Best Practices for Implementing Salesforce CRM - Cloud Experts

Meet—and beat—these 8 CRM challenges• Top 5 sales reps• Lead conversion rate• Completed activitiesIn addition to such quantitative metrics, also define goals for adoption rates, performance, and continuouseducation. Here’s a dashboard that can serve as a great starting point for tracking and reaching your goals.Challenge #5: Manage changeChange is a given. You may find that 6 months after you go live, your application no longer meets somebusiness needs. For example, territories are realigned, an account has too many unused fields, or you mightwant to add a great new feature.Because Salesforce CRM is so easy to change, you’ll need a process to manage these changes, so theydon’t interfere with your business process or undermine your business strategy. Creating a changemanagement plan helps keep your organization’s vision, strategy, and goals closely aligned. Althoughchange management is most critical for complex implementations, customers of all sizes should have achange strategy. Here’s a change management example you can use to help manage your changes.Challenge #6: Train and train againAlthough we’ve won lots of awards for our easy-to-use interface, training is still crucial. In particular, youwant to be sure users make the most of the customizations that affect their day-to-day jobs.Training is one of the most important things you can do to improve adoption and enforce your businessprocess. Be sure to train users initially and reinforce that training periodically. It’s also a good idea tocreate training resources to support your specific implementation, such as newsletters, brown-bag sessions,and tips of the week. Many customers create an Education Web tab to manage their training resources.Be sure to use salesforce.com’s resources to help you train your users and manage your training:• Free online training• A free resource for tracking course completion statistics (Setup | Manage Users | Training History)• Best Practice document “10 tips for a successful training plan”BEST PRACTICE 3