A successful CRM requires ongoing love and attention beyond the initial implementation process.
As we referred to in Part 1 in this blog series, it’s important to upskill members of the team internally so they can manage and update the CRM on a daily basis and support its ongoing adoption, value and usability for customers.
Identifying your organisation’s Salesforce Champion.
We call these individuals ‘Salesforce Champions’ and an internal Salesforce Champion needs to have a long-term continuous improvement strategy for their CRM.
Salesforce advocates that change is the norm, which includes reviewing and improving Salesforce functionality on a regular basis to align with changes in processes, new releases, new reporting requirements etc.
A Salesforce system is never ‘finished’ as changes and improvements to the system should be the norm. There is always a to do list…
An organisation which does not invest budget and effort in a Salesforce Champion to analyse, plan and deploy changes to Salesforce is limiting their overall ability to maximise efficiency for their team and maximise value out of their CRM long term.
We advocate the following practices for Internal Salesforce Champions.
- Ensure you are trained in the Salesforce Admin essentials as covered in Part 1.
- Host monthly internal Salesforce meetings in team meetings or during lunch to gather issues, requirements, discuss new features to support departmental adoption and advancements.
- Check out the Salesforce Release Notes and summarise updates to share with the team and prioritise what’s valuable.
- Enable an easy and efficient way for team users to submit requests for changes or updates to Salesforce through the use of the case object or custom object and use this to track, record updates and budget accordingly.
- Learn the core business analysis skills, document requirements and change requests, and ensure changes are reflected in training manuals so there is clear and relevant documentation for the team.
- Use the Files Tab in Salesforce to share training videos and manuals for users or use tools such as Walk with me, Visual Flow or Sales Path to navigate people through the use of the system.
- The Salesforce Champion should continue to join groups and attend events to learn new skills and features and exchange best practices with other organisations.
- Ensure sufficient budget is allocated at the operational level and departmentally for salesforce development work, and log how and when a budget has been utilised for reporting purposes.
- Run regular health checks on the Salesforce instance to check that’s it’s running at an optimal level. For our clients we normally undertake health checks for NPSP, Security, Optimiser, Critical Updates, Field Analysis, and Error Logs.
