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The Ideal Salesforce Implementation Team

Oct 20, 2021 Six Consulting

It requires a well-planned and well-executed implementation to get it right.

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Salesforce can provide massive value to your company, reaching far beyond just the sales team. It's a solution that can streamline processes, improve efficiency, and create better customer experiences.

But that doesn't happen by accident. It requires a well-planned and well-executed implementation to get it right. And that requires having the right team in place to execute that implementation.

Doing that requires that you have six key roles filled on your Salesforce implementation team. These roles ensure that you have the business and technical expertise and knowledge in place, and a comprehensive understanding of the things it takes to knock your Salesforce implementation out of the park.

 

The Six Key Roles on Your Salesforce Implementation Team

Project Lead / Product Owner

The project lead or product owner is the person that should have a complete view of your Salesforce implementation, the goals, and what the outcome should look like. This should be someone with the authority to make decisions that will get the project done on things like budgets, timelines, and so on. At the very least, they should have a direct line to the executive team to make budget decisions when needed.

This role acts as a liaison between all stakeholders and team members, from leadership to IT and admins to outside partners. At the end of the day, it's the project lead who is responsible for getting your Salesforce instance implemented correctly for your business.

Salesforce Administrator

Whether you hire someone for this role or repurpose a resource within your organization, you'll need someone to act as your Salesforce Administrator. This person will create new accounts, setting up permissions, and possibly configuring forms, reports, views, and so forth. This is the person who will be maintaining your Salesforce instance once you go live.

Data Lead / IT Team

Salesforce might have lots of great functionality, but it's almost meaningless without data. Your data lead should understand the goals of what Salesforce does for your organization and knows the data required to meet those goals.

This person will be the source for identifying where existing data is stored, defining and maintaining data quality and governance, setting data extract processes, and determining what system or systems will be the source of truth going forward.

This may be someone from your IT department. Even if it is, you may want other IT team members involved in the implementation team, too. However, because Salesforce is cloud-hosted and has a separate administrator, you don't necessarily need an IT team to implement and maintain the instance. Other roles can fill some of the same purposes IT team members would in larger organizations.

Subject Matter Experts

Various business units will be the end-users of your Salesforce implementation. You'll need users from these groups to help guide what the user experience for their departments needs to look like. Ideally, these SMEs will be power users within their groups, with deep domain knowledge in both their department and its role in the business at large.

Project Manager

Your project manager outlines implementation tasks, schedules, and deliverables, ensuring each team member knows their responsibilities, and getting the work done promptly. This may require identifying needed resources, communicating roadblocks, and escalating budget and timeline issues to the project owner. They will also provide support for user acceptance testing, user training, and project rollout.

Implementation Partner

You might wonder why a partner is an essential part of your ideal Salesforce implementation team. Can't you implement Salesforce on your own?

It's certainly possible to do so. But, an implementation partner can accelerate both your implementation project and your success with your Salesforce investment.

Salesforce is an incredibly powerful tool. But it's also a complex and nuanced system. Thanks to their hands-on experience, a skilled implementation partner will have seen projects similar to yours.

For instance, Six Consulting has helped hundreds of organizations get up and running on Salesforce. We're familiar with fast-tracking the elements that will have you up and running quickly, what can keep your users from adopting the solution, and what pitfalls lie ahead and help you to avoid them. It's possible to implement Salesforce without a partner like Six Consulting, but it may take you much longer to see results and realize the ROI that you're hoping to achieve.

Conclusion

Getting your Salesforce implementation right from the start can catapult your success with your investment in the platform. Understanding the right direction and achieving organizational adoption means getting the right people in the room and allowing their expertise to guide you where you need to go. It also means using your team to understand hurdles like user adoption and training. All of this requires a group that can answer questions about how your business operates today so Salesforce can be configured to support you into the future.

 

Six Consulting can help you realize a smooth and seamless transition to using Salesforce across your organization, from evaluation and planning to implementation and training. Our architects, developers, and Salesforce experts have helped companies just like yours get up and running quickly. The faster you get started with Salesforce, the sooner you'll see the massive benefits the platform can have for your business. Contact us today to discover how we can help you.

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