Salesforce Sales Cloud – An Implementation Handbook E-Book

Kerry Townsend

• Herausgeber: Packt Publishing
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 583

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

Salesforce Sales Cloud is a system rich in functionality, addressing many sales business challenges such as sales productivity, forecast visibility, and sales enablement. However, unlocking the full value of the system and getting maximum returns pose a challenge, especially if you’re new to the technology.
This implementation handbook goes beyond mere configuration to ensure a successful implementation journey. From laying the groundwork for your project to engaging stakeholders with sales-specific business insights, this book equips you with the knowledge you need to plan and execute.
As you progress, you’ll learn how to design a robust data model to support the sales and lead generation process, followed by crafting an intuitive user experience to drive productivity. You’ll then explore crucial post-building aspects such as testing, training, and releasing functionality. Finally, you’ll discover how the solutions’ capability can be expanded by adding and integrating other tools to address typical sales use cases.
By the end of this book, you’ll have grasped how to leverage Sales Cloud to solve sales challenges and have gained the confidence to design and implement solutions successfully with the help of real-world use cases.

Leseprobe

Salesforce Sales Cloud – An Implementation Handbook

A practical guide from design to deployment for driving success in sales

Kerry Townsend

Salesforce Sales Cloud – An Implementation Handbook

Copyright © 2024 Packt Publishing

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First published: April 2024

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The opportunity to write this book coincided with a particularly difficult time and required a considerable time investment. I would like to thank my mum for her unwavering support and belief. Without her, I would not be me, this and all my achievements are as much hers as they are mine.

I would also like to thank Paul Battisson, who helped me believe I could achieve this long-term goal of being published and made sure it happened for me.

I would also like to thank Andrew Hart, my technical reviewer whose confidence in me kept me going through the difficult times.

Contributors

About the author

Kerry Townsend is a Salesforce specialist, working with the platform since 2005 – first as a user, then as a solo Admin. She moved over to consulting in 2010, initially at boutiques, as a global systems integrator, and more recently, returning to working for herself. She has refined her skills while delivering a broad range of Salesforce solutions using multiple clouds, predominantly Sales and Marketing Cloud, for small to enterprise-size businesses.

She has 16 Salesforce certifications and has been recognized as a Salesforce MVP since 2018. She is passionate about enabling others and is a Salesforce community conference and Trailblazer community’s group leader. She is also a regular speaker at Salesforce conferences across the globe, including Dreamforce.

About the reviewer

Andrew Hart has worked in the CRM space for 25 years, with over 10 years of experience in Salesforce. He has been associated with a wide range of challenging projects across many industries and geographies. He is highly certified in multiple ecosystems and was the 202nd person to achieve the Salesforce Certified Technical Architect credential.

He currently leads the Services team at Own Company, following spells at Salesforce, Oracle, Accenture, and IBM where he was a platform architect, helping the biggest and some of the most complex customers get value from their CRM investments.

He can be contacted at [email protected].

I would like to thank my family for their support in everything I do. But mostly I want to thank Kerry for letting me work with her on this book. Spending time with her and pushing ideas back and forth was as valuable to me, as I hope it was to her.

-Andrew Hart

Table of Contents

Preface

Part 1: Building the Fundamentals

1

Preparing for Success

Supporting tools and information

Common sales challenges

Managing the sales pipeline

Forecasting accuracy

Increasing sales productivity

Achieving sales and marketing alignment

Alignment with company strategy and values

The importance of adoption

What is adoption?

Why is adoption important for Sales Cloud success?

Barriers to adoption

What is your approach?

Defining the scope of your implementation

What is scope?

Defining the scope

Managing scope

Summary

Further reading

2

Defining the Approach

Supporting tools and information

Salesforce ALM

Low-code and pro-code development

Development methodologies

Salesforce environment strategy and DevOps tools

Salesforce development environments – Sandboxes

Salesforce native life cycle management tools

What is DevOps?

Commercially available DevOps tools

Developing a testing approach

Why is testing important?

