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Salesforce was designed to make your team more productive, but is your team inadvertently getting in its own way?

 

In Part 1 of this blog series, we looked at how avoiding risk, being careful with complexity, and controlling change management can help keep your org on track and maximize efficiency for your team.

 

Here’s the second half of our A-Z (or, really, just A-F) tips to proactively become a Salesforce champion within your org to ensure your team is set up for success.

 

Drive Governance

To keep technical debt at bay, there should always be a “why” behind the “what” you’re trying to do. Governance should not be reactive, but a calculated, proactive approach. By establishing design and development standards for how your team manages your org schema, automation, processes, data quality, and code, your team can save time while increasing efficiencies, and avoiding redundancies and roadblocks:

 

  • Governance improves agility by ensuring all members of your team are working together to achieve goals that align with overall business goals. A lack of planning up front can be costly down the road when your team is tasked with an org cleanup.

  • To prevent unnecessary and redundant customizations in production (which can be a huge risk for your org), limit the power you give to your users. We recommend a maximum of one Salesforce Admin for every 750 active users in your org. Also consider changing Admins to delegated admins for users who only need to do simple tasks like change set deployments, user acceptance testing, or managing passwords and users.



Embrace Benchmarks and Best Practices

 Knowing what to measure is key to developing a clear understanding of what makes you successful. These best practices allow you to benchmark your success, and then measure how you grow from there:

 

  • Identify strategic impact. Align your business goals and challenges to Salesforce features and functionality.

  • Review Salesforce best practices, as well as peer benchmarks, to make sure you’re staying ahead of the curve.

  • Develop behavior driven dashboards to keep your teams transparent and accountable for delivering against metrics in Salesforce.

  • Use the Salesforce adoption dashboards from AppExchange to monitor utilization and identify trends and patterns in your org. Doing this will not only highlight areas for improvement, but will also reveal persona-based requirements that could come in handy when implementing new features or transitioning to Lightning.

 

Focus on Features That Drive Adoption and Value

Adoption is imperative in making sure you get the most value from your investment in Salesforce. If you want to drive adoption among your team, you need to understand what speaks to them, will benefit them most, and what will help them work smarter and not harder:

 

  • Employ Chatter groups, surveys, job shadowing, focus groups, and/or whiteboarding sessions to gain an understanding of the “as is” state of your org. This will help you know how to make decisions that will get your closer to your desired future state.

  • Build a clear value proposition for your users, stating what’s “in it for them,” and they will be more open to embracing change.

  • Communicate with your team early and often, and whenever any changes will impact their work.

  • Keep the focus on continuous process improvement — this harkens back to the infamous saying that, “change is the only constant.”

 

By keeping these best practices in mind, you’ll get closer to realizing the full potential of your Salesforce investment. Trust us, your business will be thankful. If you missed our first set of tips, check out our A-C tips in Part 1.

 

Want to hear more from Suzanne on how to maximize your Salesforce usage? Join us for an upcoming webinar called, How Boston DND Is Improving Boston’s Neighborhoods with Salesforce, Faster, featuring demos and tips from our org health expert. Register for the webinar today.

 

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