Key Challenges Organizations Face When Implementing Salesforce CRM

Before implementing Salesforce, it’s imperative to understand the challenges, strengths and limitations faced during the implementation to avoid common roadblocks that delay ROI.

Here is a look at the major challenges organizations face while implementing Salesforce CRM.

1. How or Where to Start?

Determining how and where to start with the implementation is one of the biggest challenges the organization face in the early stage. This is the stage where organizations get hung up, the process gets on hold, and further unclear ideas, hit and try method, little know-how, spoils the broth.

2. Dealing with Data Migration

In Salesforce implementation, data migration, integration, and maintenance are few of the significant challenges organization face during development. Data migration is a monumental task that deserves a separate strategy, approach, budget, and team. Dealing with user mapping, duplicate data, adding custom fields, security, clean up, managing access control etc. takes up considerable time and money. During Salesforce implementation, migration strategy has to be such that it improves the usability and efficiency of your new system which in turn gives a better ROI.

3. Integrating Salesforce with Other Systems

To leverage the benefit of Salesforce, it needs to be integrated with other business applications in the organization. A business IT environment is disparate— from on-premise applications, mobile app, cloud apps – and integrating Salesforce with other applications require planning and strategy.

4. Complicating the Implementation

Salesforce CRM has a wide-range of services designed to improve your business processes. But just because a feature is available does not mean that you have to incorporate it into your business. Organizations usually end up complicating things by opting for more features than required which also results in accrued cost of Salesforce Implementation.

5. Incomplete Requirements

One of the biggest reasons for IT project failure are poor system requirements. Requirements establish the needs of stakeholders that will be solved by the new software. The first step of the requirements process is the discovery or the findings. A thorough analysis, documentation and management of the requirements are important to ensure the end product fulfills the goals and vision. Some examples of requirement pitfalls are—

• Poorly defined project scope
• Incomplete details and omissions
• Communication breakdowns
• Out of control changes

6. Training or Adoption for Staff or Leadership

Technology that your team does not understand is as good as useless. In a typical case, the team views Salesforce as separate from what they do i.e., an additional chore for entering data. At the early stage, the team may not see this enabler for making their work simpler and easier ahead.

7. Selecting Right Salesforce Implementation Partner

Salesforce implementation is a high risk, high reward situation. It’s one of the biggest investments you’ll make, hence, engaging an experienced Salesforce implementation partner is crucial. Trying to cut cost by selecting an under-qualified Salesforce implementation partner or DIY-ing the implementation internally can be disastrous. The challenge is deciding if you need to hire an implementation firm for initial deployment and then choosing the right Salesforce consultant best suited for the business.

These are some of the challenges that organizations are likely to face if they are planning to implement Salesforce, but for the most part, they are preventable if you are selecting the right Salesforce implementation partner.

With over a decade of Salesforce experience and a strong pool of Salesforce certified resources, Damco’s global Salesforce practice has been helping organizations increase their agility through increased social interaction with customers, more collaborative relationships with partners, and more flexible and user-friendly enterprise applications.

Finding difficulty in realizing the true potential of your Salesforce license? This article will help you better optimize your Salesforce implementations, read here: https://www.damcogroup.com/blogs/3-tactics-to-optimize-your-salesforce-implementations