Salesforce Platform Strategy

Whether you are just getting started with Salesforce or consider yourself an early adopter of certain CRM features for your business practices, maintaining a realistic and well thought out strategy are ongoing necessities. We will help you develop and maintain that strategy or evaluate your current strategy to ensure you are receiving the highest ROI possible.

Few companies can be all things to all potential and existing customers. To get value from customer relationships, you need to understand who you are building these customer relationships with. For example, are you providing a broad range of services to a distinct group of companies or a single product for a wide range of businesses?

A relationship only lasts when both parties benefit from the relationship. What do your customers need from you? If customers are looking for after-sales service, then you need to be able to provide distinguishable service while still making a profit. For customers who simply want to buy and walk away, a different strategy is needed.

Processes should be designed and systems should be implemented in order to remove blockages and improve relationships through communication and responsiveness. It's important to realize that only people can build relationships. Systems and software only support people and processes as customer relationships are built - they cannot solve issues with personnel or with poor processes.

Avoid CRM Failure

A successful CRM implementation can generate substantial returns. Payback within months and Return on Investment (ROI) of more than 100% is by no means impossible. This cannot be accomplished, however, in an implementation that focuses on a set of generic best practices or with a system that cannot be configured to match your specific business processes.

Guarantee CRM Success

  • Set reasonable and achievable expectations for your organization and have a clearly defined set of goals
  • Develop a plan for dealing with the resistors to change
  • Understand that adoption of a CRM strategy is a top-down initiative - the executive team must support and be behind the decision to implement CRM
  • Understand that a successful CRM implementation will make your good sales people better and your bad sales people more visible
  • Understand that adoption of CRM is an evolutionary process not a revolutionary process
  • Never stop training your team