Salesforce Summer ’22 Sandbox Preview

The Salesforce Summer ’22 sandbox preview is arriving in late April! Below are the key dates for the Summer ’22 release so that you can mark your calendars and prepare.

Key Dates for the Salesforce Summer '22 Release
Image by Salesforce

Depending on your instance, the major release dates for the Spring ’22 features are:

    • May 20: First release
    • June 3: Second release
    • June 10/11: Final release

Other key dates through the Spring ‘22 Release include:

April 21: Sign up for the pre-release environment

In this test environment, you can try new features to figure out which features are right for your organization.

April 27: Preview release notes are available

All release notes become available. Head to Salesforce Help to scan and review the new release notes.

May 5: Sandbox cut-off date

Utilizing a sandbox environment can help you get early access to new features before your scheduled production upgrade. You must have an active sandbox environment before May 5, 2022.

May 6: Salesforce Summer ’22 release site is live

The release site becomes live! Trailhead modules are also available to quickly learn new features.

May 20: First release weekend

Salesforce and a small number of customers will be upgraded.

May 20 to May 27: Release readiness live broadcast

Salesforce admins and developers kick off the Summer ’22 release with their favorite features from the release. The Salesforce team will discuss and demo new features around this time.

June 3: Second release weekend

Another wave of Salesforce instances gets upgraded. Salesforce’s Trust page has the information on the timing of your upgrade.

June 10-11: Final release weekend

All remaining Salesforce instances will be upgraded on these dates.

To show the date of the Salesforce Summer ’22 release reaching your org, visit Salesforce Trust and click on your instance name and click “Maintenance”. If you don’t know your instance, go to your company information within setup in your Salesforce org.

About Corrao Group 

For over 20 years 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, we understand 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 we can help your company, read our reviews on G2 or contact us today!

Sources:

Don’t Miss These Key Dates: Summer ’22 Sandbox Preview

 

Salesforce Spring ’22 Release Notes Highlights

The Salesforce Spring ’22 release notes are here! As we do every release, we have read through the release notes and highlighted our favorite new updates and enhancements. Depending on your instance, the Spring ’22 Release Notes are scheduled to go live on January 14/15, February 4th/5th, and February 11th/12th. In this blog, we highlight new features for Consumer Goods Cloud, Sales Cloud, Pardot, and Service Cloud. It’s important to note that most of these newly released features are only available in Salesforce Lightning and not Classic. If you haven’t already, check out our blog on the Salesforce Winter ’22 Release Notes.

Consumer Goods Cloud 

Scheduled Visits to the Right Stores at the Right Time

    • With Einstein Visit Recommendation, you can keep your products front and center to keep your store managers satisfied. Sales Managers can select a group of stores and receive recommendations on which ones to visit and when. Based on the recommendations, they can ensure their most valuable stores receive immediate attention.

Optimize Visit Frequency to Improve Store Sales

    • Help your sales managers determine how often to visit stores. Improve your strategy for store visits with optimal visit frequency recommendations to help generate more revenue for your company. You can create your smart visit story to optimize store visits by field reps with insights that identify the right selling tasks for them.

Ensure Timely Deliveries to Stores with Delivery Tasks

    • When sales managers see all of their region’s orders, they can prioritize orders so that the highest selling stores are restocked and supplied first. Sales managers can create and assign delivery tasks to drivers, who can view the tasks on their mobile devices.

Visit Execution: Enhanced Flexibility and Improved Productivity

    • Sales managers can now create custom tasks with the standard Consumer Goods objects. Field reps can become more productive to take charge of their day and capture more during store visits.

Build Stronger Relationships with Partners Through Communities

    • Consumer Goods objects are now available in Salesforce Communities. You can utilize these objects to create a portal for your store contacts, consumers, and partners.

Enjoy More Accessibility on the Go

    • Sales Managers can now edit store details, create promotions and visits, and perform other actives from their mobile devices.

Sales Cloud 

Revenue Intelligence

    • Sales teams can achieve sales targets, grow sales pipelines, and ensure forecast accuracy like never before. Revenue Intelligence is a data-driven sales solution that combines Tableau CRM dashboards and analytics with pipeline Inspections.

