Salesforce is a powerful platform with a wide range of standard features. It can be difficult to ensure you’re fully utilizing all of the available functionality. These four strategies will help your organization maximize your Salesforce investment.
Conducting a Health Check of Your Salesforce Org
You can conduct a health check of your Salesforce org with your Center of Excellence, admin team or consulting partner. A health check is a thorough evaluation of your Salesforce environment that often concludes with a series of steps for improving your use of the platform. Through a Health Check, you can identify underutilized features, potential issues with data quality, and opportunities to improve reporting for critical decision making. You can also uncover areas for increased automation using tools like Process Builder, leading to better use of corporate resources.
Working with a consulting partner gives you the benefit of an outside perspective. A partner can also bring focus and efficiency, accomplishing the Health Check in less time.
Leveraging Additional Standard Features
Salesforce offers many standard features. There may be existing functionality that you could leverage to support more areas of your business through a single platform.
Some helpful features you may not be utilizing include Path, Products, Account Teams, Territories, and Campaign Influence.
Path
- Configure a journey for your sales team with selling tips and guidance at each stage.
- Highlight key fields to be completed for each step in the Path.
Products
- Tie individual products and service offerings to Opportunities.
- Gain the ability to report on product performance and improve visibility into customer purchases.
Account teams
- Assign a group of users to an Account.
- Provide varying levels of access to the Account record and any underlying Cases or Opportunities.
Territories
- Limit team members’ access to Accounts based on geographic region.
Campaign Influence and Auto-Association
- Automatically tie opportunities to Campaigns.
- Measure the success of marketing efforts.
By taking advantage of additional standard features, you can gain more value from the platform without investing in new apps or custom development. Also, you can keep track of Salesforce Releases to ensure you’re aware of new features and enhancements in the future.
Using Process Builder to Add More Process Automation and Reduce Workload
Through Process Builder, you can automate tasks or record updates for your users. A Process Builder could be used for tasks like updating the addresses on all of the Contact records tied to an Account when the Account address is changed. You could also use Process Builder to change the Account Type to Customer when an Opportunity moves to a Closed Won stage.
Finding New Ways to Increase User Adoption
Another way to increase your return on your investment in Salesforce is to foster more adoption in your organization. Some users might be using platforms outside of Salesforce like Excel or a quoting application. By leveraging Salesforce for more areas of your business, you can begin to build a lead-to-cash solution.
For example, you may be able to leverage standard quoting inside Salesforce as opposed to a separate application.
You can also promote adoption by hosting a regular training event like a Lunch and Learn. This can be a time to demo a new feature, recommend best practices, or answer questions from your team.
These four solutions will help your organization fully leverage Salesforce, ensuring you’re taking advantage of all the system has to offer and maximize your Salesforce investment. They can lead to more effective use of the funds committed to Salesforce. Integrating Salesforce with other applications is another way to enhance the value of the platform. Integrations bring more data into a single system, giving team members a more complete picture while working with the platform.
