Salesforce customers are drowning in opportunity – a good problem to have. In most cases, the challenge they have with Salesforce is not that it is rigid or limited, like the enterprise software of the past, but that it is so flexible and ever-evolving that they worry they aren’t extracting all the value from it that they could.
When Dreamforce attendees listen to big product announcements like Salesforce Customer 360 or Einstein Voice Assistant, many of them may think, “Sounds great – but I have so many more basic things I want to do, and I seem to keep falling behind.”
Return on investment depends on ongoing support of a Salesforce implementation.
What gets caught in the backlog? Things like adding workflow rules – automations that will save everyone a lot of time in the long run, but first someone has to define them and test them and probably revise them several times to make sure they do what we want them to do – while not breaking anything else. Or how about adding integrations everyone agrees would make a lot of sense – and would save teams lots of time – if only someone had time to work on them.
Finding the right resources to maximize the value of Salesforce is what makes for a high-performance implementation. According to a Success Metrics Survey Salesforce conducted between 2015-2017 among 7,000+ randomly selected customers, the most successful customers enjoyed:
- 32% faster time to deliver analytics
- 36% faster deployment of business-driven requirements
- 10% less time spent on administrative tasks
- 24% better user adoption
- 24% more sales wins
- 22% more improvement in revenue
- 28% more improvement in customer satisfaction
Thankfully, Salesforce is continually adding and refining tools to simplify common tasks. For example, Process Builder provides a point-and-click method for defining workflows. Still, someone has to do the pointing and clicking, and the need to test never goes away.
Meanwhile, the “easier” Salesforce administration becomes, the faster new requests seem to accumulate. The more capability you provide users, the more they ask for and the less they are willing to suffer through awkward workarounds. They have heard about features and additional applications you have not implemented, and they want to know why not. Maybe they’ve been paying attention to the Dreamforce announcements, too, and want to take advantage of the latest innovations and acquired products.
It’s a FOMO thing – Fear of Missing Out.
The Salesforce administrator who takes pride in delivering results for the business will want to carve out time to address all these wants and needs. That’s also who fixes the integrations that worked fine last week, but inexplicably stopped. The cause might be an API change – not everyone takes as much pride in the stability of its APIs as Salesforce does – or a firewall glitch, or a fault in the system you’re connecting to or, well, who knows what? While the core Salesforce systems almost never go down, all that stuff around the edges breaks from time to time.
Companies need help with everything described here, but it’s a different kind of help than you get from a systems integrator. Plenty of systems integrators will help you with your Salesforce implementation, but most aren’t geared to providing ongoing support. You might go back to them to help with rolling out a new Salesforce application, or the creation of a custom app that might require hundreds of hours of consulting, but you don’t want to pay the premium fees they charge on a continual basis.
For an external perspective on a new approach, read Diginomica’s article, Why Rimini Street is reinventing TPM for the world of SaaS.
The march of technological progress has always meant that whenever something that used to be hard becomes easy, the next step is not to relax but instead to invent new challenges for ourselves.
One can see this in the evolution of cloud software, particularly at Salesforce, which pioneered Software as a Service and made so many aspects of sales and marketing management easier. Yet instead of simply enjoying those gains, Salesforce users quickly gained new ambitions for what they ought to be able to accomplish. Those demands continue to grow long after the initial implementations are done, and systems integrators move on to their next project. To its credit, Salesforce keeps responding to those demands by continually delivering new capabilities, new opportunities for business excellence.
So, get surfing those waves of opportunity rather than drowning in them. With expert assistance, you can focus on business goals like winning customers, building stronger relationships with them, and keeping customers happy by delivering better service. See how through Application Management Services to Sales Cloud and Service Cloud customers, from Rimini Street.