There are two interesting statistics related to Salesforce. One: 90% of Fortune 500 companies use it to manage their customer and partner relationships. Two: two-thirds of Salesforce implementations underperform. There are two explanations for this (and no, the platform is not the problem). Issues crop up when the organisation stops investing in the system and also due to some decisions made before, during and after the implementation. The good news is — most of the value is still there to be claimed. All within the licences you already pay for. In this blog, we are going to understand why most Salesforce orgs underperform and how to get more from your existing licenses.
Key Takeaways
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Salesforce rarely underperforms because of the platform itself. It happens because of the decisions made before and during the implementation. These are the most common ones we see.
There’s an old saying. If you just have a hammer in your hand, everything looks like a nail. It applies to implementation partners too. If the partner knows Sales Cloud, they will see all your business problems as Sales Cloud problems. They will recommend a custom build for a problem that could have been solved in a fraction of the time using a simple Flow.
You might not notice the time this will all take. The proposal will be super confident. The demo —top-notch. But after a few months, you will notice some mismatches. It typically shows up in small ways first. Your team will build workarounds in the background because the system doesn’t match how they are actually supposed to work. You need to rely on the original developers for every tiny update. Meanwhile, the features you paid for sit unused in the side.
Salesforce projects don’t end the day the system goes live. Partners and businesses thinking otherwise are making mistakes. Why? Your day-to-day operations don’t stop. Teams and products don’t stop growing. Before you know it, new fields will have to be added. Layouts will get cluttered. The fin team asks for a completely new report that you had never planned for.
If your org stays frozen in the shape it had on launch day, your team will be left with no option - they will stop working in the system and will start working around it.
They will start creating reports manually. An unorganised email thread will be used as the single source of truth for customer-related information. They might seem harmless initially. But you are effectively taking out tasks from Salesforce(for which you paid) and putting them back into the tools it was meant to replace.
“Salesforce can’t do that”. This is probably the most expensive sentence you will hear as a business using Salesforce. Once they hear it multiple times, most teams stop asking completely what’s possible and what isn’t in Salesforce. ‘No’ becomes a fact instead of an answer. They ask for workarounds directly to the partners. They buy another tool. Or worse, they accept that their manual process is the best way to go about it.
9 out of 10 times, Salesforce could have done it all along, but nobody checked. The ‘no’ may have come from a partner who didn’t know the platform well enough or from a time when the feature didn’t exist. Either way, the cost adds up quietly in extra licences and extra developers.
National Family Mediation(NFM), one of our clients in the charity sector, is an excellent example. According to its CEO, Sarah Hawkins, the charity was told time and again that automating referrals in Salesforce was simply not possible. In her own words:
“When you come in with a fresh pair of eyes, you think, ‘Surely, it shouldn’t be this difficult’. But we were just being told, ‘No’.”
“As a charity, we try to utilise as much technology within a budget as we possibly can. Salesforce is primarily our main database, so we need that to be working to its full capacity,”.
Let us get one thing straight - Getting more from Salesforce ≠ buying more Salesforce. Instead, follow this simple 5-step framework to get the most from your existing Salesforce licences:
Begin with an audit. Look for unused fields and outdated automations. Scour for licences assigned to people who no longer log in. These are a few areas where technical debt is slowing your users down. In other words, your Salesforce investment is getting wasted here.
Check for spreadsheet and manual report generation processes. See if there are email chains that sit outside Salesforce and are being used as a data source for any process.
Ask your implementation partner whether the platform can close the above gaps through standard Salesforce features or even simple configuration. In most cases, a simple Flow could do the trick. Most experienced partners will suggest this before they ask you to consider custom code or a third-party tool.
In case a previous consultant or partner had said that something couldn’t be done, ask again now. The platform changes constantly. A feature that didn’t exist three years ago may now be standard.
Review your org regularly. Always tie any changes to your real business needs. Work with a partner who looks at your processes first and recommends the tool second.
Once again, remember this - the value of Salesforce is usually already there, inside licences you are paying for. The work is in finding it. Fixing what’s in the way and keeping it that way. And the right implementation partner can help you do this.
We are a Salesforce consulting and AI partner. We help organisations across sectors get more from the Salesforce platform they already pay for. We start with how your teams actually work and recommend the solutions second.
Over the years, we have seen many instances where a business invests in Salesforce. Then it forgets about it. The teams slowly shift back to Excel. They hire costly developers to integrate 3rd party tools with Salesforce for functions that Salesforce could have done natively.
But some are different. They succeed in getting more from Salesforce than what they had envisioned in the first place. NFM relied on an outdated version of Salesforce Classic and a costly third-party tool, Conga, to run daily operations. We modernised the platform on Salesforce Lightning and built the automation into it. NFM did not need more features or functions. They just needed to make the best use of the one it already had.
Sometimes customisation is unavoidable. For instance, another client of ours had a requirement. Their finance team wanted to see campaign revenue (month-on-month) across campaigns running 3-6 months. We highlighted that the standard setup of Salesforce cannot do it, but a custom monthly finance allocation could solve it. We delivered.
The lesson: before you pay for another tool, ask whether Salesforce itself can do the job. In most cases, it can!
Our goal: Make your Salesforce work harder for you.
Want to know more about us? Contact us now.