[Selecting the right one from a host of Salesforce solutions is about making a strategic investment that can fundamentally transform the way your organization operates and engages with customers – or wreak complete havoc. Which one of those it will be depends on how well your team is prepared for making this critical choice.
That’s why our team has leveraged years of experience with Salesforce to share with you this comprehensive guide, leading you through the terrain of the Salesforce product selection process. From the initial assessment of your organization’s pain points to the articulation of measurable objectives, we will delve deep into each stage of that process as well as the features and benefits of some of the most popular Salesforce business solutions.
Identify Your Business Needs
The first critical step is to assess your organization’s pain points and areas that need the most improvement. Are your sales processes inefficient? Is your marketing department hitting the right audience? Is customer support lacking cohesion? Pinpointing these will allow you to align Salesforce functionalities with your specific business challenges.
Map out each step of your existing processes, from lead generation to customer service, and identify bottlenecks, redundancies, and areas of inefficiency. This analysis will also uncover several opportunities for automation, optimization, and integration within Salesforce.
Then define what success looks like for your organization. Your business objectives will very often stem from your above pain points – this could be increasing sales efficiency, enhancing customer satisfaction, or streamlining marketing campaigns. The most important thing is that these objectives must be measurable and realistic – this will provide benchmarks for evaluating the effectiveness of Salesforce enterprise solutions post-implementation.
Top Salesforce Solutions
This list by no means contains every single one of the Salesforce solutions available (you can find a more comprehensive solution guide here) – we’ve only narrowed it down to the most common and effective ones from our experience. These are:
- Salesforce Sales Cloud
- Salesforce Service Cloud
- Salesforce Marketing Cloud
- Salesforce Commerce Cloud
- Salesforce Einstein Analytics
- Salesforce Community Cloud
- Salesforce Pardot
- Salesforce CPQ
- Salesforce Field Service Lightning
Salesforce Sales Cloud
Sales Cloud is one of the most fundamental Salesforce business solutions that drives revenue growth and fosters lasting customer relationships. It offers a plethora of features designed to streamline sales processes, including lead management, opportunity tracking, and pipeline forecasting.
Sales Cloud equips sales professionals with the tools they need to prioritize leads, engage prospects effectively, and close deals faster. Furthermore, its robust analytics and reporting capabilities provide valuable insights into sales performance.
Salesforce Service Cloud
Service Cloud helps deliver exceptional customer service experiences – it assists in managing customer inquiries, resolving issues promptly, and delivering personalized support across multiple channels.
From knowledge base management to AI-powered chatbots, it equips service teams with everything they need to enhance customer satisfaction, improve agent productivity, and build long-term customer loyalty.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud
Marketing Cloud allows marketers to create targeted campaigns, automate numerous vital workflows, and precisely measure campaign performance. Email marketing, social media management, mobile engagement, advertising automation – all of this can be monitored, controlled, and adjusted in real time to nurture leads and deliver relevant content.
Salesforce Commerce Cloud
Commerce Cloud is a leading e-commerce solution that helps teams build engaging online storefronts, streamline order management, and optimize merchandising strategies. From omnichannel commerce to predictive analytics and integrated marketing, it equips retailers with the tools they need to deliver shopping experiences that keep customers coming back for more.
Salesforce Einstein Analytics
Einstein Analytics uses AI and machine learning to uncover actionable intelligence from vast datasets. Its intuitive dashboards, predictive analytics, and AI-driven insights allow teams to make smarter, data-driven decisions across the entire business – sales forecasting, customer segmentation, or marketing performance analysis.
Salesforce Community Cloud
Community Cloud empowers teams to build vibrant, branded communities where customers, partners, and employees can connect, collaborate, and engage. With features like customizable community templates, discussion forums, and knowledge bases, teams, and their non-members can share insights and make use of self-service support.
Salesforce Pardot
Pardot is a marketing automation platform designed to help B2B marketers create personalized campaigns, track prospect interactions, and score leads based on engagement and behavior. In turn, this tends to accelerate sales cycles, improve marketing ROI, and drive revenue growth.
