Building a successful Salesforce® instance requires careful planning and execution. While a recent Ad Victoriam Salesforce Blog provided outlines for a great roadmap for implementation, even with a strong plan, mistakes can happen. Here, we delve into some of the most common pitfalls that can derail your Salesforce implementation, and how to navigate around them.

5 Implementation Tips (+1)

1. Underestimating the Importance of Data Migration: Dirty, inaccurate, or incomplete data in your legacy system will translate directly into Salesforce.  Solution: Invest in data cleansing and standardization before migration. Identify and eliminate duplicate records, and ensure consistent formatting for fields like addresses and phone numbers.
2. Neglecting User Training and Adoption: Salesforce is powerful, but it’s only valuable if your team uses it effectively. Solution: Develop a comprehensive training and adoption program tailored to user roles. Provide a mix of hands-on sessions, online tutorials, and ongoing support resources. Don’t underestimate the importance of change management – address user concerns and encourage feedback throughout the process.
3. The “Big Bang” Approach: Trying to implement everything at once can be overwhelming and lead to delays. Solution: Break down the implementation into manageable phases. Prioritize critical functionalities and focus on getting those embedded first. This allows for a smoother rollout and quicker user adoption.
4. Ignoring Customization Needs: Salesforce offers a robust platform, but it may not perfectly fit your unique business processes.  Solution: Don’t be afraid to leverage customizations like workflows, automation, and custom objects. However, maintaining a balance between over-customization and future upgrades can be challenging.
5. Lack of Communication and Collaboration: Salesforce implementation is a team effort. Internal stakeholders, Salesforce consultants, and IT teams must be on the same page.  Solution: Establish clear communication channels and regular meetings. Define roles and responsibilities for each team member involved.

Bonus Tip: Not Having a Post-Implementation Plan: Your work isn’t done after launch.  Solution: Develop a plan to monitor user adoption, data quality, and system performance. Regularly review metrics and identify areas for improvement. Schedule ongoing training sessions to keep users up to speed with new features and best practices.

By avoiding these common mistakes and following a well-defined plan, you can ensure a smooth Salesforce implementation that delivers real value to your organization.

Summary

A successful Salesforce implementation requires a strategic approach. While a defined roadmap is crucial, pitfalls can still arise. This blog explores common mistakes such as poor data migration or neglecting user training, offering solutions like data cleansing and phased rollouts. It emphasizes the importance of customization to fit your specific needs while advocating for clear communication and collaboration throughout the process. Remember, a successful implementation goes beyond launch; a post-implementation plan to monitor user adoption and system performance is essential for ongoing success.

How AdVic Can Help

Whether it’s a Salesforce implementation, enhancement, or integration project you are mulling over, let the AdVic® U.S.-based Team – who works on your hours – do the heavy lifting by addressing your complex challenges through our cloud, integration, and data expertise, leaving you to what you do best – servicing your customers. Let’s talk about your Salesforce project today!

Related Resources:

Inside a Salesforce Implementation: From Initiation to Go-Live
When Outsourcing a Salesforce Implementation Makes Sense
Sales Cloud Implementation Best Practices
Tips for a Successful Salesforce Implementation

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For those who don’t know, AdVic’s extensive line of Accelerators are quick start tools that advance the implementation or enhancement of your Salesforce® platform to equip and empower your team, customers and your partners in just weeks, not months. 

With our uniquely crafted solutions, based on industry best practices and thousands of successfully completed projects, your company will be able to quickly leverage Salesforce functionality, lower deployment costs with accelerating platform benefits, and gain out-of-the-box resolution – which can be customized to your needs – to top industry use cases. 

In Part 1 of this AdVic® Salesforce Blog series, we’re taking a look at a few of our various Accelerator offerings and how they can expedite the Salesforce solution you have been looking for. 

Sales Cloud Accelerator

Salesforce Sales Cloud is a customer relationship management (CRM) platform designed to support sales, marketing and customer support.

With AdVic’s Sales Cloud Accelerator, your sales team can sell smarter and faster by centralizing your customer. information, capturing their interactions with your company, and automating many of the tasks salespeople do every day. 

