Part 5 of our blog series discussed a suitable set of implementation phases. To maximize your Salesforce implementation, you must have your time and budget for these phases planned out. The amount of budget and time you will need to allocate will vary depending on your Salesforce requirements. An excellent consulting partner will spend time upfront to walk you through your time and budgeting needs.
Implementing Salesforce: Budget
Budgeting for the cost of a successful Salesforce instance will change due to the necessary features or services, the number of licenses (users), the cost of consulting, and more.
The license pricing for Sales Cloud users per month starts at:
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- Essentials ($25 User/Month)
- Professional ($75 User/Month)
- Enterprise ($150 User/Month)
- Unlimited ($300 User/Month)
Other Budgeting Factors Include:
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- Consulting Costs: Consultants typically charge at an hourly rate. The price of the hourly rate depends on the company. It’s crucial to find an experienced partner with a vast knowledge of the platform and your industry.
- Data Migration: Migrating data from another system into Salesforce depends on how much data there is, data quality, and time.
- Integration/Customization: Expenses will depend on the level of customization and optimization wanted or needed by the customer. A phased deployment helps with user adoption and lower budgets.
- User Training: To ensure adoption, it’s important to have your users go through training to learn Salesforce. Poor user adoption can lead to wasted time and money, and sometimes abandonment of Salesforce.
Spending quality time with a consultant to detail out a phased approach will help you maximize your Salesforce investment.
Implementing Salesforce: Time
Custom Implementations
When you are implementing Salesforce with a consulting partner, there are two main periods of time where you will be heavily needed for custom implementations: Pre-Implementation and Walk-through/Training.
Pre-Implementation
On the front end of the project, this is where your executives and other key members of your business will get involved in what is called a Specification Design. Specification Design meetings will take about 1-2 weeks of your time where your partner will dive deep into your current pain points, your business processes, and the overall goals of what you’re trying to accomplish. After 1-2 weeks, the partner should provide you with a detailed Statement of Work for your approval and signature. Once signed, the partner will begin to work on your Salesforce org! Spending quality time with your partner here to specify every detail of the project will help result in a maximized system.
Traning and Walkthrough
At the end of the project, your executives and any other key members will need time to walk through the configured system. Your partner should provide a thorough walkthrough of your system for your approval and handoff to your team. Additionally, partners will spend time training users on how to use key features to ensure user adoption.
Service Agreements
A more successful engagement than Custom Implementations, ongoing service agreements provide ongoing support and training at will. Service Agreements can be utilized for any challenges your company may be facing: BPO optimization, additional Salesforce customization, ongoing training, support requests, and more. Service Agreements help ensure your employees are comfortable and in control of Salesforce. Through our experience, we have found that companies prefer service agreements because of the ongoing support and training provided by Salesforce architects and developers.
If you would like to learn more about implementing Salesforce on your budget and time, please contact us!
About Corrao Group
Since 2002, we have been helping B2B organizations of all sizes optimize their business processes with Salesforce and their third-party applications. As everyday Salesforce power users, Corrao Group understands how flexible the Salesforce platform is to support every business department. We’ve worked with nearly 1,000 customers, implementing, customizing, and optimizing over 2,100 Salesforce projects. If you are interested in learning more about how Corrao Group can help your company, read our reviews on G2 or contact us today!
