How Salesforce helps Small Businesses Grow

Introduction

Salesforce offers a suite of cloud-based solutions for managing business processes, including Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, and Marketing Cloud. The Salesforce Platform provides a foundation for building custom applications and extending business processes.
The Salesforce Platform is highly customizable and offers a growing set of features to help businesses meet their evolving needs. These features include:

APIs for integrations and tooling
A programming interface for custom applications
Analytics with reporting and dashboards
Data quality tools
Data sharing and visibility
Automation
Communities
Lightning User interface

Salesforce is also a reliable and stable platform with consistent performance. However, there are some common pitfalls that should be avoided to maximize value for small and mid-sized businesses.

This blog targets executives of small businesses in search of strategies to consistently advance their businesses while maintaining manageable operations and minimizing costs.

Common pitfalls

Complexity

A few reasons why Salesforce can seem complex to users

Design of the business processes such as the number of steps
User interface design and navigation contribute to user experience.
Lack of training on how to use the business process.
The amount of customization that went into the Salesforce instance.

Costs

Costs for Salesforce implementation rise for the following reasons.

Too many customizations requiring employee or consultant resources
Unused licenses and licenses for users who have left the business.
Purchasing external applications for the same functionality that Salesforce provides.
- For example, purchasing sales forecasting applications when there is forecasting already available in Salesforce.
Existing inefficiencies in the implementation lead to increased costs in time and resources for new projects

Data Quality

Data quality is a common issue that can come up with any implementation. The primary cause of data quality problems is adoption. Lack of adoption by all members of a team can lead to data missing or insufficient. Integrations can be another source of bad data unless validated.

Operational

Salesforce is a multi-tenant architecture, which means that all customers use the same infrastructure and have a fair share. Salesforce prevents excessive or inefficient code executions by imposing Limits.

Custom application should be designed to operate within the limits.
inefficient processes such as polling for data
Excessive and repeated API executions
Better planning for large data migrations.

Following Salesforce best practices helps maximize value

Avoiding pitfalls and Maximizing your ROI

Based on our observations and insights there are a few steps that can be taken to avoid pitfalls and get the maximum from Salesforce to grow your business.

Scale Salesforce with your business

Only buy licenses for the people who need to use Salesforce for their daily tasks. Start with a small number of licenses and add more as needed. Add packages that you need for a specific business case. Regularly audit your system to make sure that you are using all of your licenses and do not have packages that you are not using. This will help you to keep costs low and make the system manageable.

Go low code whenever possible

Explore out-of-the-box Salesforce features that can be used instead of customizations. Customizations invoke Apex code to extend and execute a business functionality. Customizations are essential for many use cases, however, customize when absolutely need to. This ensures manageability and cost effectiveness.

Better data quality

Boost adoption to improve data quality
Periodically check your data sources such as users, integrations to ensure quality data is being input.
Run reports to check your user adoption and data quality
Use out-of-the-box tools available for data quality validations and data enrichment.

Training & best practices

Salesforce has a lot of good documentation, however, if you are short on time, getting a consultant to train your staff on using Salesforce for your sales process and operations rather might be a good idea.
Best practices for your implementation mainly managing data, managing users, and managing reports etc can help keep the implementation efficient.

Benefits

Salesforce is a popular business platform because it offers immense value to businesses of all sizes. Features such as lead management and opportunity management can significantly boost sales performance. Your Salesforce implementation can scale as your business grows, with features such as CPQ, PRM, and AI along with best-in-class data security, performance, and stability.

Conclusion

Salesforce is an ideal platform for small businesses, offering features and stability that can support growth and scale. To get the best value from Salesforce, let the platform grow with your business and follow best practices. Contact Unificient for help with your Salesforce implementation and best practices.