In addition, you can:

• Eliminate mistakes or repetitive tasks by Tracking and Reporting on sales activity.
• Display comprehensive and predictable real time forecasting.
• Enforce consistent pipeline data across every sales engagement.
• Automate the triage of incoming leads based on your specific routing requirements such as territory, prioritization, and product.
• Build reports and dashboards without help from IT.

Best of all, be up and running with the Sales Cloud Accelerator in as little as four weeks.

Service Cloud Accelerator

Salesforce Service Cloud is a CRM platform for customer service and support that enables users to automate service processes, streamline workflows and find key articles, topics and experts to support customer service agents.

If you’re like most companies, your service team’s challenges have grown as your business has. The Service Cloud Accelerator will equip your team with the tool they need – from case routing to managing service level agreements – while providing you with the 360-degree data to manage towards your goals

How Else Service Cloud Accelerator Empowers Your Team:

• Engage on a one-to-one level with every customer, everywhere.
• Gain customer experiences that foster satisfaction and loyalty.
• Quick Implementation – with weeks – for fast ROI.
• Engage with easy-to-create reports and dashboard for performance and success management.
• Seamlessly migrate your data from your current system into Salesforce® (Accelerator add-on).

More Information About Service Cloud Accelerator

And with AdVic’s Service Cloud Accelerator, your company can create personalized customer experiences within weeks. The video below shows you more.

Service Cloud + Data Migration Accelerator

Eliminating technology limitations accelerates progress – especially when  it relates to servicing customers, everyone’s number one priority. For some start-ups, Zendesk may be an initial option due to it being a quick fix, low-cost  help desk ticketing system approach. But as the need for smarter, faster and more personalized service delivery grows, organizations commonly  migrate from a “help desk” approach to a full-service relationship management system like Salesforce Service Cloud. Ad Victoriam’s Service Cloud + Data Migration Accelerator will migrate your business from Zendesk to Service Cloud to improve customer service delivery and propel satisfaction within weeks. 

Experience Cloud Accelerator

Salesforce Experience Cloud (formerly Community Cloud) is an all- encompassing software system with an integrated set of technologies, digital marketing products, services and solutions that help companies digitize business operations, engage customers, and provide effective connection and collaboration with their partners. In addition, Experience Cloud integrates all Salesforce apps and capabilities under one roof, including sales, marketing, and customer care, as well as analytics, advertising, and content management.

Why Salesforce Experience Cloud?

• Integration of data from any source.
• Provide personalized experiences.
• Personalized design for each type of device.
• Boost interaction with your users.
• Real-time tracking.
• Optimize response management.
• Analytics for decision-making. 

In Part 2 of this AdVic Salesforce Blog series, we take a look at these AdVic Accelerators:

• Salesforce Order Management Accelerator
• B2B Commerce Accelerator
• Marketing Cloud Accelerator
• MuleSoft Ignite Accelerator

Why not start accelerating your progress today? Take advantage of AdVic’s Accelerator tools that not only expedite your progress, but deliver the results you need cost-effectively. Schedule a meeting with us now!

Related Resources:

Expedite Salesforce Implementation with an Accelerator – Part 2

AdVic Accelerators: Products That Propel Your Salesforce Platform’s Value

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Most likely, the reason your key C-suite stakeholders haven’t seriously considered cloud computing previously is that they are not armed with the right information. So, it’s up to you to help them see the benefits, which in turn may make them see the light and be more motivated to make the necessary changes.

Ad Victoriam has done hundreds of cloud migration projects for businesses of all sizes, so we’re pretty familiar with the pain points in securing C-suite support. So, in an effort to help you, below are five benefits of why doing a cloud migration should absolutely be included when you submit your 2021 budget plan for approval. And each benefit includes specific challenges that will be solved.