Pipeline Inspection

    • Get AI-powered insights into every opportunity’s progress, engagement status, and activity details.

Einstein Conversation Insights

    • Einstein Conversation insights now include transcripts for video and voice calls. Users can now receive custom coaching recommendations related to their customer’s conversations.

Integration with Google

    • Engagement data includes soft and hard bounces, replies, and out-of-office replies for each recipient of an email sent from the Gmail integration with inbox.

Integration with Microsoft

    • Sales reps who meet with customers using Microsoft teams can pin and access Salesforce records and Salesforce Meetings during the video meeting.

Pardot 

Marketing Assets

    • Customize your enhanced landing pages with custom redirects for retired pages, form styles, and more. Easily build email templates in Lightning for sales reps to use in Salesforce Engage emails. In addition, try out the Slack connector for Pardot (beta feature) to monitor where the Slack completion action is being used on Pardot assets.

Automation

    • Push enhanced emails-now with tracker domain selection-to your automation rules and completion actions. Use Einstein Key Account intelligence to improve your automation.

Pardot Lightning Email Builder

    • Create email templates and emails in a modern, drag and drop builder. Send and resend emails from the Pardot Lightning app, and view individual email performance and aggregated metrics across multiple sends.

Service Cloud 

Channels (Voice)

    • New enhancements to the Voice channel improve the experience for supervisors, agents, and contact center admins. “Enhance the supervisor experience by enabling supervisors to listen in on calls, filtering which queues and skills they see in Omni Supervisor, and giving them access to real-time metrics in Amazon Connect. Get an improved agent experience with org-wide access to voice call recordings and voice call records, and call routing that respects Omni-Channel agent capacity” (Salesforce).

Routing

    • With new Omni Supervisor enhancements, you can manage routing more effectively and efficiently. Manage offline agents in the agents tab, and focus your supervisors on the right queues and skills in the Queues backlog, assigned work, and skills backlog tab.

Einstein for Service

    • You can now include up to 10 fields in your Article Recommendations model. A newly redesigned Bot builder is now more user-friendly.

Incident Management

    • When urgent issues need resolving, Incident Management can help eliminate potential complications before they get worse. Salesforce has out-of-the-box Incident Management page layouts complete with SLA management tools to help right away.

Knowledge

    • Salesforce has made it easier to share knowledge article links that point to the latest updated version. Images can now open to full size to zoom in on crucial details.

If you would like to learn more about the Salesforce Spring ’22 release notes, please visit our Salesforce page and contact us!

About Corrao Group

For over 20 years 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, we understand 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 we can help your company, read our reviews on G2 or contact us today!

Sources and Information:

Salesforce Spring ’22 Release Notes

Salesforce Helps The Consumer Goods Industry Drive Digital Transformation

The Consumer Goods industry is undergoing a massive digital transformation right now. The lack of digital presence and disconnected supply chains have caused stores to close at a rapid rate these past 2 years. A recent Salesforce report found that 54% of end consumers surveyed prefer to buy online. Add on the effects of COVID-19, and now 87% of shoppers begin their hunt in digital channels – up 71% from last year! The Consumer Goods industry requires a digital and accessible solution from anywhere, allowing you to build smarter and personalized B2B engagements at scale with AI-powered insights. Salesforce’s Consumer Goods Cloud helps improve field execution, account planning, promotions, channel partner relationships, and more.

Exposed Archaic Business Processes

The COVID-19 Pandemic has exposed the archaic “old-fashioned‘ ways of the Consumer Goods Industry. Lack of visibility into supply chains was already an issue before COVID-19, but with the pandemic outbreak, 56% of global retailers reported moderate disruption in their supply chains as a result of COVID-19 whereas 12% reported heavy disruption. Additionally, CG companies face visibility issues into shelf management with the increasingly tough job to keep inventory levels adequate as sales plunge and rise. Using spreadsheets to track key information and data is no longer sustainable. Unreliable and outdated data is when companies start to make bad business decisions, leading to wasted money and time on poor in-store execution. Consumer Goods companies need to understand in real-time how well their products are selling, what’s needed in the physical stores, and which locations need attention from field representatives. Innovative technology along with Artificial Intelligence is helping companies gain a competitive edge to become more data-driven. Salesforce’s Consumer Goods Cloud is helping companies accelerate account and retail growth.

