One of the biggest reasons why Salesforce has been ruling the CRM industry for more than two decades is its consistency. Since its inception, Salesforce has been ahead of the curve by providing its users with relevant tools and features. The CRM platform has helped businesses stay in sync with the latest tech trends in the market and streamline their processes in the best way possible.
However, a Salesforce org needs to be optimized to make the most of its features and get a step closer to your business goals. After you have implemented Salesforce within your organization, Salesforce optimization helps you enhance its potential and allows your team to exploit the same.
Salesforce implementation partners ensure that your Salesforce org is optimized enough to attain your business objectives. They understand your specific needs and preferences to provide you with robust Salesforce optimization solutions.
Before having a look at different ways of optimizing your Salesforce org, let us start by understanding what a Salesforce org is.
What is a Salesforce Org?
Org in Salesforce refers to the centralized repository of the data and metadata of your business. It is an abbreviation for “organization” and represents all your business records in a nutshell. When you implement Salesforce, you are implementing a Salesforce instance that resides on a set of different servers. Every instance is made up of multiple orgs depending on the companies they belong to.
When you add or integrate data using Salesforce, you are making changes in your Salesforce org. All your business data is stored within a Salesforce org, which in turn is contained within a Salesforce instance, just like several other orgs just like yours.
Now that you have an idea about what an org in Salesforce refers to, let us understand Salesforce optimization.
What is Salesforce Optimization?
In simple terms, Salesforce optimization is the process of making the most of your Salesforce org. It revolves around understanding the potential of your org and expanding the horizons to reap in more benefits from the same.
Salesforce optimization involves having an analytical look at your business and its performance to see how well you have been able to utilize the potential of Salesforce. A lot of businesses are not able to utilize more than 10% – 20% of the CRM platform’s abilities, tools, and features. Instances like these indicate the need for efficient Salesforce optimization.
The reasons behind the lack of an optimized Salesforce org can be many, such as an incapable team, a lack of resources, a lack of knowledge, a limited customer base, or plain ignorance. Salesforce optimization allows you to explore the utility of the CRM platform and extract maximum benefit from the same.
Important ways to optimize your Salesforce Org
Depending on the objectives you want to fulfil, the customers you want to cater to, and the processes you want to streamline, it is important to choose the most effective ways of optimizing Salesforce for your business. These techniques need not be massive. Even seemingly trivial changes to your Salesforce org can help you optimize it.
Figure : Ways to optimize your Salesforce Org in business
1. Third-party Integration
Salesforce is a highly customizable platform, making it easy for businesses to integrate it with a third-party application or service. Salesforce integration allows you to expand the overall functionality of your Salesforce org by integrating it with a suitable third-party platform.
One of the biggest benefits of Salesforce integration is that it prevents your team members from switching between different platforms while performing specific tasks. For example, if you integrate Salesforce with a payment gateway like PayPal, you can manage your payments and your CRM data on the same platform.
Salesforce integration should be carried out with the utmost care and precision to optimize your org. Make sure you clean your data and remove duplicate records before you blend them with
the concerned third party.
2. Involving your Stakeholders in the Decision-making Process
Another important way of optimizing your Salesforce org is by involving all your key stakeholders in the decision-making process. Before, during, and after implementing Salesforce within your organization, talk to the stakeholders, especially your clients and your employees, regarding important decisions being made.
Take your stakeholders’ opinions on matters regarding the tools to be added, the features to be enhanced, the technologies to be prioritized, the workflows to be automated, and more. As your stakeholders have a vested interest in your business and are directly influenced by the way your Salesforce org is used, their inputs help a great deal in Salesforce optimization.
3. Surveying your Technology
In the age of digitization, the technology you work with plays an important role in how your CRM platform functions. While Salesforce helps you use the latest technologies, it is essential to choose the right technologies to work with. Salesforce optimization should always involve a thorough survey of your technology to understand how well it has fared for your Salesforce org.
This helps you understand the existing state of your Salesforce org, analyze its health, monitor its performance, and evaluate its impact. The technology you use dictates the experience of your team working on your Salesforce org and the results it provides to you.
Assessing the technology used in your CRM platform also helps you enhance the security protocols for managing your business records. As you optimize your Salesforce org, it provides better security and privacy to your valuable data.
4. Simplifying User Experience
Salesforce users often complain of the functionality and processes being a little too complicated for them to understand. While Salesforce implementation makes your work easier and streamlines your business processes, users need to be trained to adapt to the platform and its unique functionality.
This often gets in the way of optimizing your Salesforce org. Salesforce optimization should involve simplifying the user experience of your team members as they work on the CRM platform.
Salesforce Optimizer is a new tool designed for Salesforce administrators to simplify the end-user experience. It is used for managing multiple Salesforce features seamlessly in a way that they can be optimized while making them simpler for the users. With Salesforce Optimizer, your team members can get their work done easily and quickly.
By running Salesforce Optimizer in your production environment or sandboxes, you can get personalized reports along with recommendations for cleaning up implementations, reducing data complexity, implementing features, and improving feature adoption.
5. Salesforce Lightning Implementation
Another highly sought-after way towards seamless Salesforce optimization is to implement Salesforce Lightning with your organization. With the new Salesforce Lightning edition, you can create personalized user experiences for improving your workflows and productivity.
Salesforce Lightning allows you to work more effectively and build healthy relationships with your clients. It provides you with a modern and refreshed UI that is more interactive and robust. It allows you to create a plethora of different components and applications that are deployable across multiple devices.
Moreover, Salesforce Lightning gives you access to the coveted Lightning Ecosystem. – a community of partners building new Salesforce applications and components using the Lightning Experience. This further helps you drive user engagement and enhance user experience.
Another major reason why Salesforce optimization is incomplete without Salesforce Lightning is that no new updates come to Salesforce Classic anymore. All new tools and features of Salesforce are now introduced directly on Salesforce Lightning.
6. Measuring and refining your Business Processes
It is the business processes you perform that make Salesforce implementation worthwhile. Salesforce optimization requires you to measure your business processes and refine them as per your needs and preferences.
To optimize their Salesforce orgs, Salesforce administrators need to work on two key metrics – usage and adoption. Examine all your business processes to identify the areas where user interaction is falling short. These underperforming features need to then be removed or altered to obtain better results.
When you improve and standardize your Salesforce processes, it helps you enhance the efficiency of the CRM platform and ensure that its quality is maintained over time. Refined processes and workflows improve the quality of tasks performed by your team members and the results achieved out of the same.
7. Creating Chatter groups for effective communication
If all your employees use Chatter for communication, employees working in a specific department may encounter messages related to a different department. Your sales reps will not always be interested in the updates given by your customer service agents.
To avoid this inconvenience and ensure smooth communication, you can always create Chatter groups for specific teams and departments within your Salesforce org. This facilitates more focused, effective, and responsive communication within your organization.
The Final Word
These were some of the most important ways in which you can optimize your Salesforce org to enhance its functionality. Ongoing Salesforce optimization allows you to leverage your business processes and build healthy relations with your customers. Once you implement the CRM platform, make sure you work with your Salesforce partners to optimize the CRM solution to thrive in the industry you operate in.