Salesforce CPQ (Configure, Price, Quote)
CPQ streamlines the quoting and proposal process, helping sales teams generate accurate quotes, pricing, and contracts quickly and efficiently. Namely, sales reps are enabled to configure complex product offerings, apply pricing rules and discounts, and generate professional-looking quotes.
Salesforce Field Service Lightning
Field Service Lightning is a field service management solution that helps optimize scheduling, dispatching, and management of field service operations. Features like appointment scheduling, route optimization, and mobile access to customer data allow field service technicians to be more productive, responsive, and efficient.
What to Consider When Choosing a Salesforce Solution for Your Enterprise Business
We recommend that your primary focus lies on the following five factors:
- Scalability and Flexibility
- Integration Capabilities
- Customization Capabilities
- Ease of Adoption
- Pricing Structure
Now, let’s talk about each of those in greater detail.
Scalability and Flexibility
Consider the scalability of Salesforce enterprise solutions in terms of both technical capabilities and licensing models. Ensure that the solution can handle large datasets efficiently, support high user concurrency, and scale seamlessly across different geographies or business units.
Additionally, evaluate the flexibility of the solution to adapt to changing business requirements, such as new processes, products, or markets. Look for solutions that offer customizable architectures, modular components, and extensible platforms to support your organization’s long-term growth.
Integration Capabilities
Ensure that your solution can seamlessly connect with your existing systems, data sources, and third-party applications. Look for ones that offer robust APIs, standard connectors, and middleware support to facilitate data exchange, synchronization, and workflow automation across multiple or all systems that are in use in your company.
Also consider factors such as data mapping, transformation, and error handling capabilities – they allow for a smooth integration with minimal manual intervention.
Customization Capabilities
Evaluate the configuration options available to ensure the solution aligns with your organization’s needs and development capabilities. Look for solutions that offer a range of customization tools, such as point-and-click configuration, declarative development, and programmatic customization options (for instance – Apex, Visualforce).
Assess the flexibility of the solution to accommodate custom data models, business rules, and user interfaces without compromising performance or scalability. Consider factors such as sandbox environments, version control, and release management practices to ensure efficient and controlled customization processes that minimize risks and downtime.
Ease of Adoption
Evaluate the user interface, navigation, and overall user experience of the solution to see how intuitive and responsive it is. Also, look at how well it is optimized for different devices and screen sizes – you may conduct usability testing and gather feedback from end users to identify certain usability issues.
Prioritize solutions that offer customizable dashboards, personalized views, and role-based access controls to cater to the diverse preferences of users across different roles and departments. And, naturally, Invest in user training, onboarding programs, and user support resources to provide users with the knowledge and skills they need to make the most out of your Salesforce.
Pricing Structure
Finally, evaluate the pricing structure, licensing options, and pricing models and see how they align with your budget and financial constraints. The most important factors here are subscription fees, implementation costs, ongoing maintenance expenses, and scalability options – to estimate the total cost of ownership over time.
On top of that, assess the value proposition of the solutions in terms of their ability to drive revenue growth, improve operational efficiency, and deliver tangible business outcomes that justify the investment. Collaborate with your finance and procurement teams to conduct a thorough cost-benefit analysis and negotiate favorable pricing terms and conditions with Salesforce vendors or partners.
Leverage Resources and Expertise to Choose the Right Salesforce Solution
At this stage, the focus lies on extensive research – make sure to use the knowledge that is publicly available, test the products in their trial versions, and seek a third, professional opinion from Salesforce experts.
Use Salesforce Documentation, Tutorials, and Community Forums
Take advantage of Salesforce’s official documentation, which includes comprehensive user guides, implementation guides, and developer documentation covering various aspects of Salesforce solutions. Additionally, explore Salesforce Trailhead, a free online learning platform that offers interactive modules, guided learning paths, and hands-on challenges to help you learn Salesforce concepts and skills at your own pace.
Also make sure to engage with the Salesforce community through forums, discussion groups, and social media channels to share knowledge, and seek advice on specific topics or challenges.
