What Does Salesforce Implementation Actually Mean?
A lot of times when I tell people that I do Salesforce implementations to support nonprofit clients, I kind of get a blank stare. So I’m going to take a minute to explain what it means to help a nonprofit with a Salesforce implementation.
When you sign up for Salesforce, they’re very generous to their nonprofit partners by giving access to the platform for free, along with 10 user licenses. When you first log in, you’re looking at a basic shell of the program. Unless you have an experienced staff person who understands how to use the system and configure it, it really is just a blank slate to get you started.
Hiring an implementation partner is where the up front cost comes in to use Salesforce.
Your implementation partner is going to help you with a number of things:
They’re going to have discovery meetings with you and your team to help identify what it is that you like or dislike about your previous software, what your goals are and what your wish list is.
After you talk through some of those pieces, you’ll start to refine some of the needs that you have for your system.
Your implementation partner is then going to build out these needs in Salesforce.
They’re going to plan time for you to test it and see if it actually works how you want it to work.
They’ll make further changes based off that testing.
Then you’ll go live and they’ll work with training your staff.
In a nutshell, that’s what implementation is.
The things that you don’t see happen behind the scenes:
They’re also setting up security methods.
Who has access to which records and information.
They’re setting up your data so you can visually see the information that you’re entering through dashboards and reports.
They’re creating all sorts of custom fields that are specific to your organization.
One of the most exciting pieces, is that your Implementation partner will do a tremendous amount of automation on the Salesforce platform. Your implementation partner can set up those automations so things happen in the background that you don’t even see, but they make your life easier and more efficient.
Not to mention there are plenty of integrations that exist in Salesforce. So if you’re using event software, payment processing tools, Slack, social media tools; there are all sorts of different features that you can oftentimes integrate with your system. Your implementation partner is going to help you set all of that up as well.
So bringing somebody on board to help with your implementation is just getting an expert to make the system custom and specific to your organization’s needs. They’re going to tell you things that are capable and not capable, and they’re going to guide you through that entire process.
By the time you launch, you’re going to feel confident, and most importantly, excited about using your new system, because you’ll know it was built specifically to your organizations needs.
If you have any questions on what Salesforce implementation means and what it includes or does not include, let’s chat. Whether you’re shopping around a bunch of different partners to find the right one, or you just have some basic questions, I’m an open book.
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