Become Data-Driven With Consumer Goods Cloud

Salesforce’s Consumer Goods Cloud is an intelligent and seamless B2B CRM solution that can fuel alignment and growth from anywhere. With a 360-degree view of your customer, Consumer Goods Cloud allows you to streamline your account relationships and sales activities to optimize every selling opportunity. For field members, Salesforce Maps integrated with Consumer Goods Clouds maximizes your field reps entire day, sending them to locations that need attention first. Salesforce Maps along with Salesforce’s Mobile app optimizes your team to drive performance, reduce downtime with route plans, and enables your reps to sell more with key insights and analytics (Inventory Audits/Promotion Checks) at each store location. In today’s market, a move to Salesforce Consumer Goods Cloud will help your company accelerate growth intelligently, accurately, and effectively. Transform your business with Salesforce Consumer Goods Cloud today!

Stats provided from Salesforce.

If you would like to learn more about Consumer Goods Cloud, please visit our Consumer Goods Cloud page.

About Corrao Group

For over 20 years 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, we understand 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 we can help your company, read our reviews on G2 or contact us today!

Celebrating 2 Decades of Corrao Group

In January of 2002, Jack Corrao assembled in his home office in San Diego to begin the Corrao Group. He would build a company based on reinventing how companies operate, communicate, and interact with customers. Coming from two decades in the corporate world, Jack felt that too many data silos and lack of processes inhibited most companies from growing and ultimately provided poor customer satisfaction. The vision was to assemble hands-on experts, in a virtual fashion, that allowed a Work From Home mentality.

Twenty years later, Corrao Group’s employees continue to drive digital transformations for companies of every size and industry. Driven by our core values — Trust, User Adoption, and Giving Back — Corrao Group has helped transform businesses across the United States. On this 20th Anniversary, we want to say thank you to our customers, employees, partners, and Salesforce. We couldn’t have done any of this without you.

Salesforce Partner

If you would like to learn more about Corrao Group, please visit our website!

8 Salesforce Data Cleanup Best Practices

According to Salesforce, “Poor quality data costs businesses around $700 billion a year, or 30 percent of the average company’s revenue”. Poor data quality can include missing data, inaccurate data, duplicate data, and more. Bad data management can lead to costly business decisions because of misleading/incorrect data. Inaccurate reports and dashboards, wasted time and money, and a decline in user adoption are all ways bad data can affect your business. We recommend using any downtime to clean your Salesforce data during the holiday season.

8 Salesforce data cleanup ideas Include:

Deleting Data Duplicates

    • Look for and pinpoint duplicate data in your system. Duplicates in your system could include contacts, campaigns, accounts, reports and dashboards, and more. Run a report to identify how many duplicates are in the system. Salesforce Data Loader can help the records be queried and deleted from Salesforce.

Validate Your Data

    • Use this time to ensure all the data in your org is accurate, consistent, and effective. Your company can expect improved business results when employees start inserting high-quality data into Salesforce. Data validation should be a recurring project that can be done yearly or even multiple times per year.

Data Updates

    • Fill in important missing information on your Accounts and Contacts. Fields that could be missing include job title, location, phone number, and more. These pieces of information are critical for your team, and having incorrect or missing data slows the team down.

Data Rules

    • If you do not have rules on data entry into the system, this would be an excellent time to set up best practices for your employees on entering quality data into Salesforce. Data validation rules/requirements can help verify the data your employees are entering are meeting your business standards before the user can save the record.

Campaigns (Outdated and New)

    • Look through your Salesforce campaigns and clean up any duplicates, members who don’t belong in the campaign anymore, close outdated campaigns, and create new campaigns for 2022.

Reports and Dashboards

    • Reports and Dashboards in Salesforce can quickly become obsolete. Any reports or dashboards that are outdated or not in use should be removed from your org.

Pardot Landing Pages

    • Go through your Landing Pages in Pardot to review if there is any outdated content that needs to be updated. If you are not utilizing the landing page anymore, the best practice would be to archive the page to remove it from list views.

