Great news! Your company has finally made the investment in the worlds best rated CRM, Salesforce. Happy Day!

I know you have been waiting patiently for this moment. So, congratulations.  Now the big question is whether or not you need a Certified Salesforce Administrator or, can you implement this on your own? The answer to that question will depend entirely on your situation. A thorough look at this question is worth your time and focused energy.

The short answer is yes. Yes, you can implement Salesforce on your own, but will you get the most out of your investment dollars if you do? Having a Certified Salesforce Administrator complete your implementation will guarantee a successful rollout.

Here are the top reasons we believe that everyone should use a Certified Salesforce Administrator to implement Salesforce.

QUALITY

Best Practices – When leveraging an experienced Salesforce Consultant for your implementation, you are sure to get industry best practices for using, testing, and customizing the platform. These best practices are learned from years of completing similar implementations and can put your company on the right path to fully optimize the system and what it has to offer. Let your Salesforce consulting team provide you with tips, tricks and nuances without you having to learn them the hard way.

Ongoing Support – If you partner with the right Salesforce Consultants, they won’t just disappear after your implementation. Although future training, support and issue resolution may not be covered in your initial implementation contract, a true Salesforce Consulting partner will be there to help. In addition to providing constant support of your Salesforce system, your consultants should always be notifying you of future releases and changes to your Salesforce org so you can stay ahead of the new features.

TIME TO IMPLEMENT

Your Sales team is already stressed out about how much work they have on their plates – do they really have extra time to devote to this project? Will it end up at the bottom of their to-do lists behind all their other critical tasks? Consultants will be completely focused on completing your project on time and on budget. No distractions.

Learning Time – As you would imagine there will be a learning curve, not only with respect to the day to day use of this powerful new tool, but with implementing and customizing it as well. Using your internal staff to implement the Salesforce platform can add multiple hours, days or even weeks and months to the project timeline. Not to mention, you’re assuming the tools and procedures they’re implementing are correct. Salesforce Consultants spend their days, every day working in the system and typically have been for years. Their experience can save you a lot of time and money.

Planning Time – Your team will need to take time to get organized and map out a detailed implementation plan.  That may be easy if you have a Project Management Officer (PMO) or if your team is experienced in managing CRM implementations.  If not, it will likely take them some time to ramp up and come up with an appropriate implementation plan. Experienced Salesforce consultants will have standard implementation plan blueprints they can customize to fit your unique requirements.

Setup and Configuration Time – Your team can, and will, learn how to setup and configure Salesforce.  However, we recommend letting them learn when the stakes aren’t so high and the pressure’s not so great. Salesforce consultants have configured many organizations.  They know exactly what steps need to be done to add your custom fields, modify your user settings, and configure security settings so that each user sees just what you want them to see.  Additionally,  they can do it in a fraction of the time it will take your team.

RETURN ON INVESTMENT (ROI)

User Adoption – To thoroughly understand whether or not your users have been adopting the new CRM platform, you will want to measure their overall usage, the quality of the data and the measurable improvements in business performance. In other words, are your Sales Reps being more productive with their time.

In a yearly study by Bluewolf called The State of Salesforce 2017, they found that 77% of people surveyed really didn’t believe that they had done everything to get the most out of their Salesforce investment. Try not to become one of these companies. Let your Salesforce consulting team guarantee you are using the platform to it’s fullest potential. Salesforce self-implementations tend to focus on just getting the system up and running. The bells and whistles that Salesforce offers then become a “nice to have”, not a “need to have” and can be completely forgotten. With a Salesforce Consultant you can have both.

Proper training and understanding of the Salesforce platform can lead to increased user adoption and positively affect all key performance metrics. Using a Salesforce Consultant for your implementation can help provide the tools and skills necessary to maintain user adoption.

Ongoing ROI – For many companies, ongoing ROI is a large factor in deciding whether or not an investment has been worth it. To help companies better understand their ongoing Salesforce ROI, Salesforce has built a CRM Benefit Calculator which can be found here.