The 5 Benefits of a Cloud Migration

    #1 Sell Smarter and Faster

• Increase Salesforce productivity and revenue
• Keep track of every customer interaction
• Automate redundant tasks and admin work

     #2. Create More Engaging Marketing

• Send targeted and personalized messaging
• Trigger messages based on customer actions
• Use data from multiple sources and devices

    #3. Better Support for Every Customer

• Improve agent response time
• Manage every channel from one view
• Unify email, social, phone, and chat support

   #4. Connect Every Commerce Channel

• Unify the B2B and B2C buying experiences
• Deliver continual shopping innovations
• Conquer personalization with AI

   #5. Easily Build Apps for Every Role

• Create apps with drag-and-drop tools
• Integrate customer data from any source
• Connect apps and data with ready-made components

Any three of the above benefits would be enough to convince many businesses to move their systems into the cloud. But when you add up all five, it’s approaching no-brainer territory for your C-suite.

Whether you’re just starting your journey to the cloud or are looking to take your current cloud performance to the next level, the Ad Victoriam consulting team is standing by to customize your plan for your specific business needs; our specialty is understanding your business inside-out. Can we talk today?

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Avoiding Data Migration Pitfalls
Data Migration & Salesforce Platform Enhanced in Two Months
How to Convince Your Stakeholders It’s Time to Get a CRM

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Many people are challenged underestimating a data migration project’s complexity, poor planning, and not setting aside enough resources. If not quickly addressed, these problems can lead to slow user adoption at best, and major customer relationship issues at worst.

Avoid Exceeding Your Timeline and Budget

Here are a few common reasons companies exceed their timeline and budget during data migration projects:

• Lack of planning and project management before the actual migration.
• Not able to visualize the final solution.
• Including the wrong business subject matter experts on the project.
• Mismatch or lack of technical skills.
• Choosing the wrong tool to do the job.
• Not scoping out all the requirements before the migration.
• Not enough time allocated to user acceptance testing.

Tips for a Smooth Data Migration

To ensure your business has a smooth data migration, Ad Victoriam recommends:

• A Project Manager with experience or technical understanding of data migration.
• Use an Agile Project delivery approach.
• Choosing the right tool for the migration process. For example – if your environment is SQL server, use SSIS, which is built on SQL Server.
• Perform extensive discovery sessions to fully understand your business processes and data migration needs.
• Only migrate clean data into the future solution to ensure more streamline business processes and reporting otherwise the migration was a waste of time and effort.
• Get your users excited about the new solution with their cleaned data, which will increase their productivity and lower your cost.
• Have a recovery plan. Each stage of the data migration should include recovery options. Plan how you can roll back changes during extraction, transformation, and loading.
• Don’t forget test planning. As a part of your project planning, you should have a test plan in place. Consider what steps will need to be tested before you can safely move data.

Planning for Success

The information presented above is a high-level data migration plan that encompasses the steps to “go live” — ensuring that the systems are prepared, the personnel is available and trained to perform the migration, affected stakeholders have been notified, and a time window for the move has been scheduled.

So, are you looking for help constructing your “go live” plan? Start here!

If you are thinking about a data migration for your business, all of the challenges outlined in this article can be overcome by using the right partner, and this is where Ad Victoriam’s extensive data solutions expertise comes in to help you plan and carry out your vision toward success. Let’s start working on your plan today!

Watch AdVic’s “Harnessing Data & Automation to Drive Sales Performance” Webinar

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Data Migration & Salesforce Platform Enhanced in Two Months
Ensuring a Smooth Data Migration

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AdVic Loves a Challenge

AdVic originally engaged because this high tech company’s original Sales Cloud implementation completed by their internal IT team resulted in a large amount of technical debt and limited use of valuable features. The company needed to clean their technical debt, migrate their data into Salesforce, enhance its usability, and increase productivity while positioning it, and their company for growth – all by their very tight two-month deadline.

The AdVic Sales Cloud Remedy

• Refactored and modernized complex web of payment practices to expedite payment dispensing.
• Connected and restructured previously disjointed Opportunity methodology in combination with – Events Objects Activity features in Salesforce enabled sales to utilize and leverage the Opportunity Pipeline for fostering deals to close faster and more efficiently.
• Streamlining activity utilization enriched Opportunities, improve user adoption, and increase productivity.
• Reconfigured and aligned their AppExchange packages, including ZoomInfo, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Yoxel, Outreach, Marketo, Vizable, and Valence, with Sales Cloud.

