How To Ruin Your Salesforce Implementation

Getting it wrong with a tool as foundational as Salesforce carries massive implications - no matter if it's Sales Cloud or any additional module.

This is a significant part of the overall budget - whether it’s a basic install, new product or cloud, or migrating an outside process to get it all under one digital roof - you have to get it right the first time.

Some statistics around percentage of budget spent on software:

• Tech investment as part of overall budget rose from 4.25% in 2020 to 5.29% in 2023 (source)

• IT spends 18% of budget on average (source)

• Marketing allocated nearly 19% of budget (source)

Just look at this Statista chart showing the continuing upward trend of technology spend overall.

If you’ve been in this space long enough, you inevitably get pulled in to fix a bad implementation and clean up a mess.  It's unfortunate that a bad partner leads to so much negative impact.

As a co-founder here at DoubleTrack and a consultant for well over a decade, here’s some ways I’ve seen companies go wrong … and pay the price because of it.

Technology < Process

It’s cliche in the consulting world to say good technology can’t fix bad processes.

And yet, companies buy technology without addressing the underlying issues all the time.

For example, let’s say you’re on a platform like Zoho, Pipedrive, or maybe a homegrown system. You decide Salesforce is a solution that better aligns with your business goals and growth plans.

Here’s how Salesforce will help:

• Bring multiple teams onto one platform, with a clear source of truth

• Introduce a hierarchy for leads, opportunities, and accounts that is easy to use

• Secure platform from a leading technology company in the space

• Robust reporting capabilities that come standard

• Provide the foundation for enhanced performance for various teams, depending on who’s using the platform

It takes training and 100% internal adoption to realize the best value of these, of course, and switching to a new system is never easy. Unrealized potential is paying for inefficiency, a hidden cost of failing to get everything you expected.

Here are some gaps that may be highlighted by the switch to a more robust platform:

1. Sales teams working with unclear pipelines, lack of activity tracking, and/or uploading lists into the system at will

2. A messy support handoff for onboarding or support

3. Bottlenecked approval processes that over-rely on a single person to keep things moving

4. Marketing being “out of it” once a lead gets entered into the system

A new technology won’t fix any of this. In fact, it may make them worse! These are cultural challenges and processes that have to be fixed with a top-down approach.

Stuff, not strategy

Part of what I do is begin understanding what works now.

What I’m looking for, no matter if it’s an engagement around your lead-to-cash process, customer support efficiency, or billing automations includes:

• What does this look like?

• Who is impacted by these processes?

• What technologies impact this?

• What do you actually like and want to keep?

• Why are you looking to make changes now?

• How does this align with your overall business goals?

Sometimes, there is already a future-state roadmap in place for companies who have a good amount of platform maturity.

Unfortunately, in discovery calls, there are some companies who will simply tell you what they’ll do. They’ll list the benefits, the cost, the timeline … but it’s a turnkey solution with minor adjustments to fit into your industry or use case.

There’s no alignment to the overarching business objectives.

In fact, this is something I’d advise anyone using a consultant (whether for Salesforce or anything else) to gauge when evaluating vendors.

Do they make a concerted effort to understand your business, and is that vendor communicating how they can help in a way that makes perfect sense to you?

If both answers are a “yes” then it’s likely you’re getting a good partner.

Do you have doubts? Test them. Ask a vendor “what do you understand about our core KPIs and how this engagement relates to it?”

Leaving It Alone

I’m referring to what happens after implementation. (Obviously, you’ll be heavily involved in the process of getting the project live!) Yes, technically this isn’t getting the implementation itself wrong, but failing here renders a successful project moot.

I see this occur too often:

A company buys Salesforce and it's exactly what they need … at the time. 

With a basic implementation, you’ll see leads, accounts, contacts, opportunities are working cohesively in one place. You have the lead’s lifecycle, history, previous opportunities. They're all in one place.

However, your business isn’t stagnant. It grows and evolves. How you do business shifts accordingly, whether it’s supporting new products, enhanced processes, better customer support, etc.

How will Salesforce grow with you?

This technology isn’t a one-and-done type of project. The ongoing maintenance and support needed ensures your platform keeps up with anything that occurs:

• An M&A

• Tech stack additions that feed into Salesforce

• Org structure changes

• New approval processes

• New products or pricing structures

• Additional customer support features

• …and more

Suddenly, what was once exactly what you needed isn’t keeping up, unless you have the resources in place that have already been managing your systems.

And the project costs for playing “catch up” with your system are massive.

Related: Four business cases for investing in your Salesforce instance

Admin role

In the past, a Salesforce Administrator was the keeper of the system, but development and system architecture was left to someone else. However, now this is a wear-many-hats type of role that combines elements of Business Admin, Developer, Architect, and Revenue Operations.

Spread across multiple departments (or even business units), it’s easy to see how the resources available to make system updates might be spread thin.

For small-to-midsize orgs, it may be one point of contact pulling it all together.

For large enterprises, they may have teams of 20+ people dedicated specifically to Salesforce and linked technologies. But even then, the backlog can be huge - and a tangled mess depending on the roadmap (or lack thereof) for the platform.

Either way, asking the question “how can we get more from what we have?” lends itself perfectly to your Salesforce instance.

How to get your implementation right

I characterize this as a three-step process.

Step 1: Get the right partner

A few questions to ask:

• Do they give you a good feeling, or inspire doubt?

• Is a vendor listing out stuff they can do, or trying to understand your business and identify how their work impacts your desired outcomes?

• What’s their recent track record? Can they provide references?

• Who would they put on your project - can you view those people’s information (i.e. LinkedIn profiles) to determine how qualified they are to work on your instance?

 Asking these will help you avoid getting a project that misses the mark.

Step 2: Cross-functional involvement

Involved and responsive companies make it far easier for consultants like us to nail details down and create a smoother experience.

This spans initial discovery, design, and understanding how your implementation supports overall business goals.

Throughout the process, it’s also staying involved in testing, giving timely feedback, and working alongside your chosen partner.

But you can’t do it alone.

If your team is driving an implementation, have you pulled in related teams who may be impacted - or should be leveraging what you’re getting, too? For instance, if you’re overhauling your quote-to-cash process with a CPQ implementation, does Finance have visibility and comments on how this will impact how they do business?

• What about Support?

• Product Marketing with price books, perhaps?

You get the picture. Staying siloed does nobody any good when leveraging Salesforce.

Step 3: Keep investing

I’ll repeat what I said earlier: There is no such things as set it and forget it implementation.

How do you keep your instance adapted to evolving business and customer needs?

In two words: Managed services.

Why?

1. Admins and developers get the support they need to keep everything running smoothly

2. As Salesforce releases updates, you have the expertise to take full advantage on-hand already

3. Ability to scale up as the business grows and needs it - without increasing headcount

It’s a popular option, and avoids the “leave it alone” problem because you’ve invested in the expertise to make certain you’re getting the most out of Salesforce.

Want to take it a step further? Identify the short- and long-term needs for the business and distill them into a prioritized project plan.

A roadmapping exercise aligns leaders in different teams around similar Salesforce-related discussions. You’d be surprised at the “ah ha” moments that stem from the discussions!