Our Salesforce Solution Architect, Andrew Lukasiewicz, guides you through the top 3 steps you need to follow for a successful Salesforce Implementation Process

Check out what our Salesforce specialist recommend to our customers before diving into a Salesforce Implementation. By doing this exercise, you'll realise why Salesforce is the best choice for your business. 

1 Gather Requirements

Once you’ve got a team with an aligned vision for what a successful Salesforce implementation looks like, ask yourself: what specific functions does the system need to provide to support that vision? Learn and discuss with stakeholders how a requirement is defined correctly. The main ideas to take home after conducting your research is:

• Requirements should be unambiguous, using precise language.
• Requirements should be short, excluding unnecessary information
• Requirements should be testable/verifiable to check off the list at the end of the project.
• Requirements should use consistent terminology with industry standards/naming conventions listed in a glossary.
• Requirements shouldn’t include conjunctions like “and” / “or”, as these probably represent two different requirements.
• Read More: How to Write User Stories for Salesforce

2 Prioritise Requirements

After gathering the requirements, it’s time to prioritise. You’ll rarely have enough resources or budget to accomplish everything within your expected time frame. Sometimes, you need to limit how much you want to build within a specific phase to make the change management aspect more manageable.

1. Start by assigning a priority of either High/Medium/Low to your requirements and identify what a “must-have”, a “should-have”, and a “nice-to-have is”.

2. Must-haves are requirements that are non-negotiable一without these, you cannot go live.

3. Should-haves are those requirements that would greatly benefit go-live but can be worked around with some manual effort.

4. Finally, Nice-to-haves are those requirements that would be helpful but serve more convenience than a core business function.

You willl want your technical team or Salesforce partner to start putting together an effort estimate on each condition. Moreover, group the criteria into larger groups for easier prioritisation during the build phase. These are commonly referred to as Epics.

Estimating requirements is both a science and an art – it’s more important to call out what a given requirement isn’t asking for by stating assumptions than to specify how you will build the solution itself. Requirements estimation is one of the main tasks your Salesforce partner will perform, and should describe in detail all the items in the list of expectations. 

3 Build

It’s time to bring those requirements to life. As an experienced partner, our team likes to begin identifying dependencies between requirements within Epics. For example, they build the Lead custom fields before they start tinkering with the Page Layout. This is what they maintain as a best practice.

We know that you may not be completely involved in the building process, as it is mainly the consultants’ and developers’ domain, but here are three topics to discuss with them:

• Refreshing a sandbox organisation.
• Documentation – what documentation will the partner provide?
• Prepare for deployment from Day 1.

The next step is to assign a project manager who will be involved during every step of your CRM tool implementation. You need an expert in the field to whom you will hand over this responsibility and whom you know can handle this extensive process.

The project manager's job is introducing your staff to the CRM mission. Now, you can set up the calendar with specific dates.

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