Why did your business decide to implement Salesforce? Whether you’re just getting started with Salesforce or have used it for years, and regardless of exactly how you use Salesforce, the decision likely centered around at least one of the following:
- Simplifying, standardizing and automating key business processes
- Improving tracking around and visibility into data
- Increasing efficiency to save costs and/or drive more revenue
Whatever the exact reason for the decision, it was most certainly something that multiple people evaluated. There’s no getting around it: Salesforce is a big investment for any business, but it’s an investment that can deliver enormous returns — if it’s managed correctly.
Success with Salesforce Requires Proper Management
Salesforce is an extremely powerful solution. Its breadth and flexibility allow it to fulfill a variety of needs for all kinds of businesses, and regular improvements to the solution mean that there really is no limit on what’s possible.
But for all the things that Salesforce is, there’s one thing it most certainly is not: A “set it and forget it” solution.
Quite the contrary, success with Salesforce requires proper management in the form of a governance strategy for ongoing maintenance, particularly when it comes to configuring the solution in a way that can help scale your business.
Far too often, organizations devote significant time and effort to their Salesforce implementation only to leave the solution as is once they go live. But this approach leaves value on the table, as true success with Salesforce comes when it evolves alongside the business.
Furthermore, as you do scale Salesforce within your organization, you will begin to have multiple work streams occurring in parallel, and a clear, centralized governance strategy is the only way to effectively manage those streams.
3 Ways Salesforce Governance Improves ROI
How exactly does proper management in the form of a Salesforce governance strategy improve ROI? It comes down to three key reasons:
1) People
User adoption is essential to Salesforce success. You can have the best possible configuration of Salesforce for your business, but if no one uses it, then nothing else matters. But anyone who’s implemented a new technology or process before knows that securing and maintaining user adoption isn’t always easy.
A Salesforce governance strategy can help manage the people aspect of Salesforce success by running change management efforts. In this way, Salesforce governance should help ensure users understand new processes and confirm that any changes fulfill a business need (rather than creating admin work for users). Finally, it should create a forum for users to provide feedback so that your organization can continue to improve its Salesforce instance.
2) Growth
As your business grows and evolves, so should your use of Salesforce. What worked for you this year may no longer suffice in a year or two down the line. As a result, your business needs to monitor what’s working and what’s not, all while keeping an eye toward opportunities to improve.
Introducing a Salesforce governance strategy can help manage this growth by (a) making sure stakeholders from across the business can voice their needs and (b) ensuring that your business takes advantage of the new features and functionality that Salesforce rolls out on a regular basis. Critically, proper Salesforce governance should also increase the agility of change.
3) Stability
Evolving your Salesforce instance over time is most certainly important, but those changes need to be made effectively to deliver the desired results. Otherwise, you might end up introducing changes that don’t meet business needs or create issues within the system.
Once again, a Salesforce governance strategy can help mitigate these risks associated with change. In this case, Salesforce governance ensures stability by centralizing decision making, maintaining best practices for development and design standards and properly rolling out new developments to the organization.
Getting Started with Salesforce Governance in Your Organization
By promoting user adoption, ensuring system growth and maintaining stability throughout that growth, a formal Salesforce governance strategy can help your organization continue to increase the value of Salesforce long term.
What does it take to get started with a Salesforce governance strategy? Download our Salesforce Application Governance White Paper to find out everything you need to know.