What Is Salesforce Implementation? Strategies and How to Implement
Table of Contents
Introduction
Salesforce, a leading CRM services provider has changed the way businesses interact with their customers. It manages extensive customer data in one place, changing the scenario of customer interaction management. However, successfully implementing Salesforce is not as straightforward as it may seem. The platform’s robust capabilities come with complexities that require strategic planning, technical expertise, and a clear understanding of business needs.
Many businesses attempt to handle the implementation themselves, often underestimating these challenges, which can lead to suboptimal results, wasted resources, and missed opportunities.
Partnering with experienced Salesforce implementation partners is the key to overcoming these challenges and unlocking the platform’s full potential. Whether it’s customizing workflows, integrating with existing systems, or training your team, the right guidance can make all the difference.
In this blog, we’ll provide a comprehensive Salesforce implementation guide, including its benefits and challenges, so you can complete the intricate process successfully and leverage the platform’s CRM capabilities.
What Is Salesforce Implementation?
Salesforce implementation is a process of configuring the CRM (Customer Relationship Management) platform according to specific business requirements including customizing objects, fields, layouts, workflows, etc.
Why Do Businesses Need to Implement Salesforce? Key Benefits


Salesforce is a highly customizable CRM platform empowering businesses to improve sales and marketing processes. Here are some key benefits businesses can gain:
1. 360-degree View of Customer Data
Most businesses have scattered data on different platforms, but implementing Salesforce provides a unified view of each customer interaction that includes information on customer buying preferences, behavior, and current needs. Salesforce customer 360 view enables personalization of communication to reduce customer churn, make informed decisions, and increase customer loyalty.
2. Streamline Customer Support Process
It enables seamless customer support by unifying customer interactions. It allows support agents to access relevant customer data such as case history and resolution process, leading to faster response time. Its AI-powered service planner delivers data-driven and step-by-step case solutions, leading to reduced response time and improved agent productivity.
3. Saves Developers Time
Implementing Salesforce will not only help businesses with the click-not-code feature, but it also offer AI-powered CodeGenie that helps users with code completion. Even the platform has its native Salesforce AppExchange marketplace having over a thousand third-party tools that increase the platform’s capabilities. It saves developers a lot of time drains in developing a custom workflow or integrating payment getaways. Salesforce provides a drag-and-drop component to configure and customize objects and workflows without the need for code.
4. Improved Communication and Collaboration
Businesses often use different applications for tasks and communication, but implementing Salesforce enables teams to communicate within the platform with its internal social network, “Chatter.” This is a mobile app for employees to stay connected on the go. Also, implementation will provide a unified platform that allows all departments to access updated customer information in real-time.
5. Targeted Marketing and Lead Management
With Salesforce implementation, marketing teams can segment audiences based on specific criteria, enabling them to create highly personalized and targeted campaigns. By focusing on individual interests, marketers can prioritize high-potential leads.
Additionally, implementing Salesforce CRM streamlines lead management by capturing leads from multiple channels. It provides sales forecasting tools to analyze customer behavior and historical data, leading to enhanced opportunity management.


Why Do Businesses Fail in Salesforce Implementation?
The Salesforce implementation process seems to be easy for most businesses. However, a salesforce state shows around 30% to 70% of businesses fail to implement CRM successfully. The question is why? To know the reasons for the failure of Salesforce’s implementation, read the following pointers.
Lack of Proper Strategy
Various businesses do not make a coherent strategy before implementing CRM. They start moving whole data from the existing platform without a strategy and do not remove duplicate entries, or create budgets, and timelines. Acquiring expected results within a budget and deadline is next to impossible without a proper strategy.
Higher Result Expectations
Before starting implementation, it is essential to have clear and measurable expectations. But many businesses complete the implementation process and from the next day, they expect higher outcomes. This turns out to be a nightmare because Salesforce implementation benefits in the long run rather than in a day.
Lack of Alignment with Existing Infrastructure
Many businesses fail to implement Salesforce because they do not check if their existing systems and infrastructure align with this platform. It causes them as the platform supports their app integration. Also, poor data quality such as incorrect and inefficient data leads to issues in data integration compatibility.
Failure in User Adoption
Implementation of Salesforce often fails due to a lack of user training of employees. Without proper training, it is complicated for employees to understand how to leverage the value of the Salesforce platform and leverage its capabilities. Also, not evolving end users (sales and marketing teams) in the design and configuration process leads to providing them with a platform that not only eases their work but increases complexity.
Complex Integration
Integrating Salesforce gives you the scope of integration, but some businesses overutilize this feature by including some complex integrations. This leads to increased budget, and inadequate risk management, leading to performance bottlenecks and slowing down the platform.
These are the most common reasons why businesses fail to implement Salesforce successfully. However, using strategies can help ease the process.
Different Salesforce Implementation Strategies