When to test

Testing low code versus pro code

The impact of deployment methodology and environment strategy on testing

Types of testing

Test strategy versus test plan versus test cases

Test strategy

Test plan

Test cases

Beyond the basics

Change management and training

What is change management?

Why is change management important?

What are the principles of change management?

Planning your training

Types of training

Learning styles

What is a training plan?

Salesforce resources

Summary

Further reading

3

Design and Build: The Core Sales Process

Supporting tools and information

Understanding your sales (business) process

Common sales frameworks

Gathering information on the sales process

Harmonizing the sales process

Overcoming objections

Sales Cloud data model and security

Sales Cloud’s capabilities

Sales Cloud data model

Sales Cloud security

Reports and forecasting/reporting metrics

Sales Cloud capabilities

Key considerations

In practice

Accounts and Contacts

Sales Cloud capabilities

Key considerations

In practice

Opportunities, products, and price books

Sales Cloud capabilities

Key considerations

In practice

Activities

Sales Cloud capabilities

Key considerations

In practice

Account Team, Opportunity Team, and Opportunity Splits

Sales Cloud capabilities

Translating sales process requirements into a design

Summary

Further reading

4

Design and Build: The Lead Generation Process

Supporting tools and information

Understanding how your organization generates business

Customer buying journey

Demand generation versus lead generation

B2B versus B2C

Channels and strategies

Personal data regulation

What is a Lead?

Gathering information on the lead generation process

Lead generation data and security model

Sales Cloud capabilities

Sales Cloud data model

Salesforce Consent Data Model

Sales Cloud security

Leads

Sales Cloud capabilities

Key considerations

In practice

Campaigns

Sales Cloud capabilities

Key considerations

In practice

Other Objects

Translating lead generation process requirements into design

Summary

Further reading

5

Design and Build: Sales User Productivity

Supporting tools information

The importance of user experience (UX) design

What is UX design?

Why is it important?

Design principles

Salesforce Certified User Experience (UX) Designer

Sales Cloud User Interface (UI) design

Org-wide branding

Lightning Applications (Apps)

Page Layouts

Analyzing and visualizing data – Reports and Dashboards

Automation

Automation tools

Email and calendar integrations

Lightning Sync

Einstein Activity Capture standard

Sending emails from Lightning Experience via Gmail or Office 365

Email to Salesforce

Other options

Going mobile

Common Sales Cloud use cases

Working offline

Settings and considerations

In-App Guidance

Why use In-App Guidance?

Common Sales Cloud use cases

Summary

Further reading

Part 2: Preparing to Release

6

Bringing Data into Sales Cloud

Supporting tools and information

Identifying data to load

Identifying available data

Assessing the data

Deciding what data to load

Preparing your data

Selecting your data-loading tool

Salesforce-supported tools

Third-party tools

Which tool to use

Loading data

The loading process

Data mapping and formatting

Executing a data load

Validating a data load

Undoing a data load

Planning your legacy data load

Business transition

Loading order

Preloading steps

Post-loading steps

Data load rehearsal

Scheduling

Communication

Ongoing data-loading activities

Summary

Further reading

7

Getting Sign-Off

Supporting tools and information

The what, why, who, how, and when of sign-off

What is a sign-off?

Why is sign-off important?

Who is involved?

How does it happen?

When to use the different types of sign-off

Types of sign-off

Discovery sign-off

Scope sign-off

Design sign-off

Build sign-off

Testing sign-off

Implementation sign-off

Change sign-off

Summary

8

Executing Testing

Supporting tools and information

Testing in practice

Creating test plans and executing testing

Unit Testing

Quality Assurance testing

System integration testing

User Acceptance Testing

Translating Users’ Stories into Test Cases

Other testing

Performance Testing

Summary

Further reading

9

Executing Training

Supporting tools and information

Training in practice

Developing your Training Plan

Creating training materials

Delivering training

Instructor-led

Self-paced

Summary

Further reading

10

Deployment Planning

Supporting tools and information

Deciding how and when to deploy

Creating a deployment plan

Deployment checklist

Deployment communication plan

Going live

Post-go-live support

In practice

Summary

Further reading

Part 3: Beyond the Fundamentals

11

Territory Management

Supporting tools and information

What are sales territories?