Engage with Salesforce Consultants and Partners
Salesforce consultants like OMI can bring specialized expertise, industry knowledge, and implementation experience to help you navigate the complexities of choosing and implementing Salesforce solutions. Collaborate with them to conduct a comprehensive needs assessment, evaluate solution options, and develop a tailored implementation roadmap.
You may also seek guidance from Salesforce’s Partner Community, which includes a network of trusted advisors, solution providers, and system integrators who can offer strong support throughout the evaluation and selection process.
Leverage Trial Versions and Demos
Take advantage of trial versions or sandbox environments offered by Salesforce to test drive different solutions and evaluate their capabilities in a simulated environment. Request personalized demos from Salesforce vendors or partners to see how the solutions address your specific business workflows. Pay attention to usability, performance, and user experience factors during the demo sessions to identify any potential pain points or areas for improvement.
Also, don’t hesitate to ask vendor representatives or solution experts questions to clarify any doubts and gather additional information.
Make Your Decision
Next, it’s time to commit to a choice – gather every ounce of information, conduct a comprehensive analysis, and discuss your findings with the key decision-makers.
Consolidating Findings
Review the documentation, notes, and feedback collected during solution demos, vendor discussions, and stakeholder interviews. From that review, compare and contrast the strengths, weaknesses, and trade-offs of each of the Salesforce solutions, taking into account factors such as functionality, usability, support, and pricing. Then create a structured evaluation matrix or scorecard to objectively assess and rank the solutions based on their alignment with your team’s needs and objectives.
Conducting a Cost-Benefit Analysis
Calculate the total cost of ownership for each solution, including upfront implementation costs, ongoing subscription fees, maintenance expenses, and any additional infrastructure or integration costs. Then estimate the expected benefits associated with each solution and quantify the projected ROI by comparing the benefits against the total costs over some time. Consider factors such as payback period, net present value (NPV), and internal rate of return (IRR) to assess the financial viability of each solution.
Seeking Stakeholder Buy-In and Consensus
Engage key stakeholders, including executives, department heads, end users, and IT leaders, throughout the decision-making process to gather input and address concerns, if any. Present your findings from the evaluation process in a compelling manner, highlighting the business benefits, ROI potential, and strategic fit of the chosen solution.
After that, use the stakeholder feedback to refine the decision criteria as well as the implementation plan.
Implementation and Optimization
The final step is to make sure your team has a solid plan for every member before its execution begins, and after the implementation process is finished – give the team the knowledge they need not only to perform well but to find areas for improvement.
Plan for Successful Implementation
Develop a detailed implementation plan that outlines key milestones, tasks, dependencies, and resource requirements – and also make sure to establish clear timelines, deliverables, and success criteria to track progress and ensure accountability.
Conduct thorough data migration, cleansing, and validation activities to ensure the accuracy and integrity of data within the Salesforce system. And, if needed, collaborate closely with Salesforce consultants and partners like OMI to deploy the solution according to best practices and industry standards.
Provide Comprehensive Training and Support
Develop comprehensive training programs and materials that cater to different user roles, skill levels, and learning preferences. To remain agile and adaptable, also offer a combination of instructor-led training sessions, self-paced online courses, and interactive workshops – this will accommodate diverse learning styles and schedules.
It’s also crucial to provide ongoing support through help desk services, user guides, knowledge base articles, and peer-to-peer forums to address user questions, issues, and challenges in real-time.
Continuously Refine the Salesforce Solution
Last but not least, you need to establish a process for collecting, analyzing, and acting on user feedback, feature requests, and enhancement opportunities. Solicit feedback from users through surveys, focus groups, and user satisfaction ratings to identify pain points, usability issues, and areas for improvement.
Conclusion
It’s of critical importance to set clear, measurable objectives and evaluate various Salesforce solutions against these benchmarks. Once you’ve done that, make clever use of the knowledge that is publicly available, test the products, and conduct a deep analysis of what you have learned.
If the stakeholders end up supporting your choice, don’t rush – make a detailed implementation plan before getting to work and provide your team with all the training they will need after the process is finished.
Should you have any trouble, you can always count on OMI’s 25 years worth of experience in successful CRM implementation – don’t hesitate to reach out to us and we’ll get the job done.