Author Archives: Roli Agarwal

Increase ROI

How to Increase Salesforce ROI

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Salesforce is mentioned in almost every talk about picking a new CRM. The world-renowned CRM provider was ranked #1 by the International Data Corporation (IDC) in their latest Worldwide Semiannual Software Tracker.

When it comes to something as essential as selecting a new Customer Relationship Management platform, the bottom line always comes first. And you’ll need demonstrable ROI to persuade your company’s decision-makers or even yourself. Your Salesforce ROI has two sides: growing revenue and lowering costs. To achieve both, make sure you and your staff are doing all possible to make the most of what Salesforce has to offer in terms of assisting your company’s growth. In this blog, we’ll see how you can improve and increase your Salesforce ROI.

Factors Contributing to Increasing in Salesforce ROI

Salesforce, like any other platform, should be used in conjunction with your existing procedures to help you reach your objectives. We see organizations trying to follow a different procedure within Salesforce all the time since they don’t know how to customize the product to their needs. This results in dissatisfaction, a lack of acceptance and usage of the product as a whole, and a considerable waste of time and corporate resources for your employees. So, businesses must ensure the following things as they primarily contribute to the increasing ROI of Salesforce in your business:

  • Position of Data

Businesses are always gathering data, but most of them are unable to utilize it and derive value from it because the data hasn’t been tailored for their team’s unique requirements or isn’t conveniently available in one spot. So, it should be ensured that all of the Salesforce data should be present at a centralized location and must be relevant for every team.

  • Salesforce Roadmap & schedule

Without a proper roadmap, teams often find it quite stressful to handle more work at a time and get overwhelmed. So, you need to have a structured roadmap made for your teams regarding the use of Salesforce and have to focus on more customization and adoption across your organization. This way, you can start small and get on schedule every time.

  • Employees’ understanding

As per Salesforce reports, eighty-five percent of businesses expect consistent interactions across teams/departments. But, often, businesses fail to make their employees understand the benefits of Salesforce, and as a result, there are non-streamlined operations and work. So, it is one of the most important factors to make your employees aware of the benefits of Salesforce and yield more efficient and collaborative outputs.

How to Increase Salesforce User Adoption?

It’s usually due to a lack of salesforce user adoption. It’s all well and good to create an amazing CRM system, but if the target user isn’t involved in the construction and maintenance of the platform, the entire process will stutter and eventually fail. So, here are the key ways to increase Salesforce user adoption.

  • Establishing ownership with senior stakeholders

When a Salesforce team is backed by an executive stakeholder who can assist roadmap and prioritize based on business goals, as well as guarantee the delivery/communications around upgrades across the board, the team is less likely to face pushback.

  • Identifying bottlenecks and automating processes

People will be more likely to utilize Salesforce if it is made easier to use. Adding a little creativity to Salesforce may help users speed up activities that would otherwise be done manually, such as data entry.

  • Utilizing AppExchange

The AppExchange has a plethora of free and paid plugins designed specifically to make Salesforce more useful. When it comes to making Salesforce more appealing, engaging, and easy to use, these add-on bells and whistles may be tremendously effective.

  • Partnering with the best users

Keeping your users at the center of everything you do will boost adoption rates by reinforcing the idea that this is a platform intended to help them succeed, not as a tracking tool.

Best Practices to Increase User Adoption

Here are some best practices to increase Salesforce user adoption:

  • Making Salesforce easier to use

Simplicity is essential when it comes to your Salesforce org. Allowing your implementation to become bogged down with hundreds of needed data columns is a bad idea. Consider how you can make some parts more efficient and interesting.

  • Leading examples & training users

When it comes to deploying Salesforce, proper training is a requirement. Salesforce adoption requires a top-down strategy, and leadership support is essential for success. On a daily basis, sales executives must show the platform’s strategic worth.

  • Celebrating the power users and having fun with chatter

Salesforce’s social networking tool, Chatter, may help your employees become more engaged with the platform. Incentives and incentive systems have been shown to increase employee engagement and motivation, so always consider giving your best users some of them.

Conclusion

It may be a lot of fun to learn all there is to know about your clients with CRM software and tools. But keep in mind that they are only tools, and they can’t take the place of the actual human element in the marketing process. Relationships, loyalty, and other intangibles are now more than ever the true indicators of return on investment. So, following these steps in the blog would help you to yield the most ROI out of your Salesforce.