Outdated Content

    • Utilize this time to go through all the current content across your social channels. Find out if you need to update any of the data before 2022 arrives. Some of the most popular updates occur on blog posts.

The 2nd largest issue among Salesforce customers is bad data. If you are struggling with Salesforce data issues, schedule a free assessment with us today! We can walk through your system and provide best practices to clean up your Salesforce data.

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, we understand 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 we can help your company, read our reviews on G2 or contact us today!

Key Dates for the Salesforce Spring ’22 Release

We hope you had a great Thanksgiving! The Salesforce Spring ’22 sandbox preview is coming up in early December. Below are the key dates for Spring ’22 so that you can mark your calendars and prepare.

Depending on your instance, the dates for the Spring ’22 Release are:

    • January 14th/15th, 2022
    • February 4th/5th, 2022
    • February 11th/12th, 2022

Other key dates through the Spring ‘22 Release include:

December 16: Sign up for the pre-release environment

In this test environment, you can try new features to figure out which features are right for your organization.

December 22: Preview Release Notes are available

The release notes become available. Head to Salesforce Help to scan and review the new releases.

January 6th: Sandbox cut-off date

Utilizing a sandbox environment can help you get early access to new features before your scheduled production upgrade. You must have an active sandbox environment before January 6, 2022.

January 7: Spring ’22 Release site is live

The release site becomes live! Trailhead modules are also available to quickly learn new features.

January 14: First Release Weekend

Salesforce and a small number of customers will be upgraded.

February 4 to 11: Release readiness live broadcast

Salesforce’s admin’s and developers kick off the Spring ’22 Release with their favorite features from the release. The Salesforce team will discuss and demo new features.

February 4: Second Release Weekend

Another wave of Salesforce instances gets upgraded. Salesforce’s Trust page has the information on the timing of your upgrade.

February 11 and 12: Final Release Weekend

All remaining Salesforce instances will be upgraded on these dates.

To show the date of the Salesforce Spring ’22 release hitting your org, go over to Salesforce Trust and click on your instance name and click “Maintenance”. If you don’t know your instance, go to your company information within Setup in your Org.

Salesforce Spring '22 Release Timeline

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 1,047+ customers, implementing, customizing, and optimizing over 2,150 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!

The Salesforce Journey: An 8 Part Blog Series

We created an 8-part blog series highlighting the journey for new customers looking to digitally transform their company with Salesforce. Moving to a cloud-based system is a big change for companies working in spreadsheets or homegrown systems every day. Our blog series helps your company make the right decision through every phase of the Salesforce journey. In order below are the 8 blogs with a short description and a link to each blog. Feel free to reach out to us if you see any area where we can assist.

It’s Time to Reevaluate Your Tech Stack

The days of tracking leads and customers in spreadsheets are gone. As a business owner, moving to a cloud-based system from spreadsheets or old proprietary systems may bring some fears and doubts. However, cloud-based systems allow for companies to have more connectivity and accessibility, increased collaboration, and improved efficiency. With a centralized location for all your data, your entire company can track and keep up with your customer’s entire journey.

Support Work From Anywhere

After your company has decided to move to a cloud-based system, it’s time to develop a new culture for your staff. You should have 3-5 KPIs that you are tracking year in and year out to measure performance and ROI. Additionally, during this time period, your staff should be documenting all their business processes. A CRM system alone will not magically streamline your business processes from the start. Being able to define your entire Business Process Optimization (BPOs) on paper is critical.

Selecting and Implementing Your CRM

The 2020 pandemic accelerated the future of work as the work-from-anywhere mentality has to be considered when deploying a new CRM. Having a CRM that is flexible to digital workflow changes will be critical for your business’s success. Through our 13 years of experience, we have found that Salesforce is the clear leader among CRM platforms.

Why You Need a Salesforce Implementation Partner

Companies typically face three significant obstacles when implementing Salesforce: implementation, adoption, and platform capabilities. The sheer scope of a Salesforce implementation is tremendous. Rushing through an implementation or using “quickstart” templates as a baseline foundation will come back to cause mid to long-term scalability and poor user adoption issues. We’ve found that the best way to maximize your Salesforce investment is with an experienced Salesforce partner.