Why manage sales territories?

Understanding your organization’s territory strategy

What is Sales Cloud Sales Territories?

The capabilities of Sales Territories

Key concepts

When to use Sales Cloud Territory Management

Translating Territory requirements into a design

Key considerations

Setting up Sales Territories

Summary

Further reading

12

Modeling Additional Processes with Sales Cloud

Supporting tools and information

Additional process requirements

Additional Sales Cloud functionality

Sales Cloud data model

Quotes and Quote Line Items

Sales Cloud capabilities

Key considerations

In practice

Contracts

Sales Cloud capabilities

Key considerations

In practice

Orders and Order Line Items

Sales Cloud capabilities

Key considerations

In practice

Custom Objects

Custom Object elements

Key considerations

In practice

Summary

Further reading

13

Common System Integrations

Supporting tools and information

Why do we integrate systems with Sales Cloud?

Common integrations

Sales solutions

Marketing solutions

Customer Support systems

Finance and accounting systems

Document generation

eSignature

Data enrichment

Customer Data Platforms

Systems integrations overview

Types of integrations

Key considerations

Transformation and mapping

Who should be involved?

Where to start?

Summary

Further reading

14

Extending with the AppExchange

Supporting tools and information

What is the AppExchange?

Applications

Bolt Solutions

Flow Solutions

Lightning Data solutions

Components

Consultants

Getting the most from AppExchange

Searching the AppExchange

Discovering apps from the Demo Jam

The Power of AppExchange

Installing an AppExchange solution

Common types of applications to enhance your implementation

Salesforce Labs solutions

Document creation

Digital signatures

Accounting

Marketing

Summary

Further reading

Index

Other Books You May Enjoy

Preface

The Salesforce Sales Cloud – An Implementation Handbook is a practical guide on how to design and deliver Sales Cloud solutions. Concepts and functionality related to Sales Cloud are presented and explained in the context of the software delivery lifecycle to illustrate when and how solution decisions are made. Tips, pitfalls, and examples are given to provide enough information to make decisions for their use case without being overwhelming. The book is beneficial for those who are new to Sales Cloud and software delivery and also for those want to gain an insight into the different aspects of Sales Cloud.

Your journey in this book will start with how to set yourself and your Sales Cloud implementation up for success by having clear alignment with company goals, being clear on the scope of the required solution, and having detailed, documented, and confirmed processes and requirements. These foundational elements can often be rushed and overlooked because of a desire to get hands-on straight away and start building your Sales Cloud implementation, but this can be the root of many implementation delays or failures.

The book guides you through how to engage with stakeholders, how to gather requirements for the system, describes the out-of-the-box functionality, and goes on to describe how you approach and deliver the build, test, and release phases of your Sales Cloud implementation.

Furthermore, this book covers how to extend your solution beyond the out-of-the-box Sales Cloud functionality. By the end of this book, readers will have the confidence to start their first Sales Cloud implementation. They will understand all the components that are required to deliver a successful solution. They will be able to make choices that are appropriate for their use case.

Who this book is for

If you are a newly appointed or certified Admin, a consultant new to Sales Cloud, or a stakeholder in a Sales Cloud implementation, this book will give you the insights that will set you up for success. Admins, Consultants, or Business Analysts already familiar with the Salesforce Customer 360 platform will learn how and when to design and build Sales Cloud functionality to solve business challenges.

This book is a practical companion that the reader can follow, or dip in and out of, to guide them in building Sales Cloud implementations. It teaches the technology options available so the reader can make appropriate choices for their use case. It is born of the lessons learned and successes earned by an enthusiastic, accidental admin who transitioned into an experienced consultant. As it is written by and for people without a formal technology education, this book distills the lessons learned over projects. It provides pragmatic, practical advice and tools.

