5 Tell-Tale Signs Your Business Needs a Salesforce Tune-up
So, you’ve implemented Salesforce. Perhaps it’s been a great system that was customized for your current business processes and current users; but lately, it hasn’t been meeting your needs. Or, perhaps it never really did.
The reality is that even the best CRM deployments weather with age and require periodic “health checks”. To ensure your Salesforce instance continues performing optimally, it’s important to perform periodic check-ups and evaluate if any tune ups are required to keep it running like a well-oiled machine that delivers amazing results. Start 2018 on the right foot by taking the time to reassess your CRM needs.
It might be time for your Salesforce system to get a health check if:
1. You’ve lost in-house Salesforce resources and talent
Does this scenario sound familiar? Your CRM system was working very smoothly thanks to a rock star Salesforce Admin who kept things going. But alas, all good things come to an end. Your rock star just bid adieu to the company, and no one else understands the system well enough to keep it running.
This may be the time to leverage some outside expertise—at least for an interim timeframe. Whether you plan to replace your internal resource or not, there may be value in engaging an external expert so your team can continue focusing on selling instead of getting bogged down and frustrated by not having the data they need.
2. Your CRM is not well integrated with other business systems
Are you spending a lot of time manually transferring data? Do you trust the reliability of data from multiple systems? The facts is that your job is probably much harder if your enterprise systems don’t seamlessly talk to one another.
So if you’re looking to improve data quality and transparency across systems, now’s the time to take a step back and determine the time and level of effort required to better integrate your systems. A solid integration can remove human error and ensure everyone has visibility into the data they need. It’s worth the investment to engage a systems integration expert to help assess the best approach for this.
3. Your sales team is avoiding Salesforce altogether and attempting to track things “their own way”
Have you struggled with user adoption despite training attempts? Are your users treating Salesforce like a Rolodex? A recent survey found that 59% of CRM implementations fails due to low user adoption. User adoption is crucial to developing a 360-degree view of your customers. With this visibility, your executives and sales team can help uncover previously hidden opportunities to better serve your customers in ways that drive sustainable profits.
You should assess the factors that may be contributing to poor user adoption such as:
- Un-intuitive systems
- Gathering too much non-crucial information
- Data entry perceived as an obstruction to selling
Designing the system from the perspective of the end-users has a big impact on long-term adoption and overall success with your CRM. Consider engaging a Salesforce expert to help you tune-up your UI to include fewer fields, auto-populate data where possible, and perform data validation to expedite recording leads, opportunities and sales.
4. Your reports are inaccurate and your data is a complete mess
Does this sound familiar? You’ve spent a tremendous amount of time and resources implementing your CRM, but junky data is making your system totally ineffective. Your data is a complete mess and you don’t have the resources to keep your sales efforts running in order to clean up your system.
If this rings true, it may be time to engage an external resource team to put together a time-bound action plan to help you manage your data clean-up efforts, including duplicates, data aggregation, etc.
5. You’ve outgrown your Salesforce environment
Has your organization been experiencing lots of growth? The maturity of your Salesforce instance should reflect the size of the organization. In fact, the best time to begin considering a health check is when your business grows beyond your initial maturity level. How does your organization stack up? Download our Salesforce Maturity Model Infographic to find out!
Related: How to Improve the ROI of Your Salesforce Investment
Investing in regular CRM tune-ups will help keep the system running so that you can focus on what matters most to you—growing and managing your business.
Bringing It All Together
Even if Salesforce was working perfectly when you rolled it out, it may no longer be giving you what you need. By performing regular Salesforce tune-ups, you can help ensure you have better visibility into your opportunity pipeline, actionable data to manage the customer lifecycle and more accountability for your sales team.
Think your business could benefit from a health check? Get in touch with Bridgepoint today for a free one-day Salesforce Health Check. Explore our full suite of Salesforce services and solutions here.
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