Release Manager Salesforce

The Need for a Dedicated Salesforce Release Manager

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Salesforce release management is an ongoing procedure with certain stages that must be followed to ensure a successful release every time. To ensure a stable deployment of new features, each step must be completed before moving on to the next. Processes for Salesforce Release Management should not be set up in isolation. They are intricately linked to the organization’s business strategy, objectives, change management, governance, and other factors. The goal of release management is to create optimal business value and resource utilization by having a consistent set of repeatable, dependable, and resource-independent processes. Given that most businesses are focused on completing shorter, high-yield business initiatives, optimizing the application delivery value chain is critical to ensuring that the business value is delivered without bottlenecks. That is why a Salesforce Release Manager is crucial in every organization working with the Salesforce platform to ensure a smooth release process and to prevent any misalignment in the same.

Setting up Salesforce Sandbox

A Salesforce sandbox is a place where you can test and build without risking your main, or production, Salesforce org’s valuable data being changed or lost. Sandboxes are a great way to keep your data clean while you’re teaching, testing, or developing. It’s usually a good idea to first test these features in a sandbox, regardless of the size of your business or the feature you’re changing or introducing. Setting up a Salesforce Sandbox requires you to choose the appropriate option from the given list according to your requirements. Mainly, Salesforce offers four types of Sandboxes to be created based on the different needs of the organization. And once you configure all the necessary points, your Sandbox will be created in any span of time, ranging from minutes to days depending upon the size of the data and your organization.

Importance of a Release Management Strategy

The lack of a release management strategy that dictates how and when changes to the system are provided is one of the main factors that may derail a successful Salesforce operation. Because without a release management plan, what began as a well-organized program with stakeholder buy-in and end-user knowledge can swiftly devolve into chaos. A Salesforce release management approach helps keep a successful Salesforce program on pace and generate ongoing benefits, allowing you to double down on the gains you’ve already seen. It accomplishes this by establishing a clear procedure for receiving, reviewing, and prioritizing requests for updates, as well as delivering those changes in an orderly manner.

Keeping updated with Salesforce’s yearly releases

Salesforce release managers are the company’s ambassadors, leaders, and experts on all things related to Salesforce. And remaining updated on technologies that can affect your organization, whether they’re new tools you can use or upgrades to features you already use, is an important aspect of being the Salesforce expert for your firm. With three product releases every year, it’s critical to have a game plan in place for upcoming releases. So, to keep your Salesforce environment updated, you need to focus on the following points:

  • Be aware of when the updates are coming

To be prepared, you must first understand what is coming and when it will arrive. All key dates for your Salesforce environment are listed on the Salesforce Trust calendar, including release schedules for your Salesforce instance.  

  • Test the new features

When working with new updates, try to look into the new environment features and get to know how new things work.

Updating Salesforce Environment Best Practices

Salesforce’s ability to allow fewer technical users to construct apps and customizations without writing a single line of code is at the heart of what makes it so effective. This one-of-a-kind strength, however, comes at a price. Because of its proclivity for introducing numerous competing sources of truth, as well as the cost of reversing click settings into code, it makes source control and release management extremely difficult. Companies should follow several guiding principles while implementing Salesforce source control and release management, which may not be required in other software development stacks. So, below are some best practices and methods that companies can practice to keep their Salesforce environment updated and clean:

  • Using pull requests & feature branching

Your developers/admins should each work on their sandbox and commit modifications to a feature branch that represents a business change (Jira ticket, business request, etc.). Before being deployed in targeted environments, this feature branch will be integrated into integration branches.  

  • Tracking code & configurations in Git and sourcing from it

Setting up a continuous integration task that deploys from your Git repository to your production instance is the ideal way to do this. This forces your entire team to follow the release management procedure and always commit changes to Git before pushing them to production.  

  • Releasing smaller changes frequently

This allows your team to quickly sync their sandboxes by simply delivering the master branch to their sandboxes without encountering any deployment difficulties.  

  • Setting automated continuous integration

Set up automatic continuous integration jobs to validate commits as soon as they are merged. Build failures clog your release management pipeline, so create a culture in which everyone takes build failures seriously and addresses them promptly.  

  • Segregation of duty & access control

Your Salesforce release management process should be constructed so that each job is solely concerned with his or her element of the process. Depending on the size and complexity of your Salesforce system, your optimum build pipeline, branching strategy, and release management procedure will range slightly. However, if you follow the best practices outlined above, you will be one step ahead of the game in bringing your team toward a more simplified, modern, and automated Salesforce release management process.

Conclusion

A successful implementation is a vital first step in your Salesforce journey, but it is only the beginning. To reap the long-term benefits of Salesforce, institutional governance is required, as is a release management approach. When combined with a great Salesforce release manager, these tactics will yield even greater returns on your investment and help keep both end-users and stakeholders involved in the program.