Choosing a Suitable Sequence of Salesforce Implementation Phases

Salesforce is best implemented in phases, setting up and training users from each department. Doing so helps boost user adoption and allows for the correct transfer of business processes into Salesforce. Ensuring each department is set up on Salesforce before moving onto the next department is key to a successful implementation.

Planning Your Budget and Time for a Salesforce Implementation

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. Spending quality time with a consultant to detail out a phased approach will help you maximize your Salesforce investment.

7 Salesforce Implementation Risks to Avoid

Through our experience of over 2,150+ projects, we’ve identified 7 key Salesforce implementation risks. Take a look at the 7 most common pitfalls that costs companies thousands of dollars.

3 Best Practices to Ensure Salesforce Adoption

Salesforce adoption is not an easy task to deal with. Without successful user adoption, your employees will struggle to use Salesforce to its full capacity. Obtaining executive buy-in, knowing your-end users, and continuous training will help your company achieve Salesforce adoption.

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 1,047+ customers, implementing, customizing, and optimizing over 2,150 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!

3 Best Practices to Ensure Salesforce Adoption

In our previous blog, we mentioned user adoption as a common Salesforce implementation risk. Salesforce adoption is not an easy task to deal with. Salesforce is a brand new complex system for your employees to learn and work in every day. Without successful user adoption, your employees will struggle to use Salesforce to its full capacity. With over 2,150+ successfully completed Salesforce projects, we put together three best practices to ensure Salesforce adoption.

Obtain Executive Buy-in

Having executive buy-in is critical for great user adoption. Executives and managers must lead by example and use the product every day. If employees recognize that their managers are not using Salesforce because it’s tedious to learn, employees will do the same and revert right back to what they are most comfortable with. This leads to some employees using Salesforce and some not, completely disconnecting business processes. One way of showing executive buy-in is to utilize Salesforce within meetings. Take advantage of sales meetings by reviewing the pipeline, analytics, leads, and more, all within Salesforce. By using Salesforce in meetings, you’ll reinforce the significance of using it to your employees and show them the platform’s value. Adjusting to a new system is hard enough, but having executives set the everyday standard of “Living Within Salesforce” will improve your adoption and, ultimately, ROI.

Know Your End-Users

Salesforce empowers employees to do their jobs quicker, better, and faster. When your employees start to use and learn Salesforce, it’s important to get constant feedback on their experience. Finding tedious manual tasks that Salesforce automation can take care of will save your employees an enormous amount of time, allowing them to focus on more meaningful responsibilities such as selling or customer support. Some ideas on how to collect feedback from your employees are 1 on 1 meetings with them, building a community within Salesforce, utilizing Quip for suggestions, company surveys, and more. Ongoing enhancements to your Salesforce org are expected as you are trying to build a user-friendly CRM that helps users in their roles daily.

Continuous Training

Going from spreadsheets to Salesforce can be very challenging for employees. Attempting to work within Salesforce at the same time they’re still learning the system can be frustrating. Everyone learns differently, so it’s essential to take a multi-stepped approach to ensure Salesforce adoption. Some examples of different training approaches are lunch and learns, 1 on 1 training sessions, group training, Trailheads, Salesforce videos, and more. The key to Salesforce adoption is continuous learning and training. At Corrao Group, we’ve used Salesforce for over a decade and our employees, both new and old, still learn more about the system daily as there are always new ways to enhance how we do business.

If you would like to learn more about Salesforce Adoption, 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 1,047+ customers, implementing, customizing, and optimizing over 2,150 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!

7 Salesforce Implementation Risks to Avoid

In part 6 of our blog series, we discussed the time and budget needed for a Salesforce implementation. In this article, we want to dive deeper into why Salesforce implementations fail. Since the early 2000s, the implementation failure rate of CRM’s has been disturbing (See photo below). Why are companies investing in a CRM like Salesforce only to fail throughout implementation and adoption? Through our experience of over 2,000+ projects, we’ve identified 7 key Salesforce implementation risks: failure of executive buy-in and support, not establishing an internal Salesforce team, disconnected business processes, reviewing references if you get a partner, data issues, lack of training, and adoption, and continued feedback/enhancements.

