So, you are moving to Salesforce!

It is finally that time – you have decided to move from your old system to Salesforce. I bet you are excited. You have watched the videos, read the articles, and chosen a Salesforce partner to work with. What could possibly go wrong?

Insisting that Salesforce behaves just like your old solution.

On the surface this sounds perfectly reasonable. Why would you want to lose functionality? Clearly Salesforce should be able to do everything your old solution did. At the same time, if your old solution was lacking, why would you want to create a new solution in its image? Why go through the pain and expense of replacing your old CRM just to end up with a similar system?

This transition period is, in fact, a perfect time to craft a better solution. After all, Salesforce has a wide breadth of capabilities to exploit.

One of the first things we encourage our clients to do is to create a vision for the future. This is done by identifying objectives and value drivers that create the most improvement for their organization. Once completed, clients can identify their success metrics, which allows measurement of the expected improvements. These metrics can be added right into Salesforce as reports and dashboards to allow the simple monitoring of success. Your Salesforce partner can help you choose the best Salesforce capabilities, applications, and integrations to build your solution.

This is also the time to reconsider your critical processes. Legacy systems often dictate and constrain your processes. Why not take the opportunity to reengineer your processes by removing unnecessary non-value steps and combining steps to make the process simpler? Salesforce has a number of process automation capabilities like workflows, approvals, process builder, flows and triggers to really allow you to streamline your key processes.

Insisting that Salesforce should look just like your old solution is not the only red flag, but it is certainly something to be mindful of as you transition to Salesforce.