Salesforce leads today’s era of Software as a Service (SaaS). Salesforce has been one of the first movers in this space and still remains a leader owing to its ability to continuously innovate. With each of their frequent major and minor releases, several functionalities and features are added in order to make “customer centricity” a driving strategy for every organization.
But, the success of the product is not just about what functionality the underlying technology provides, but it is about the user experience, ease of use, scalability, agility and much more.
By virtue of the phenomenal flexibility that Salesforce provides, organizations are able to harness more from their Salesforce environments by making some very unique, purposeful and innovative customizations to the basic product. Large enterprise customers of Salesforce often have their own development teams for such customizations.
Similar to larger enterprises, smaller organizations also have aggressive plans for business expansion which demand the launching of new applications and functionalities to support such growth.
They have a large scope to evolve and need continuous enhancements to their processes and additions of new functionalities to their applications. But they have a far lesser luxury in terms of time, investment and ability to attract and retain the right kind of Salesforce talent leading to a few challenges.
Some of the challenges that we have seen organizations regularly face are
This is where the salesforce partner ecosystem can play a significant role.
Besides the challenges, there are certain myths and misconceptions about implementing and maintaining Salesforce.
Many organizations assume that Salesforce is very easy to implement since videos and tutorials are available online. Even the Salesforce sales teams support this narrative.
Yes, it is easy when your team is small and your process is simple to implement. But most of the time this is not the case. And even if it is, it doesn't remain that way for long. Very soon you need to integrate more complex processes and also take into consideration various factors such as dynamic market demands, competitor strategies, demographic changes, etc. These dynamic changes mean a continuous enhancement to your processes.
Many organizations are also led to believe that post implementation, managing the Salesforce environment is a cakewalk. Well, if it is just about putting in some data and generating some reports and scheduling the report delivery to specific people’s emails, it is fairly an easy affair. But the reality is far from this.
Some organizations hire a Salesforce Administrator to assist the business teams and the IT teams to collaborate. The Admin generally supports existing operational activities like activation of users, making new reports and dashboards, adding new fields, training users and similar tasks. But when it comes to developing new functionality, he or she is usually clueless.
We have experienced customers facing dilemmas such as -
These and many other dilemmas, questions and nightmares befall the Salesforce champion within an organization every now and then.
An organization deploying salesforce must therefore first identify such a partner to correctly implement and support their Salesforce environment. Such a partner must understand the business needs at a functional level and help in developing processes in adherence to best practices. A common mistake organizations make is hiring a management consulting company. A good partner with a proven track record will do the job better, faster and cheaper!
We have done this for over a decade with many customers. So, if you need a reliable Salesforce Partner, we are just a phone call away!
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