Are you considering using the Salesforce platform in your business? Perhaps you’ve already had it for a while but it no longer fits your processes (or never has!). There are multiple factors that can influence the success of your Salesforce implementation and there are many companies who can get you up and running, Stimulus Consulting being one of them. But beware, not all consultancies are the same!
Just take a look at some of the alarming stories our clients have told us when using our consultancy services to identify and resolve low user adoption, inaccurate reporting and a slow ROI from their existing Salesforce implementation.
"Every user has the same Administrator profile."
Consequence: All users could create, edit and delete ANY Salesforce record and configure and customise the application.
Best Practice: This is a very powerful profile that should only be given to someone who has solid CRM administration experience and ideally holds a current Salesforce Administration certification. Perhaps consider setting up a delegated administrator for users who need limited admin permissions.
More Info: https://help.salesforce.com/articleView?id=admin_delegate.htm&type=5
https://www.stimulusconsulting.co.uk/salesforce-courses/
“All users can create reports and report folders, so we have hundreds of folders containing multiple versions of the same report all telling a slightly different story.”
Consequence: Users couldn’t find the report they were looking for, so they continued to create new versions thereby exacerbating the situation.
Best Practice: Define a set of reports that can be used throughout the business, as users who run the reports will only ever see the data they have access to. It is also a good idea to keep the number of people who can create/manage public report folders to a minimum. Depending on the size of your business this may just be the System Administrator, but for larger organisations you may wish Senior Managers or Team Leads to have this function.
More Info: https://help.salesforce.com/articleView?id=leads_def.htm&type=5
“All users share the same login.”
Consequence: Too many to detail here, but at the very least this will have a negative impact on the integrity of your data and prevent you from utilising some great out-of-the-box Salesforce functionality.
Best Practice: Provide each user their own Salesforce login! If you are a Non-profit organisation you can receive 10 subscription licenses at zero cost to yourselves.
More Info: https://www.salesforce.org/nonprofit_product/nonprofit-editions-pricing/
“We gave a lot of users the View All Data and Modify All Data permissions because they were complaining they couldn’t update records in Salesforce.”
Consequence: These permissions will completely bypass your security model and allow such users to edit ANY Salesforce record.
Best Practice: The View/Modify All Data permissions are too often given as a shortcut to granting object or record-level access. Some organisations have a legal obligation to ensure that certain information is hidden from certain users, so you should evaluate who needs to see what in your org and set object-level access accordingly. If this or record-level access needs to be extended for some users, explore the use of roles, security settings and permission sets.
Configuring your security model to achieve the desired result can be quite complex, generally you should be running workshops or a series of meetings to scope the requirements in detail with your colleagues and management team. If you need help with this then please don’t hesitate to contact us.
More Info: https://help.salesforce.com/articleView?id=000321298&type=1&mode=1
“It takes too long to create an Opportunity because every field has been set to required, so I keep track of my deals on a spreadsheet.”
Consequence: This will hit your users hard and clearly stifle user adoption! Sales won’t be able to provide accurate sales pipeline forecasts and management reports will not give a true representation of closed/lost deals.
Best Practice: This may be a case for using record types. Explore whether there are different types of opportunities. For example, sales may need to capture some information that professional services do not and vice versa. If that’s the case, then you could create different page layouts for each record type so that each team is only required to populate fields relevant to their function.
More Info: https://help.salesforce.com/articleView?id=customize_recordtype.htm&type=5
Stimulus can help you avoid these all too common mistakes and many others like it. We believe continual stakeholder management and user engagement is fundamental to the success of an implementation and pride ourselves on delivering business led functionality. To top it off we can also provide post-deployment support and supporting documentation to help you with those inevitable questions of “why” or “how” something was implemented. Check out our full range of services here.