What this book covers

Chapter 1, Preparing for Success, outlines the foundations for the success of any Sales Cloud implementation and how you can ensure success on your project.

Chapter 2, Defining the Approach, walks you through the important upfront decisions that define how you approach the delivery of your implementation. It introduces the Salesforce Application Lifecycle and outlines your development methodology, testing, development environment, and change management options, allowing you to shape the delivery of your implementation as you need.

Chapter 3, Design and Build: The Core Sales Process, focuses on how to gather requirements and design a Sales Cloud Solution that enables your organization’s core sales process. It starts by introducing some common sales frameworks to give you the language and understanding to be able to collaborate with sales stakeholders. It moves on to how to gather the details required and then we step through the data structure that is available in Sales Cloud and what it is designed for.

Chapter 4, Design and Build: The Lead Generation Process, focuses on the process before the core sales process and how the leads are managed. Again, we review common frameworks, gathering requirements and the capability available in Sales Cloud.

Chapter 5, Design and Build: Sales User Productivity, explains all the Sales Cloud functionality that is available to increase your sales team’s productivity so you can select what is appropriate for your use case.

Chapter 6, Bringing Data into Sales Cloud, guides you through how you load data into Sales Cloud and how you go about planning your implementation data migration.

Chapter 7, Getting Sign-Off, explains why sign-off checkpoints play a critical role in a successful implementation and ensuring you take your stakeholders with you.

Chapter 8, Executing Testing, builds on the testing planning that was discussed in Chapter 2, Defining the Approach. It walks you through the practical considerations so you can feel confident in executing testing.

Chapter 9, Executing Training, also builds on the training planning that was discussed in Chapter 2, Defining the Approach. It provides you with practical considerations so you can feel confident in executing pre-go-live user training.

Chapter 10, Deployment Planning, explores how to approach deploying the functionality that you have built for your stakeholders in a way that minimizes the disruption to them.

Chapter 11, Territory Management, reviews the capability Sales Cloud has for modeling more complex people structures.

Chapter 12, Modeling Additional Processes with Sales Cloud, shows you how you can go further with the standard functionality or extend it to capture information and support processes that are bespoke to your organization.

Chapter 13, Common System Integrations, explores the types of systems that are commonly integrated with Sales Cloud and reviews the considerations and ways these can be approached.

Chapter 14, Extending with the AppExchange, guides you through how you can deliver system requirements by adding third-party applications that tightly integrate with Sales Cloud. We start by considering the paradigm of buy vs build and then, we move on to how you can approach gathering information and selecting an appropriate tool.

To get the most out of this book

A good working knowledge of your organization’s sales process and the organization’s goals for the Salesforce Customer 360 platform will help you get the most out of this book.

All the guidance in this book assumes that your Edition of Salesforce is either Enterprise or above (Performance or Unlimited). Essentials and Professional Edition do not have all the capabilities in Sales Cloud. To carry out any prototyping or development, you will need to have access to a Sandbox, Developer org or Trailhead org with System Administrator permissions, Modify All Data, and Customize Application.

Suggestions will be made on what tools you need in the Supporting tools and information section of each chapter however always considering use the tools available in your organization first. This will make it easier to collaborate with colleague, including senior stakeholders.

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Part 1:Building the Fundamentals

In this section, we will cover the following chapters.

Chapter 1, Preparing for SuccessChapter 2, Defining the ApproachChapter 3, Design and Build: The Core Sales ProcessChapter 4, Design and Build: The Lead Generation ProcessChapter 5, Design and Build: Sales User Productivity

1

Preparing for Success

There are many factors that influence the success of a Sales Cloud implementation. In this book, we will explore all the essentials of a typical Sales Cloud delivery project. At the beginning, there are a lot of hopes, dreams, and promises. Your implementation will be considered a success if these are delivered by the end. It is likely that some things will change and some unexpected things will come up during the course of your implementation. The aim is to stay true to the core reasons for the project’s inception. One of the key ways of staying on course is defining what success looks like at the start. Being able to revisit the shared vision means focus stays on what matters. This is the best way to realize success.