The AdVic Data Migration Remedy

• Migrated about 2.5 million records and data points including Opportunities, Accounts, Leads, Campaign Members, and Leads into the sandbox and then into production, followed by post-testing to ensure data integrity.
• Integrated the data warehouse with Salesforce to provide a single source for truth. This ensured that new Custom Reports and Dashboards exposed all data needed for managing the team and company with precision.

Embarking on a Salesforce data migration process can be daunting, we understand. Ad Victoriam Solutions is ready to listen to your concerns and make recommendations for how to best approach your challenges. We have decades of experience with many migration tools and understand the complexities of migrations. We’re here to help you get the solution you need to succeed. Let’s talk about your data migration project starting today!

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Ensuring a Smooth Data Migration
Sales Cloud Transforms Sales Operations

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Maybe you know your Contact List could use some cleaning up, or you need to remove companies that you are no longer associated with? You might also need to add new Leads to your existing data?

These can be some of the most frustrating and tedious steps on your way to CRM bliss. But they don’t have to be! Here are common issues AdVic encounters – and we fix – before starting any Salesforce migration project.

Emails

Salesforce is a great way to communicate with your contacts but to do so you need to have a way to reach them. Salesforce requires email addresses to be correctly formatted. If the email address is not in a recognized format, the whole record gets rejected. You could spend hours going through hundreds of thousands of records correcting email addresses. SQL data functions should be used to check for many data variations, like email addresses ending in periods, missing the “@” symbol, and excluding email addresses like no@email.com.

Phone Numbers

While Salesforce makes sure that email addresses are correctly formatted, you do not see as many issues with phone numbers. That’s mainly because there are so many ways to format a phone number, anything from (123)-456-7890 to 000-000-0000, with or without extensions, so Salesforce doesn’t typically reject a phone number. But there are ways to clean up fields and check for phone numbers you can’t reach, like ones with less than 10 digits, being all one number, and sequential phone numbers, like the example listed above.

Addresses

If you are like most companies, addresses are not one size fits all. From abbreviated states to full state names, a full address in one field, multiple fields for streets, and international addresses. We know this can be very challenging, but SQL functions can help with all of these issues. Using SQL, addresses can be standardized so they all are formatted the same. If you have states that are a mix of a full Georgia, GA, Alabama, and TN, they can be converted to be either full state names or the abbreviated name. When you have some addresses that are all capitalized and some that are not, those can be set to the address fields to the proper case or all capitalized letters for consistency. If you need to parse out your address to fit into Salesforce address fields, that can also be done. For example, if your address is 6525 Shiloh Rd., Suite D-300, Alpharetta, GA, 30005, then we would parse this into a street, suite, city, state, and zip code for an easy transition into Salesforce. Anything to make sure your contacts have reachable addresses.

Duplicate Contacts

Many of AdVic’s clients have sales representatives who maintain their own client contact information. When migrating those contacts into Salesforce, you could be dealing with multiple sales representatives with the same contact information and that’s a huge headache. De-duplication and merging functions can solve these issues. The best place to start is by determining what, based on your data points, identifies a record as a duplicate. Generally, this may be a combination of Name, Email, Phone Number, and/or Address. With deduplication, duplicates are identified and one record is kept. When merging, all duplicated records are combined into a single record, again based on the identification of what data is accurate.

So, remember, nearly every enterprise goes through a hectic data migration process at some point in its development. Just be sure to take the time to address the issues outlined above before you start. If you don’t, you are risking problems that can lead to slow user adoption at best, and major customer relationship issues at worst.

Ad Victoriam Solutions maximizes the top best data migration tools to facilitate a smooth and seamless data transfer to Salesforce. Since our consultants have decades of experience with many migration tools, they understand the complexities of migrations and are able to deliver the right solution for each business. Contact an AdVic Data Migration Specialist today!

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Planning Your Salesforce Implementation
How to Convince Your Stakeholders It’s Time to Get a CRM

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If your business has yet to tap into the power of the cloud, these eight benefits of cloud computing should change your mind.

