According to Forrester’s recent CRM trends report geared to help users navigate the future of CRM in 2017, the use of customer relationship management (CRM) solutions should be viewed as the foundational building block to power your customer experience (CX) strategy. For Salesforce users looking to tap into the true power of the platform, your CRM must fuel a frictionless customer experience as well as enable your marketing, sales, and service organizations supporting customer-facing operations to work more efficiently.
As your organization thinks about its CX strategy relative to your CRM roadmap over the course of the year, it’s important to approach the deployment of any new Salesforce solutions with a solid plan to ensure customer success in 2017. Statistics have shown that 30-60% of CRM projects fail – which is a troubling statistic when CRM is so vital to an organization! So where do most CRM implementations go wrong? The most common pitfall we’ve heard from Salesforce customers that have come to us for help is a lack of user adoption. But beyond that, we’ve heard tales of deployments that lacked clear goals, projects that failed to involve end users or executive sponsors, and a lack of collaboration around development and project deliverables.
When you think about it, deploying Salesforce is much like moving into a new home. There’s a lot to plan for and think about before, during, and after Salesforce goes live. To address a common question I’ve seen over on the Salesforce Success community, we’ve developed a guide to provide Salesforce Administrators, CRM project teams, and IT system owners a general framework for developing a checklist to get you “move-in ready”. From start-to-finish, it has everything a good Salesforce deployment checklist needs to help keep your project on track, including:
- collaboration and communication considerations
- inventory of key functions for a typical implementation
- deployment tools and best practices
- staying focused on your long-term vision for Salesforce
And above all, don’t forget that Salesforce partners, like Perficient, are here to help make your CRM projects a success too!