We start this chapter by exploring some of the common challenges commercial teams experience that lead to the purchase of Sales Cloud and how the tool addresses them. This will help you understand the challenges your sales stakeholders face and the capabilities you might focus on to solve them. We move on to learning the importance of ensuring your implementation and technology goals are aligned with your company strategy and values. Once Sales Cloud is implemented, you want to show that it adds value and to do this, you need a plan from the start. We also learn how user adoption plays an essential part in success, what prevents it, and how to avoid these issues from the start.

Finally, we explore how to define what is and isn’t included in an implementation by defining the project scope and how managing this keeps you on course to deliver the original vision.

All of these factors have an overall impact on implementation success. Understanding them and keeping them in mind throughout the implementation allows you to set yourself up for success.

In this chapter, we’re going to cover the following main topics:

Common sales challengesAlignment with company strategy and valuesThe importance of adoptionDefining the scope of your implementation

Supporting tools and information

To get the most from this chapter, it would be useful to have a working knowledge of your organization’s strategy and values and understand the goals and the business case for the purchase of Sales Cloud.

The information you discover and define relating to the content of this chapter, such as defining implementation goals and scope, can be captured in standard business tools such as word processing and spreadsheet tools. Where your organization has project management tools, you may start to capture the overall implementation vision using these.

Common sales challenges

The role and expectations of the teams that generate sales, also known as the commercial function, are continually evolving. While there is always an expectation to deliver increases in revenue year on year, ways of working and customers’ expectations also change. Technology and macro social and economic factors are also having a big impact. Customers are looking for personalized one-to-one relationships and are more intentional about how they spend their money, meaning sales teams have to be able to demonstrate value.

The 2020 pandemic forced many sales teams to rapidly find alternative ways of working. It took away the majority of in-person interactions, forcing organizations to quickly try and find ways to connect to customers online. Those who already had the working practices and technology had an advantage. Salespeople who built relationships in person at meetings and events needed to adopt a different approach. While the overwhelming desire in society has been to get back to in-person interactions and activities, there are some aspects of the new ways of working that people appreciate and want to continue with. For some people, working from home had benefits such as less time and money spent on commuting and more time spent with family or on leisure activities. Some people made big life changes by moving to new homes with office space and more rural locations. Equally, some organizations realized that they could conduct business without having to spend so much time and money on travel.

This enforced a global shift to working from home that proved that it was possible, although there are differences in opinion with regard to productivity. For some workers, it has meant they don’t want to go back. For sales, this means they have to be prepared to build relationships with people both in person and remotely. So, organizations have been able to do this really well, which has raised the bar further for those who are just starting their journey.

Another significant disruptor is generative artificial intelligence (AI). Following the impact of ChatGPT, we are seeing all organizations talking about how they might incorporate artificial intelligence into their ways of working to gain competitive advantage. Although this dominates conversations, most organizations are still at the early stages of understanding the potential and the implications and deciding where to incorporate it. There are questions to answer and decisions to be made to ensure that organizations receive the benefits without unintended consequences or bias.

Salesforce has announced several exciting AI features in recent months, and I am sure there will be many more. As it is early in their release, they are not widely adopted at this point. Those who are more mature in their AI journey will start to explore the benefits of these. Most organizations are still considering what these technological advancements mean for them. To capitalize on the benefits of AI, it is essential to have a volume of accurate, relevant, connected data that AI can learn from. In this book, we will not be focusing on the new AI tools as they are rapidly evolving, but we will focus on how you can implement Sales Cloud with an appropriate data model and quality data so you can connect it to other data sources and layer appropriate AI tools over the top when your organization is ready to adopt those at scale.

Next, we will explore some of the sales function-specific challenges that sales teams and leaders experience. This is not an exhaustive list but will give you an understanding of the types of challenges you might hear about.

