among other things, is tasked with monitoring the performance of CRM, such departments often offer workarounds to the company. This is due to the lack of understanding of the internal processes and capabilities of Salesforce. It is better to contact the managers of the platform provider so that the problem is solved with much greater convenience for both the consumer and the end-user and without the need to build “crutches” for CRM from workarounds and unnecessarily complex solutions.
What Can Be Changed to Improve Salesforce ROI
The success of the enterprise in general and its subsections, in particular, depends on the quality of Salesforce optimization. The optimized platform gives impetus to forming a marketing measurement strategy, helps build high-quality relationships between employees and customers, and leads to simplification and acceleration of administrative work and reporting on marketing events and accounting.
At the same time, the lack of proper Salesforce optimization results not only in gaps in work, which could have been avoided but also in other problems. For example, it creates an opportunity for duplicate configurations in several sections:
- Settings
- Analytics
- Business processes
- Databases
- Integration
All these shortcomings negatively affect the flexibility and adaptability of the company and the speed of its promotion in the market.
The settings can create long forms with fields that are not actually used. There is too much information in the databases, and a very large amount of it does not bring any practical benefit. This happens if the information is recorded automatically but without predefined rules. This redundancy leads to the fact that the database turns out to be voluminous, but it is extremely difficult to analyze and sort this information and get practical or financial benefit from it. It takes a lot of human, time, and computational resources to cope with such a flow of information. In this case, some companies refuse such analysis altogether, although the problem could be easily solved by resorting to Salesforce optimization as the best option.
With regard to redundancy in business processes, it means some optional steps that have to be performed by employees or customers. Customers appreciate the simplicity of every move, and if they need to go through more than 3-4 steps to place an order and confirm the purchase by phone number or email, more than half of users faced with such difficulties will go to competitors with a simplified alternative.
And finally, there are integrations; redundancy in them prevents the creation of automatic reporting forms and prompt data correction. This slows down the work of almost all departments in the company and impacts the effectiveness of all activities.
The increase of Salesforce ROI automatically leads to more productive work of every member of your team and the entire company combined. You will see how simple and well-established interaction in all areas leads to many positive changes:
- The productivity of the company, its turnover, and its income are growing.
- Analytics becomes transparent, understandable, and valuable for making different decisions.
- Employees of the company are relieved of their workload from routine hard work, which has a low KPI. The resource of the team is directed to the development parties.
- Customer loyalty increases and they are happy to complete their purchases, place orders, and never fail to tell their friends about your company.
It only seems to you that Salesforce ROI is just a CRM system optimization. In fact, this is the way to efficiently use resources that will help you spend less and earn more in one unit of time. That is why it is so important to do it now.
How Does Salesforce Optimization Change Business Processes?
We’ve already looked at some benefits of Salesforce optimization and saw that this process directly leads to increased productivity for the entire team. And most importantly, customers always notice this when deciding whether to return to your products or services or not. But these are far from all the benefits that the company receives after the completion of the Salesforce ROI revision and platform optimization.
The key advantages are that the properly structured work of the CRM system leads to global changes in business processes, which is displayed in practice in this form:
- The efficiency of the platform increases due to the fact that it works strictly according to the requirements that are relevant to the enterprise.
- Redundant processes are eliminated, which ultimately leads to the release of human and digital resources and the ability to channel this force in a new direction.
- The data that gets into the CRM are checked according to the established rules. This leads to greater accuracy and reliability of the information held by the company. As a result, you maintain an effective database, provide well-written reporting, make correct marketing forecasts, and build hypotheses for the future development of the company.
- Correct exchange of data leads to better analytics and, at the same time, affects close relationships with other tools integrated into the system.
As a result, the costs of storing and processing data are reduced, only practically useful modules are used, a lot of time and resources are freed up, and the company’s income is growing rapidly. New paths are emerging, and the benefits of implementing Salesforce and all the features you ultimately choose are really tangible.
How Does Salesforce Optimization Work?
During the Salesforce implementation, only those tools and modules are installed that were relevant at the time of product selection. Over time, business processes may change, and the installed software may become outdated and require updates. Therefore, Salesforce optimization always starts with technical analysis and problem finding.
This phase can last for several days as you need to document all results, identify all errors, and draw up detailed guides and recommendations for eliminating vulnerabilities. This report also lists any configuration changes and describes the full scope of work required to enhance the Salesforce ROI.
After assessing all potential costs and building a further action plan, elimination of current problems and Salesforce implementation begins, which means connecting new useful modules or integrating with those tools that you use separately.
The second step is identifying software problems. Technical and functional analyses complement each other to help you see the full picture of how you can leverage the untapped potential of the Salesforce platform to maximize your profits.
Areas that require special attention are being improved step by step, and as a result of this work, the platform is being brought in line with the current needs of the company and its business processes.
So, how does the entire platform optimization process actually go step by step?
The platform optimization algorithm is a path from understanding the problem to solving it and the ability to use the resources that the enterprise has at its disposal as efficiently as possible. This path includes:
- Analyze the situation in your company based on the information presented in the first section. Realistically see if there are any in the business processes of your enterprise that could become easier or faster.
- Invite a platform manager to assess the technical component and current functionality.
- Compare the actual needs of the company with the tools that you currently have and determine the points for growth and development.
- Give professional developers some time to optimize the system according to current requests.
- Use an updated version of the platform, discard workarounds for solving work problems, and close all technical vulnerabilities or inaccuracies.
Salesforce is the system that has everything for high-quality enterprise management. But only with the right implementation and application of these tools will you see real benefits, results, and ROI. Therefore, Salesforce optimization is not just a technical check and installation of an update but the rational use of all your resources and real cost savings.