There are various Salesforce deployment strategies that come with their benefits and drawbacks. Knowing about all the approaches helps to make the best choice depending on your requirements.
1. Big Bang Approach
Big Bang strategy is a large-scale implementation that includes a complete implementation of the existing system and process into a single process. This approach is often used by start-ups, small businesses, and medium-sized organizations.
Benefits: The Big Bang approach is useful for those organizations who want to move all users to the Salesforce platform. Also, it is cheaper and faster than other approaches. It can provide a higher return on investment (ROI) as all resources are focused on change management at a time.
Drawbacks: The Big Bang approach involves high risk and overlooking a small detail can cause big issues for all users. It requires more planning as rollback might not be possible after final implementation.
2. Phased Approach
The Phased approach or strategy enables businesses to implement the existing Salesforce platform in stages. It includes various stages and is helpful for larger enterprises who want to gradually shift to a new platform.
Benefits: It minimizes risk as testing is easier for single stages and helps teams to gain more knowledge with each stage to improve implementation and configuration.
Drawbacks: It can be expensive in the long run and time-consuming for organizations.
3. Managed Approach
In the managed approach, the Salesforce managed service providers takes full responsibility for the project. Whether it is planning, customization, configuration, data migration, user training, or going live.
Benefits: Taking a managed approach enables you to get in-depth expertise from implementation specialists. It reduces risks and complexities, leading to a faster process.
Drawbacks: Relying only on the implementation partner can limit your flexibility and businesses may feel less control over the process.
4. Self Managed Approach
In the self-managed approach, it is the sole responsibility of the organization to manage the implementation with their resources and technical expertise.
Benefits: It provides businesses with full control over the implementation and results. This can be cost-effective and enhance your internal expertise and customization.
Drawbacks: Requires significant technical expertise and resources to complete the full process. This is a time-consuming process for org and lack of specialization leads to delays and implementation issues.
5. Hybrid Approach
The Hybrid approach is a combination of managed and self-managed strategies. In this, vendors are responsible for specific phases of implementation, and businesses manage to do some phases on their own.
Benefits: The Hybrid approach allows businesses to leverage the technical expertise of implementation expertise while utilizing team knowledge over specific aspects of the projects. It can be more cost-effective than a fully managed strategy and allows companies to take technical expertise where they lack.
Drawbacks: Miscommunication between partner and business can lead to potential implementation complications.
These are the key Salesforce implementation strategies that businesses can choose according to their need to leverage the full potential of CRM.
How to Implement Salesforce Successfully?


Implementing Salesforce successfully is something that feels easier in the starting and preparation phase. However, it requires careful planning and execution with technical expertise. So, here’s a simple step of Salesforce implementation to help you out.
Step 1: Determine Business Objectives
Before diving straightly into the Salesforce implementation roadmap, businesses should take a moment to ask themselves:
- Does Salesforce CRM align with your business goals?
- What do you want to achieve by implementing Salesforce? (Set realistic goals)
- What are the features you want to configure through implementation? (Prioritize essential required features)
Getting a clear understanding of these factors will lead you to achieve overall success with CRM implementation.
Step 2: Conduct a Thorough Review
Next, you have to analyze your existing systems and IT infrastructure to find out the key areas for improvement. Thus, conducting a thorough review will even ensure you check whether your data is consistent and clean or not. Having inconsistent data leads to preparing misinformed strategies, challenges to analyzing data, and more. Also, integrating such data from multiple sources can be difficult.
Step3: Proper Implementation Planning
Successful Salesforce implementation can be challenging if you do not create a detailed plan. To ensure getting the expected results, you should first create a plan that includes your budget, timeline to achieve different milestones, resources to allocate, and most importantly identifying potential risks. You can decide whether you should hire a Salesforce developer for seamless implementation or you will go on your own as:
- Implementing Salesforce with third-party Salesforce consultants can be beneficial as it allows businesses to get access to specialized expertise in Salesforce, implement the platform as per specific needs, achieve better outcomes, and overall faster implementation.
- Implementing Salesforce with existing in-house teams may be overwhelming as it requires specialized knowledge of the platform, data migration, integration expertise, and the ability to customize and configure the platform. A lack of executive support is a leading CRM failure risk factor, state by Salesforce. Even though various businesses go on their own, this leads to the failure of CRM implementation.
Step 4: Configuration and Customization
After creating a detailed plan, the next step is configuring system objects and fields with the power-packed capabilities of Salesforce to match your business requirements. You can create automated workflows and approval processes to streamline various tasks for your teams.
Also, businesses should ask their sales, marketing, and custom service teams to customize platforms to add unique functionality that is not already available such as creating custom objects, customizing user interfaces, integrating third-party systems, and creating custom email templates.
Step 5: User Training
Before going live directly, businesses need to train their employees to utilize the platform. It will help end users utilize the Salesforce capabilities and maximize their benefits. Trained users can use the platform features effectively, leading to increased productivity. Also, this will improve user adoption and engagement, helping businesses to achieve higher return on investment.
Step 6: Testing
The next step is to conduct rigorous testing for the Salesforce customization and configuration features. This process includes testing of visual interface, workflow, integration, end-user acceptance, custom objects, and reports. It ensures the Salesforce platform and its features work properly. Also, it will lead to finding out the potential bugs and fixing them before going live. Even though Salesforce testing requires more technical knowledge and is completed by Salesforce quality assurance.
Step 7: Going Live
After completing the testing phases, the final step of the Salesforce implementation guide includes actually going live and becoming operational from the testing environment. This also involves data migration from the old system to this new powerful system. It will allow your end users to work on the Salesforce platform and provide feedback for any operational issues for ongoing bug improvement.
These are the 7 steps of Salesforce implementation guide a business can follow for successful Salesforce implementation.
Top Strategies for Successful Salesforce Implementation
Drive Organizational Alignment with All Involved Stakeholders
The key to ensuring Salesforce implementation success is to maintain alignment between all involved stakeholders across different parts of the organization. It is recommended that you build trust between those who will be directly impacted by the implementation. Alignment is simply about a shared understanding of the reason for implementation and how the implementation going to impact the different teams.
Leverage the Full Potential of Your Data
Most businesses have inconsistent data and over 80% of companies rely on stale data for decision-making, according to a BusinessWire study. They struggle to utilize the data in an actionable way due to a lack of clean and accessible data. Bring all the customer data from distinct systems into Salesforce to create a complete picture of each customer. Additionally, remove duplicate records and maintain the accuracy of data by implementing the data-cleansing process.
Configure Human-Centric Experience
When implementing Salesforce CRM, designing a human-centric solution is recommended by taking into account the end users. It means aims for the solutions that can built with relative ease and viable. Asking end users about their common pain points and researching to identify the gap in delivering customer satisfaction. It will lead to increased adoption of the Salesforce CRM and leverage
4 Ways to Evaluate the Success of Salesforce Implementation