Managing the sales pipeline

Pipeline management is the activity of managing the detailed steps in the sales process; understanding what has happened and what needs to happen next to move the deal to a close. The sales pipeline shows the status of a prospective deal at a given time. By inspecting the pipeline, a sales leader can see how many deals have been made by each salesperson and what their values are. They should also be able to see what prospect stakeholders are involved, what activities and meetings have taken place and what emails have been sent, and what the next steps are.

In addition to seeing where the pipeline is at any given time, leaders also want to know how it has changed compared to last week or last month. This allows them to take action if any negative trends are seen, such as the pipeline reducing in value or the close dates of deals being pushed out.

It is common for sales leaders to want more visibility on what is happening in the pipeline and for it to be up-to-date and accurate at any given time. Sales Cloud enables this by providing the functionality to record activities and the people involved, as well as offering a Pipeline Inspection view that gives a summary and comparison of what has changed, which we will learn about in Chapter 3 – Design and Build: The Core Sales Process. Integrations with other business tools also streamline the logging of activities, which will we look at in swsw, Common System Integrations.

Forecasting accuracy

Forecasting is the process of predicting value or the number of sales that will be achieved at a given point in time, usually by month or quarter. This number becomes a commitment to the business in terms of how much revenue will be generated, which also has an impact on the business in planning spending commitments. For example, organizations plan what they can spend on marketing or if they can hire additional people depending on the revenue forecast. Failure to achieve the revenue predicted means that cuts need to be made or plans need to be downgraded. This also had wider implications when the organization is publicly traded or when the business has been backed by investment. Forecasting is a fundamental and essential part of business planning. The accuracy of the forecast impacts the whole organization.

Sales Cloud has both specific Forecasting functionalities and Report and Dashboard functionalities for further analysis. It also enables the setup and enforcement of a consistent sales process so that data is consistently recorded by all. The forecasting functionality has features to allow leaders to view different people’s forecasts and quickly drill into the records. This allows leaders to see exactly what makes up the forecast and make manual adjustments based on their judgment so that they are confident in the forecast they commit to. We learn about Analyzing and visualizing data – Reports and Dashboards in Chapter 5.

Increasing sales productivity

All organizations welcome improvements in productivity. It would be unusual to find a commercial leader who wouldn’t want their teams to be more effective. Productivity can be increased by automating tasks such as logging data and notifying colleagues or providing them with relevant information, making it easier for team members to collaborate.

Sales Cloud offers many ways to increase productivity. Creating a single source of truth for commercial dates means Users know that they are working with and making decisions on the most up-to-date data. Stream and automate the logging of activities such as calls, emails, and meetings, automate the creation of records and notifications, and capture who is collaborating together on sales deals and in organizations to increase efficiency. We learn about setting up an appropriate data model and recording Opportunity and Account Teams in Chapter 3, Design and Build: The Core Sales Process. We review all the ways you can create a great user experience, including automation, in Chapter 5, Design and Build: Sales User Productivity.

Achieving sales and marketing alignment

Another common challenge that so many organizations face is creating alignment between sales and marketing. This refers to the role that marketing has in generating sales prospects, what determines that they have shown enough interest to a salesperson to take over, and how that handover is carried out.

Sales Cloud can assist with this as the sales prospects, Leads, resulting sales deals, and Opportunities can be tracked in one system. This means that it is possible to track a prospect all the way through its lifecycle. Ownership can be tracked and changed to capture the handover, as well as rules and guidance that support the way of working to successfully transition a prospect. With this reporting functionality, managers can assess the performance of the process. We learn about lead generation in Chapter 4, Design and Build: The Lead Generation Process.

Selling to buying groups

The buying group is the group of people who influence whether an organization makes a purchase. Particularly in a business-to-business setting or when there’s a purchase of a significant value, there can be a number of people involved in assessing the suitability or approving a purchase. For this reason, salespeople have to be able to successfully engage with multiple people.

Sales Cloud provides the functionality to be able to capture every person a salesperson interacts with and specify the role they have in the buying unit. Having this documented makes it easier to see the overall picture, create a plan, and gain the support of others. We learn about Contacts and Opportunity Contact Roles in Chapter 3 – Design and Build: The Core Sales Process.

