Challenges Faced While Implementing Salesforce and Ways to Fix Them

Implementing Salesforce is a big decision for your organisation. It can help level up your digital transformation game by streamlining processes, automating data entry, and providing real-time analytics, all of which will in return, improve your business performance. However, it can be quite challenging at the beginning for first-time adopters. 

1. Pre-Implementation Challenges 

Cost and Return Estimation 

Even before the Salesforce implementation phase, you will need to consider whether an investment in Salesforce will bring a justifiable return since Salesforce is one of the best CRM systems in the world, but not a cheap one. The challenge at this stage is to estimate the total cost of implementing Salesforce, as it includes not only the license fee but also out-of-scope items such as ongoing operations, additional features, and associated technologies and resources. That is where a Salesforce consulting partner plays an important role in revising your business processes and seeing how the implementation of Salesforce can help you address several business challenges. Salesforce partners will also provide you with crucial information about suitable products, licenses, and customised solutions that can be achieved with Salesforce before you commit more time to it. 

2. During-Implementation Challenges 

Unclear Roadmap 

If your organisation decides that Salesforce is the solution, you still need to define the objectives upfront to see what can be achieved with Salesforce in the long term or short term. During this phase, the problem faced by many companies is an unclear roadmap of the project. If a company’s stakeholders cannot agree on the requirements and scope of a Salesforce implementation project, they will end up confusing their Salesforce implementation partner or their implementation team. Consequently, unnecessary features might be incorporated, and technical obstacles might be created, preventing your company from achieving its business objectives on time. To prevent such issues, stakeholders of a company must clearly define its short-term and long-term goals to provide a clear roadmap to the implementation team. 

Integration Issues 

Integrating Salesforce with your existing systems, whether it is marketing automation, inventory management or enterprise resource planning (ERP) can be challenging. Various problems can arise, such as different data fields between Salesforce and your current systems or duplicate records. In such cases, there are several solutions to overcome the problem such as using data migration tools to export your current system’s data to Salesforce or using the App Cloud Integration tool to connect your current data sources to Salesforce in real-time. 

Customisation 

For the Salesforce platform to match your needs, it might need customisation. However, customising your Salesforce can be quite complicated, requiring more technical knowledge. Additionally, you need to be aware of to which extent your system needs to be customised because over-customising your platform can also make it harder to use. If your team is not comfortable with coding, you might need to resort to configuring or making changes to the settings of the system instead. However, if you do not want to sacrifice the flexibility of your system, it is highly recommended that you contact a  Salesforce consulting company to find an appropriate solution. 

3. After-Implementation Challenges 

Training and Adoption 

Even after you finish implementing Salesforce, the challenges will not be over. You have implemented Salesforce with the needs of your end-users in mind, so make sure that your end-users receive adequate training to widely adopt Salesforce. It is also crucial to have resources available to the end users, such as a user manual, a subject matter expert, or an admin who is highly trained in the features of the system. As your system grows, more members of the company will be involved in Salesforce too, so make sure to have a clear view of all users to include them in the training plan and to have them train new users in the future. 

To Wrap-up:  

These are some of the intrinsic challenges faced by businesses while implementing Salesforce. However, it is important to address these challenges to ensure seamless implementation of the platform and draw maximum benefit out of it.