Primary Reasons For Salesforce Implementation Failure and How to Avoid Them

Today, most organizations are using Salesforce CRM to ensure they deliver seamless and unified digital sales experiences to their customers. It is one of the leading CRM solutions used across the world to boost team productivity and allow sales professionals to work more efficiently to make smarter business decisions for the quick closing of deals. But, do you know most organizations often experience Salesforce failure after several months of use? Salesforce is a powerful tool and brings you a high return on investment if it is properly implemented. There are numerous reasons behind the Salesforce implementation failure. Let’s discover those reasons and find out how to avoid them by using the right strategies and tactics.

Common Reasons For CRM Implementation Failure

• Unclear Goals

If you really want a successful implementation of your Salesforce, then you should be clear with your vision, goals, and strategies to achieve them. For this, it is important that you keep communication open with everyone who is involved in the project. You need to decide the key pain points that need to be addressed, like how CRM will work to streamline your workflows and how it will help to improve customer experience. You have to make sure that your goals are SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-Bound).

• Lack of Executive Support

Getting support from your executives is important for the successful implementation of Salesforce. Senior management should understand the executive vision of what they want to accomplish with Salesforce CRM adoption. Keeping your executive involved from the start will help.

• Enable them to provide the right direction.
• Get support to manage your project with overarching business strategies.
• This will allow you to get buy-in from other leading management players.

Executive sponsors, such as the CEO, understand the importance of Salesforce to your organisation and ensure its successful implementation.

• Limited Investment

Insufficient budget is also one of the key reasons causing Salesforce implementation failure. Businesses can’t predict which functionality features they will require from the start. In the starting stage, many companies prefer to implement a simple form of Salesforce and upgrade it later on. It is always good to set a realistic budget and stay focused on your goals. Keeping a 10% buffer in your budget will prepare you for any surprise expenses. Also, you should focus on how the Salesforce implementation impacts your employees’ schedules and workloads.

• Lack of Training

If you don’t have well-trained users, then you won’t be able to use the full potential of your Salesforce CRM platform. Salesforce is a complex system that needs proper training for its successful integration. When your end-users are skilled and knowledgeable, they can get the most out of your Salesforce platform which benefits your business. The Salesforce platform keeps updating its features and functionalities. By updating your employees’ skills on a regular basis, you can reap the best outcomes from your system.

• Poor Communication

When the implementation team works isolated from other members, it results in a big disaster. It is important to understand the key needs of every player working in the organization. Implementing CRM is a huge initiative for any company, and therefore they should involve and inform their workforce and all who will be affected if it is done incorrectly. People who are responsible for capturing customer data, offering customer support, and running marketing campaigns should understand the customer’s issues because they are working with the current processes. Allow them to provide you with the right suggestions for the future. In this way, you can resolve the problem of poor adoption of CRM. You should keep communication lines open at every stage of the process and keep in touch with the teams.

• Incompatible IT architecture

Most of the time, Salesforce CRM implementation plans do not support your existing IT framework. You need to make sure your IT infrastructure has been well-planned and implemented so that your Salesforce adoption can be efficiently aligned with it. Your IT team should know the strategy of how to integrate the system with the current IT architecture. The proper alignment offers an improved customer experience, enhances agility, and boosts profitability.

• Absence of Hiring a Trusted Implementation Partner

No matter how skilled your IT team is, trusting your in-house resource for Salesforce implementation can lead to disaster because it’s a complicated and time-consuming process. When it comes to successful implementation, you should always approach an experienced Salesforce partner that is entirely focused on providing a successful deployment. You should research well and hire a trusted partner like Ksolves that can meet your Salesforce implementation goals and objectives.

• Data Inaccuracy

Fundamental data problems are also one of the reasons for Salesforce CRM’s failure. If your data is incorrect, duplicated, or incomplete, it can cause a variety of problems, including:

• Poor customer experience
• Inaccurate business strategies
• Trust issues
• Incorrect revenue forecasting and budgeting

It is important that your end users, Salesforce administrators, and executives should be included to keep your data organized and clean. Salesforce allows you to easily define new objects and fields, but for this, you need to smartly collect the data to avoid any chance of long data input forms, unsatisfied user adoption, long data input forms, and poor reporting.

Tips to avoid Salesforce Implementation failures

Consider the following to avoid CRM failure:

• Set SMART goals.
• Develop a clear business strategy for CRM implementation.
• Make a realistic budget.
• Integrate your new CRM technology with your existing IT architecture.
• Employ an experienced support staff member.
• Include end users from the start.
• All users should be properly trained.
• Maintain open lines of communication.

Wrapping Up

Ksolves is a Salesforce Consulting Partner and leader in offering end-to-end Salesforce Cloud implementation, integration, migration, development, and support services along with Einstein Analytics and Lightning Services. Our Salesforce-certified resources can help you get the best from your CRM with seamless implementation, integration, and support. With our decade of experience on the platform, we understand how CRM works and how it can help you with your specific business requirements. To know more contact us!