20 Feb Adoption Maturity – Leveraging The Salesforce Platform
Previously, we introduced the idea of a Salesforce Adoption Maturity Model as a way for companies to gauge how well they are capitalizing on their Salesforce investment. We discussed the first level of the model, Basic Adoption, which is focused on getting the fundamentals in place and developing the discipline within the organization to use the solutions. In the second level of the model, Leveraging the Platform, you will have reached the intermediate stage when you have begun to automate processes and expand usage of Salesforce into the areas of your business that will help you create a 360-degree view of your relationships.
In the second level, you will have moved beyond tracking and managing your sales process and sales forecast, and now all of your customer interactions are integrated and centrally tracked. You will have ironed out your major business processes and procedures so they are either performed automatically or supported by Salesforce. In essence, the platform has become part of the fabric of your business; it is hard to see yourself without it. If you don’t think you’re there yet, here are some ways to achieve it:
- Build processes that utilize data to proactively engage and manage relationships.
- Develop contact and account objects to contain detailed attributes for segmenting and analyzing data.
- Utilize custom objects, dependent fields, workflows, and triggers.
- Implement lead scoring.
- Manage customer service through cases.
- Implement metrics for measuring the entire customer lifecycle from initial inquiry to continued service.
- Utilize third-party apps from the App Exchange.
- Integrate with external systems.
- Utilize Pardot for customer communication and lead development.
- Allow partners and customers to access Salesforce through Communities.
It’s possible to reach this level of adoption within 4 to 6 months after launching Salesforce. When you make it to this level of adoption, Salesforce will now support the full life cycle of all of your relationships, from the first time you connected to the last time you interacted for any reason. When you’ve hit this stage, your team will be relying on Salesforce all the time, and your ROI will become much more visible in hard dollars.