Small-to-medium business organizations are the engine of any economy. They’re every bit as innovative as large companies, but they often need to get going faster with technology solutions — and with less implementation support. So wouldn’t it be good if there were some shortcuts to success for them?

Well, after many years working with growing businesses, we’ve learned a few tips that we know can accelerate your success — especially when you’re getting starting with a new CRM system. Each of them takes less than 30 minutes to do in Salesforce, and none of them require development or consultancy — just an understanding of what’s important to your business.

It’s as simple as you need it to be

When you’re getting started with a CRM application, one of the smartest things you can do is avoid distraction and concentrate on just the essentials. Salesforce makes this really easy. It gives you a box full of fantastic tools, but you don’t need to pull them out all at once: you can switch off or hide any elements you’re not using so that your team only has to work with what’s most important to them.

Examples? Make a list of the most important data points you need for Accounts and Contacts, and then use Salesforce’s page layout editor to remove the fields you don’t need. Write down the names of reports you’ll need right away, and then make use of the ability to hide other report types. The best thing is that you don’t lose anything this way: any of the items you remove can be easily added back in later, and you’ll gain a streamlined, easily comprehensible app that is so much easier for your team to adopt.

It speaks your language

A lead — is that the same as a prospect or a suspect? And accounts — do those represent clients, or are your clients actually Contacts? We believe that you shouldn’t need to learn new business terms to use a new business application, so we let you tweak the app so that the terms displayed in it are the ones you use every day. You can change the names of our tabs and standard fields and create new custom fields in just a few minutes, giving you an app that feels like yours, so you can get on with the business of business.

It feels like home

Another way to make the app feel like yours is to brand it with your own identity. You don’t need to be an app developer or a web designer to do this either: changing the login screen or adding your corporate logo takes seconds, and it’s easy to add custom links and news snippets to the home page. Result: when your team logs in for the first time, they’ll be in a system that already looks familiar to them.

It’ll get your whole company collaborating from the start

If you’re an SMB, collaboration tools may not be top of mind. After all, if the whole team’s in the same office, isn’t it already easy to communicate? However, we know that even the smallest teams can benefit from open communication that’s tied to the data and deals they’re working on — and that’s a perfect use case for Chatter.

Even if you’re a team of 2 people, Chatter helps you keep aligned when you’re traveling, with the benefit of having all those conversations tracked in your system of record. Colleagues who aren’t yet on Salesforce can also get in on the conversation with Chatter Free licenses (and here’s an extra tip: Chatter Free is a great way to get people familiar with the Salesforce experience before they become full users).

It makes data migration easy

“Data migration” — it’s not a phrase that excites most of us. Nevertheless, we all have deal info in spreadsheets, contacts in Outlook, and notes all over the place — and getting all of that into a new CRM system is probably the number 1 stumbling block for small organizations. So let us minimize the complexity for you with a quick and easy Data Import Wizard that guides you through the steps you need to get that data loaded. Let us help you out with short videos that’ll show you how to prepare your data, and let’s tie it all together with help and advice from our Success Community. Data migration just becomes productivity, and that is something to get excited about.

For lots more tips on how to get going with Salesforce for growing businesses, sign up for our Getting Started webinars, a series of 4 sessions specifically designed for SMBs and delivered every month by our Success Services team, or download the free e-book on the Salesforce advantage.