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Your CRM is the lifeblood of your company and the beating heart of the enterprise growth process. Forrester Research actually found that when a CRM system is correctly implemented, you can see around a 245% ROI yield as a general number. Other research also points to a significant 26% increase in customer retention. This proves that when you get it right, you really do reap the benefits.
With that in mind, it may then come as a surprise to you that a huge chunk of CRM projects fail. In fact, according to years of analysis of large companies, most had failure rates anywhere from 30%, all the way up to 70%, with Butler Group showing a 70% CRM failure rate in 2002 (Skuid).
These are some quite shocking statistics, especially if you know how important it is to keep these systems well-oiled and performing as they should.
Set Clear and Measurable Goals:
Having said all this, there are some clear ways you can improve your chances of implementing Salesforce projects so they don’t fail. The first being through breaking down your objectives and focussing on some key areas that will allow you to boost the efficiency of your platform, help you define goals and measure success to make sure you get the most out of your platform. If you don’t have defined goals, you cannot succeed:
These 6 areas of focus will help you to refine what you want to get out of your Salesforce project. It is far easier to set and measure goals in several different areas than it is to set one all-encompassing goal. You then need to ask yourself where you want to be in each of these key areas by the end of the project and define how you want the project to achieve it. For example, you could ask:
“How much are we aiming to improve customer experience, how can we achieve this with this project and how do we measure this?”
Once these clear questions are laid out, you will have a much clearer vision of where you want to be and how you’re going to get there. This ties in well to an Agile development process as you can constantly be checking your progress toward your goals at the end of each sprint.
Spring Clean Your Org:
The second way to ensure your Salesforce project doesn’t fail is to keep track of key development metrics along the way. Technical debt is one such metric that is arguably more important than any other. Technical debt is the amount of time it will take you to remediate all issues on your platform. This can often go totally overlooked by platform managers and architects as it is easy to ignore in the short term. However, in the long-term, it can be catastrophic and lead to a total platform failure.
Startlingly, the average Salesforce org in 2019 had 7617 hours of technical debt. That doesn’t even take into account time spent on operational things and unexpected problems whilst remediating. With this level of technical debt, it can be impossible to achieve your goals. Building on a platform with weak or messy foundations is not sustainable and will eventually catch up with you.
How to Measure Your Goals:
Measuring technical debt and other metrics that allow you to set these clear and defined goals can be a hard task and many don’t know where to start. If you want to know more about technical debt see this blog article we put out with all the info you need.
If you’d like to find out the metrics and methods that will ensure your Salesforce projects don’t fail, Quality Clouds can help put provide you with the information and framework you’ll need.
Arrange a call with our experts to learn more.