Here are the four ways to evaluate whether the Salesforce implementation process is successful or not.
1. User Adoption and Feedback
Businesses should analyze how many end users using Salesforce effectively and whether their work is streamlined or not. Also, get feedback from users to examine their satisfaction after moving to the platform. This will clarify how your teams work adapting to the change.
2. Results After Implementation
Next, businesses should track changes in sales growth and revenue, identifying changes in closed deals after implementing Salesforce. Also, you can monitor customer satisfaction to ensure customer service teamwork efficiency. Most importantly, you can analyze reduced budget, increased productivity of end users, and automated workflows saving time.
3. System Performance
Monitoring the system performance after implementation with integrated third-party applications is up to the mark. It must meet user expectations and make their work easier. Also, it would be capable of managing increased workloads on specific occasions.
4. Data Quality and Accuracy
Lastly, ensure data quality is consistent and correct by analyzing the decisions based on insights. It will ensure improving the efforts for data cleansing and get better results. Also, monitoring data quality and providing results ensure completeness that there is no missing data points.
Examining the implementation of these four ways leads you to consider whether the process is successful or not.


Factors Affecting the Implementation Cost
The cost of implementing is not particular and varies depending on different things. Here are the key pointers that determine the overall cost of implementation.
1. Business Size and Data Size
Firstly, implementation costs for Salesforce depend on the number of business users and the amount of data. The prices are higher when the number of users is higher. Also, industries like healthcare with complex and various systems often require specific features and configurations that increase costs.
2. Implementation Scope
The intent of customization and configuration required in implementation can vary the cost. It includes creating more customized objects, fields, and workflows to match your business requirements. Also, integrating Salesforce with other different systems also increases the costs. Apart from these, purchasing other third-party apps for integration also impacts the overall cost of the Salesforce implementation.
3. Partner Services
Hiring a Salesforce partner can seem to add extra cost during implementation. But this will not only reduce the risk of integration failure but also save time and streamline the process. As a leading Salesforce implementation company, Cyntexa combines deep expertise across various Salesforce clouds to maximize your return on investment. We provide user training, throughout support, and ongoing maintenance that will increase your return on investment and ease your implementation journey.
4. Licensing costs
The Salesforce-specific editions such as Salesforce Enterprise, Unlimited, Classic, and Lightening Professional decide the license price. Also, additional features such as marketing cloud, sales cloud, and service cloud require extra costs.
These are the key factors of the Salesforce pricing that decide the overall implementation costs.
Final Words
Salesforce helps businesses in multiple ways from centralizing customer information, to increasing sales, better data management, enhanced collaboration, flexibility, growth adaption, and more. However, leveraging these lucrative benefits can be only possible when you coherently plan before Salesforce implementation.
Even if you are unsure about doing the process on your own and do not have technical expertise, don’t worry. We at Cyntexa offer all-around experts who can help you throughout the process from planning to execution. Our Salesforce-certified specialists will ensure a successful Salesforce implementation that matches with your business objectives so you can acquire the desired results.
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