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Optimization
If 2009 is the year to do more with what you have, then optimizing your salesforce.com configuration should be one of your top priorities.
Model Metrics has helped scores of companies to “optimize” what they accomplish with salesforce.com. To be clear, optimization clients are existing subscribers of salesforce.com whom Model Metrics did not initially implement. It is interesting to see both the state in which these saleforce.com subscribers come to us, as well as the results once their optimization has been completed.
How do you know if you should optimize? Here are five profiles we often see:
1. Some of our optimization clients implemented salesforce.com and never moved past the core CRM fundamentals – contact management and pipeline management for example. Lots of room for improvement here obviously.
2. Some optimization clients did not make efforts to align their CRM configuration and usage with their company’s goals and strategies. This limit’s the ability to impact results and often leads to low rates of adoption among frustrated users who feel their CRM efforts are wasted.
3. Some optimization clients did not define initial goals and objectives. The result here is no way to evaluate success or readiness to raise the bar to higher-level initiatives, a step that increases ROI on CRM.
4. And some optimization clients never took ownership of their salesforce.com solution by having a trained salesforce.com administrator role to monitor usage, solicit feedback, make configuration updates, provide ongoing user training, and stay on top of the constantly evolving new features that can improve business processes or support other groups of users to improve collaboration, customer experience, and other goals.
5. The most common reason companies optimize is that they did not approach CRM with a complete solution plan – strategy, change management, ease of use, reports and dashboards, integration, training, AppExchange utilities, governance, administration, etc.
In future posts I’ll share details about actual optimizations and the results they achieve.
If you have questions or ideas related to salesforce.com optimization that you would like to share, please feel free to contact me at kturner@modelmetrics.com.