CRM Failure Rates from 2001-2014 (via Salesforce)

Failure of Executive Buy-In

We’ve mentioned the need for executive buy-in in recent blogs, but it’s truly the first implementation risk your company could face. For example, if you are implementing a pipeline management system for your Sales team, it’s not good enough just to have the support of the VP of Sales. The CEO, CFO, and CIO all need to understand the reason why the company is moving to a cloud-based system. If the executive teams do not see and share the value, the rest of the team will not either.

We’ve seen many executives not understanding the value of Salesforce because maybe they want to appease their employees or they could be stuck on their homegrown system. Executives sometimes miss the point of a Salesforce. It’s an efficient tool that can drastically streamline processes and improve every department within a company. Moving to Salesforce is a major business change and the executives need to step up to the plate for the best results. Lack of sponsorship and commitment is a guarantee of any project failure and not just a reason why implementations fail.

No Salesforce Champion Team

When implementing Salesforce, it’s crucial to establish an internal Salesforce team that thrives on change. We like to call this team the “Salesforce champions” of the company as they can adapt on the fly to business adjustments. Salesforce champions can be department heads or technical team members. You need to be sure these team members can help connect their teams’ wants and needs with required features in Salesforce.

Disconnected Business Processes

Salesforce is a tool that can be used by all departments within a company. When processes are disconnected, technology can’t be looked at as the magic wand that fixes everything. The most critical part of your Salesforce implementation is clearly defining and communicating your business processes, not the technology. Due to the flexibility of Salesforce, it’s not recommended you get a free trial to try to figure it out yourself. Therefore, all business processes need to be optimized to reveal new ways it can be improved, even before implementing them within Salesforce. It’s best practice to find a knowledgeable partner with expertise in the technology. For example, If you are implementing a pipeline management system, you must share everything about your Sales process! From where your leads come from, all the way to your customer surveys (after the project).

Check References!

We always recommend getting a consultation partner while implementing Salesforce. If you decide on getting a partner, make sure to check references from end-users, other companies, G2 Crowd, and even employee reviews. Find a company that you feel is going to invest in your company and Salesforce. Salesforce is a very customizable system, so it’s essential to take your time and find the right partner. One tip is to stay away from Quickstarts or Fastracks! You’re spending a lot of money on Salesforce, so there should be nothing quick or fast about your setup!

Data Issues

Any existing data you have in current systems or spreadsheets will need to be migrated into Salesforce if needed. Companies typically wait until the very end of the implementation process to start preparing the data. However, we’ve found it is more efficient to have the data prepped and ready to go before the final stage of your implementation. You want to have your data in the system to start using Salesforce with meaningful data immediately. According to RingLead, the 2nd largest issue among Salesforce customers is bad data. Companies start making poor business decisions because of inaccurate data producing misleading results.

Lack of Proper Training and Adoption

At the end of the project, your executives and any other key members should walk through the newly configured system for approval. Additionally, your company should be going through some training sessions on how to use Salesforce and its features. It’s not good enough to do one or two training sessions as ongoing training greatly helps adoption rates. Reports and dashboards can be set up to show if your employees are actually using the system as well. Companies struggle to ensure adoption because their employees either don’t use the system or do not know how to. Great Salesforce implementation partners have thousands of successful implementations completed that can be leveraged for best practices throughout training and adoption.

Internal Feedback/Ongoing Enhancements

A lot of times companies go live with their initial implementation and think their Salesforce is complete. Getting the initial implementation done is a fantastic step, but you are not done! What your business can do with Salesforce is truly limitless. Make sure it’s easy for your staff to submit potential enhancements for Salesforce because your employees are the ones that will make your org accelerate.

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!

 

Planning Your Budget and Time For a Salesforce Implementation

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:

    • Essentials ($25 User/Month)
    • Professional ($75 User/Month)
    • Enterprise ($150 User/Month)
    • Unlimited ($300 User/Month)

Other Budgeting Factors Include:

    • 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!