Reduce Expenditures, Increase Efficiencies

Migrating to the cloud reduces – and in many cases – eliminates the need for your business to purchase equipment and operate out of a data center. Now, you are seeing significant savings on hardware, facilities, utilities, and other expenses required from traditional computing. You will also reduce the need for on-site servers and expensive software, trimming your IT budget further.

Flexibility

The cloud gives you and your employees the flexibility to work from any location. Employees can complete their tasks at home or from the field. This is particularly valuable in an era when employees desire flexibility in their schedules and work environment. You can also reduce the number of workstations in your office and allow some employees to work from home, further saving costs.

Increase Collaboration

Cloud-based workflow and file-sharing applications give your teams the ability to work together more easily and efficiently. Employees can make real-time updates, see what other team members are doing and communicate effectively. This level of collaboration speeds up projects and improves customer service.

Disaster Recovery

Hosting systems and storing documents on the cloud provides a safeguard in case of a disaster. Man-made and natural disasters can damage equipment, shut off power and paralyze critical IT functions. Supporting disaster recovery efforts is one of the important advantages companies attain when they move to the cloud.

Data Security

It’s just a fact that storing data on the cloud is safer than storing it on physical servers and in data centers. Think of it this way, a breach of security on your premises can lead to compromised data security if laptops or computers are lost or stolen. However, if you have data on the cloud, you can immediately delete any confidential information remotely or move it elsewhere. It’s also a fact that breaching security protocols on cloud platforms is difficult.

Document Control

The more your employees and partners collaborate on documents, the greater the need for tight document control. Prior to the cloud, you and your employees sent files back and forth as email attachments to be worked on by one user at a time. More often than not, that ended as a mess of conflicting file content, formats and titles. However, when you move your business tasks to the cloud, all files are stored centrally and everyone sees the one up-to-date, true version of the file or document.

Automatic Software Updates

With your servers off-site and in the cloud, your hosts take care of them for you by taking charge of regular software updates – including security updates – so you don’t have to worry about wasting time maintaining the system yourself. That leaves you free to focus on the things that matter, like growing your business.

Compliance Needs

If your industry, for instance, is healthcare or financial services, ensuring data compliance is essential for your business. Moving operations to the cloud ensures that your business is using cloud-based tools and services that are already compliant, helping to remove some of the burdens of compliance from your IT team.

No doubt there are many more benefits of moving to the cloud that are not listed here, but these are some of the big ones.

Ad Victoriam has helped bring big changes to businesses all across the country. Contact us today to learn how we can help your business migrate to the cloud with little-to-no impact on daily operations, but a serious boost to your bottom line.

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Read the case study to find out the results.

The Story

This company required a trusted advisor to guide them through a complex data migration, process standardization, Salesforce CPQ (Click, Price, Quote) and Pardot implementations. Teams were using separate CRMs and spreadsheets to manage data and processes. They needed someone who could simplify the complex.

The Challenges

• DATA MIGRATION
  • Mapping between three
  • different systems
  • Managing data quality

• SALES CLOUD (process standardization)
  • Managing a sharing model to meet EU privacy laws
  • Managing data needed to track and
  • commission brokers

• SALESFORCE CPQ
  • Tracking sales of configurable products
  • Managing dual approval tracks for
  • one product

• PARDOT
  • Meeting requirements of a global team
  • including managing anti-spam laws

Salesforce CPQ & Pardot Implementation Results

Within two months of implementation, the company was up and running with their legacy data fully migrated into Salesforce, including data from various spreadsheets. They have visibility into their products and customers like they never did before, and we were able to accommodate changes in processes and product offerings along the way with little impact to their budget and timeline.

At Ad Victoriam Solution, we’re problem solvers. Let us tailor a solution just for you. Contact our knowledgeable consultants today to find out how we can help add value to your organization.

The post Customer Success Stories: Salesforce CPQ, Data Migration & Pardot Implementation for Industry-Leading Human Resources Firm appeared first on Ad Victoriam Solutions.