Your Salesforce strategy makes a huge difference in how the CRM is seen by your users. It doesn’t just determine how you build your platform; it also influences your company’s vision for Salesforce and how that’s communicated. Employees react to that just as much as they respond to the system’s ease-of-use.
And that’s why one of the most significant contributors to the success or failure of a Salesforce implementation is a company’s strategy for managing and maintaining the platform.
After all, a Salesforce build that’s too focused on data cleanliness and reporting might be perceived as just an “oversight” tool. One that’s centered on user productivity, conversely, will not only speed up your business processes but can also help your users think of it as “their tool.” Ownership leads to engagement. Engagement leads to productivity.
We’ve identified 5 real-life symptoms that could indicate that your company’s strategy for managing and maintaining Salesforce could use some improvement:
1. Your Salesforce admin is frequently trying to fix user errors.
Every time your users contact your Salesforce admin about an error, it’s a work stoppage. Not only does the communication itself take time, but these problems also keep users from doing what they want to in the technology. Errors, malfunctioning automations, insufficient privileges — all of these common issues keep your employees out of the system and drastically impede their work.
2. Your users don’t understand how to use Salesforce.
Even a well-built system will slow down your users if they are unfamiliar with how it works. Helping your users understand system navigation, existing automation rules and how to troubleshoot errors will allow them to work more quickly and comfortably in the system.
3. On average, your Salesforce strategy relies more on validation rules than automations.
A general rule of thumb: Validation rules slow down work, while automation speeds it up. Validation rules are incredibly helpful — even critical in some cases — but over-relying on them is a surefire way to frustrate users with new errors and hinder their work.
4. You hear the term “double entry” even once.
Duplicate data entry is the ultimate scourge of productivity. Any time spent repetitively entering data is time wasted, and it has a multiplicative effect. Even if 10 users need one extra minute to re-enter data in a particular process, that translates to about 400 hours of lost time a year if each user repeats that process 10 times a day.
5. Users say they can’t see the data they need.
In any business, every user needs some level of shared data access. Otherwise, Salesforce is nothing more than a fancy spreadsheet to them. Every time a user can’t find the account, contact or opportunity they need, it costs your organization time. Either the user needs to stop their work to request access to the right record, or the user just creates a duplicate one (see #4).
While it’s easy to view these signs negatively, each one presents an opportunity for improvement. Stay tuned to this blog for more on how you can leverage these opportunities and more to strengthen your long-term Salesforce strategy.
