What made your company select Salesforce? Was it the brilliant simplicity of Sales Cloud? Or was CPQ the ticket to empower your sales team? Around 150,000 companies use Salesforce to manage better and analyze customer data, automate processes, and create personalized customer experiences. But are you fully utilizing your investment? 

The Salesforce features that you know the most about are likely those that align with your business goals. But there is more to your Salesforce stack that you need to start using. 

After years of working with companies in the communication, media, and high-technology industries, we’ve identified five ways to maximize your Salesforce framework. 

After you’ve established your expectations for digital transformation and what you hope to achieve both in short-term goals and the long run, adding simple strategies to your routine can uncover new opportunities for your company via your Salesforce system.

1. Ensure Data Quality

Data quality is critical to the success of any Salesforce implementation. While your system may collect plenty of data, unstructured data contributes very little to data-based insights that can guide innovation. 

According to Forbes, 95 percent of businesses believe managing unstructured data is problematic. So the most fundamental step to maximize your Salesforce footprint is to ensure that your data is accurate, complete, and up-to-date. 

This can involve implementing data governance policies, establishing data quality metrics, and using data quality tools to monitor and improve the quality of your data.

2. Leverage Salesforce’s Capabilities 

What are your goals for implementing Salesforce? Do you plan to customize your Salesforce instance to track your end-to-end buyers’ journey, create a more robust CRM or improve scalability? Do you plan to integrate Salesforce with existing systems and leverage third-party apps to extend the functionality of Salesforce?

“Teams have to align with your goals, not with technology. Technology itself is not the answer,” Vijay Iyer, Director of Solution Engineering at Salesforce, said. “The way you leverage technology to achieve your business goals is the answer. Make sure you know the answers to these questions: What is the IT team’s job? What is the business team’s job? The sales team’s job? The marketing team’s job? What is HR’s role in the process?”

Working with an experienced Advisory Services team can help you optimize Salesforce capabilities that innovate sales, service, marketing, and analytics with automation and collaborative tools. 

Salesforce also has a vast ecosystem of third-party apps that can enhance its functionality. Explore AppExchange to find apps that can help you streamline processes and improve productivity.

3. Train and Enable Your Sales Team 

Any level of digital transformation impacts your workforce. Your sales team is one of the critical users of Salesforce, so it’s vital to ensure that they are trained and enabled to use the platform effectively. This might involve providing regular training sessions, creating user-friendly documentation and guides, or using gamification techniques to encourage adoption and engagement.

“Many times, businesses train for technology because they think digital transformation means deploying some new tech. But training needs to be multifaceted. Technology is one part of the puzzle,” Iyer explained. “You also need to teach people what’s changed in terms of strategy. Why are we using this technology? What do we need to do from a people and culture standpoint?”

Salesforce provides extensive training resources, including Trailhead, which offers interactive learning paths and certifications. 

4. Adopt a Customer-Centric Approach

One of the key ways to maximize the Salesforce footprint is to adopt a customer-centric approach. Training helps bolster autonomy among internal customers, but business growth also relies on delivering an uncompromising customer experience. This means focusing on the needs and preferences of your customers and using Salesforce to understand better and serve them at every touch and opportunity. 

Personalization is critical, especially in retail and high-tech industries. The Salesforce instance offers ways to digitally enable the customization experience. For instance, some users innovated in-store design kiosks, visualizing the product model with the customer’s specifications. Other companies use at-home AR experiences for their e-commerce shoppers to grab a virtual vision of the placement and functionality of a customized product in their home.  

If you can visualize it, an experienced delivery and advisory team can help facilitate a Salesforce-backed system to make your dreams a reality. 

5. Continuously Monitor and Optimize 

Salesforce is continually offering product updates to expand and improve Salesforce functionality. To maximize your Salesforce footprint, monitoring and optimizing your Salesforce instance continuously is essential. 

If you need support, the Simplus Strategic Services team has expertise in tracking key performance metrics, identifying areas for improvement, and implementing changes and optimizations to improve the performance and effectiveness of your Salesforce implementation. 

Whether shifting your business to a more aggressive customer focus or improving data quality for measurable decision-making, Salesforce has the features you want to automate game-changing CX touches to ensure customer loyalty and simplify essential workload processes with cost-saving efficiencies. 

Through training opportunities or personalized managed services, we love to see how Salesforce innovations bolster companies’ resilience to withstand a cooling economy and position them to react quickly with to-go-market initiatives when economic conditions improve.  

If you aren’t sure where to start, let’s chat. We want you to appreciate Salesforce functionality as much as we do. And that begins by understanding your Salesforce system.