It’s simple: if you want your teams to be more efficient and serve your customers better, Salesforce is the go-to CRM. However, you need to use Salesforce right to get your return on investment. With that in mind, we’ll show you the top Salesforce best practices that can maximize the benefits you get from the platform.
Let’s dive in!
Prioritize Your Needs, Not Your Wants is the Ultimate Salesforce Best Practice
One of the major advantages of the Salesforce platform is that it’s so customizable (especially with Salesforce integrations). As such, you can modify the platform just the way you like it and add as many advanced features as you want. Despite the advantages of this customizability, there are also some disadvantages.
Having all these features and options available could quickly become overwhelming. Also, adding more advanced and custom features makes the platform increasingly complicated to troubleshoot and maintain.
Salesforce Best Practice
For these reasons, it’s one of Salesforce best practices to start with Salesforce’s standard features. Once you’ve built a robust and reliable foundation, you can start adding features to incorporate more functionality and make your processes more efficient. Summing up, begin by prioritizing your needs and then adding your wants later on.
Keep the End User in Mind
The ultimate goal of implementing Salesforce is to make life easier for your team and, in doing so, make them more productive and efficient. So, if you implement and build out the system based on your needs without keeping your end-users in mind, they’ll likely stick to using the systems they know and trust. Ultimately, this could hamper the successful adoption of the platform.
Luckily, there are a few things you could do to combat this. For instance, as one of the top Salesforce best practices, you should involve your team in the entire process, from planning to implementation. You should also keep your team updated when you make any changes and get their feedback during every step of the process.
In this way, you’ll not only build a system based on your team’s needs, but they’ll also know what to expect and what benefits the implementation will bring to their workflows, and they’ll feel a sense of ownership.
Understand and Analyze Your Internal Processes
One of the most important Salesforce best practices is knowing everything there is to know about your internal processes. In other words, you need to understand your business processes and workflows. This means you’ll need to know every step your users go through when they need to perform a particular task to automate them through Salesforce.
When you do, you’ll know how a Salesforce implementation can improve these processes. And this understanding doesn’t stop with implementation. To follow Salesforce best practices, maintain this understanding throughout as your business and its processes evolve. This will allow you to continuously refine and improve your processes and understand where Salesforce can help and where you might need an integration. For example, you may find that Salesforce’s native Outlook integration doesn’t meet the mark so that you might invest in a solution like Match My Email.
An Essential Salesforce Best Practice is to Streamline Your Processes
For Salesforce to be most effective, you should also streamline your processes. To do this, you’ll need to give your team everything they need to do their jobs effectively. When they have everything they need, it will be easier to find information in the system, and they’ll make fewer mistakes when entering data.
But now the question is: How do you know what your team needs to do their jobs? Ask them and get feedback consistently. Communication enables you to identify challenges or bottlenecks in your processes. Once identified, you can adopt the necessary tools or strategies to ensure your processes run smoothly.
An Important Salesforce Best Practice is to Ensure Good Data Hygiene
The value you’ll get from the Salesforce platform and the quality of the insights you’ll get are directly dependent on the quality of the data you put into the system. For this reason, you should ensure good data hygiene to eliminate incorrect, missing, or duplicate data. This Salesforce best practice is especially important if you have a lot of data and pull data from several different sources.
Fortunately, there are several measures you can implement to ensure high data quality. For example, you could use naming conventions, pick-lists, address validation, and other tools to keep your data organized and optimize your workflows to ensure that your data entry is correct and consistent.
Remember Data Security
It’s no secret that data breaches are becoming increasingly common. Unfortunately, cybercriminals tend to target popular software platforms simply because so many companies use them.
As such, you should do everything to strengthen your security and protect your business from cyberattacks. Implementing this Salesforce best practice starts with keeping Salesforce updated. This ensures a bug-free experience and removes any potential vulnerabilities that could lead to data loss.
Apart from this, you can do several other things to keep your business and users safe while using Salesforce:
- Set the right permissions
- Use secure passwords
- Use multi-factor authentication
- Use login tracking
- Audit your Salesforce account consistently to identify possible threats earlier
Choose a Single Product Owner
You should choose a Salesforce product owner for your business to eliminate any confusion and ensure that everyone on your team always gets the correct answers and information. This could be anyone from an internal stakeholder to your Salesforce administrator or an external administrator. Either way, your product owner will be your team’s go-to person with any Salesforce-related questions or queries.
The benefit of this is that, by designating a product owner, you’ll give your team a single point of contact when they have questions, requests, or want to report issues. It’s definitely one of the simplest and most powerful Salesforce best practices!
Use Automations
Remember, Salesforce is meant to make your processes more efficient. Take advantage of its automation features. You’ll improve your processes, and eliminate repetitive manual tasks and errors. You’ll also save time and money.
Implementing this Salesforce best practice will save your team a lot of time and effort, which they could instead spend on more important or complex tasks.
To decide what to automate, you’ll need to map out your processes to identify the steps you’ll be able to automate. These will typically be consistent, repetitive tasks that multiple team members need to perform.
A Salesforce Best Practice is to Test, Test More, and Document
Test every new process or feature you’d like to implement. Salesforce and its features, like any other software on the market, might not work as you want them to from the get-go.
Apart from testing new features, you should also test existing features consistently to ensure that they work and that your team can use them as intended. In addition to testing, you should also document your processes and keep your documentation updated. This documentation serves as a roadmap your team can use to learn how every process works and how they should use it.
Have a Change Management Plan Ready
Let’s face it; people don’t like change. However, change will happen, especially as your business grows and evolves. You must develop a change management plan.
This plan will typically involve notifying your team in advance of any new features or changes you intend to make. Also, as part of your plan, you should schedule regular refresher sessions.
Ultimately, by doing this, you’ll ensure that your team is prepared for any new features and that they know how to use the platform’s advanced features.
Choose the Right Salesforce Resources
Salesforce is updated regularly, and new features are added a few times a year. It’s crucial that you know when these updates will happen and what new features will be added. Moreover, you’ll inevitably have some issues with the platform from time to time.
This means you’ll need to choose the right resources to provide this information or guide you when you have any challenges. Obviously, one of the most valuable resources is Salesforce itself. But there are online resources and Salesforce partners who can help, too.
Get the Most From the Salesforce Platform Now!
Hopefully, this post helped illustrate some best practices you can implement when using Salesforce. In a few words: identify your bottlenecks, map out what you want to automate, and see how Salesforce can help you resolve challenges, but don’t forget about the human touch. Keep your team and end users involved as you implement changes.
When you do, your team will be more efficient, productive and love every step of using Salesforce!