Enabling sales teams

Enabling sales teams with the knowledge, tools, and materials they need to service prospects and achieve their targets is another challenge organizations look to solve. Sales Cloud with a level of customization for specific needs will provide the tooling. In Chapter 2, Defining the Approach, we learn about the importance of the role that Change Management has in ensuring Users are prepared to use Sales Cloud. In Chapter 5 – Design and Build: Sales User Productivity, we learn about functionalities such as Sales Path and In-App Guidance and provide users with guidance on what they need to do right when they need to do it.

The examples given here are just a few of the examples of how Sales Cloud provides solutions for common sales challenges. In the next section, we will explore why it is important that you understand how your Sales Cloud implementation aligns with and enables your company strategy and values.

Alignment with company strategy and values

In this section, we will explore why it is important to not only focus on the details of your Sales Cloud implementation but also to ensure that your delivery and solution align with your company strategy, goals, and values. Ultimately, you want your Salesforce strategy to align with your company strategy; the former should enable the latter. This sounds quite obvious, but when the implementation team gets into the details, it can be easy for the focus to deviate. In some cases, it is also possible that the Sales Cloud implementation team doesn’t have visibility of how what they’re building contributes to delivering the company strategy. This can easily happen if the implementation is being delivered by an external supplier. When your Salesforce strategy aligns with your organization’s strategy, you can expect that Sales Cloud will help you achieve your goals sooner and you will be able to demonstrate how it is doing that.

The first step in developing alignment is to understand your company’s strategies, goals, and values. For example, your organization might have a goal of reducing operational costs or it might have transparency or collaboration as a value. Once these are understood, the next step is to determine how the Sales Cloud implementation supports these. For example, you might be looking to reduce the time, the number of steps, or the number of clicks required to complete a process to gain operational efficiency, you might implement an open data-sharing model to ensure transparency across the organization, or you might deliver collaboration functionalities in early releases to show commitment to them.

It is highly likely that the benefits expected by the Sales Cloud implementation are aligned with business goals, or else the purchase would not have been approved in the first place. During the implementation, it is essential not to lose sight of what we promised, as this is how success will be judged.

It is worth remembering that companies are made up of people, and companies only achieve their goals when people work together. While diversity of thought can be a strategic advantage, it is also essential that people pull in the same direction to achieve company goals.

Achieving business alignment

To achieve business alignment internally, Salesforce uses a process called V2MOM, which stands for Vision, Value, Methods, Obstacles, and Measures. Everyone in the organization completes a V2MOM, which aligns so that every person understands how their actions contribute to the overall goal. Salesforce provides information on why and how to create a V2MOM on their public learning platform, Trailhead. You can find links to this information in the Further reading section.

To achieve a successful implementation, everyone on the project, and the stakeholders, should understand what the implementation is trying to achieve and how their role contributes.

There are a number of steps that can be taken to help achieve this: communicate the goals of the implementation regularly to all stakeholders, bring stakeholders on the journey by including them in defining requirements and requesting feedback, and train and support users so they both understand the value and can perform the tasks asked of them. We explore how you can do these in subsequent chapters in this book, starting in Chapter 2 – Defining the Approach.

To ensure the focus throughout an implementation is on the overall goals, it is common to have regular steering committee meetings to keep track of progress, make decisions, connect to the business, access additional budget, and get commitment from other areas of the business. Depending on the scale of the implementation, these meetings happen weekly or monthly and include senior members of the organization, typically the executive sponsor and senior members of the implementation team.

These meetings ensure that any issues or decisions can be identified early and appropriate actions can be taken. One of the benefits of having a clear vision is that it makes prioritization easier. It is worth noting that some stakeholders may be personally invested in the success of the implementation, as it either has an impact on their role or their reputation.

For example, if your organization prides itself on transparency, then you will probably find your data model will be quite open, allowing people to view most records. If your client confidentiality is core to your business, you are likely to have a private model with restrictions on who can see what data. If collaboration is important, the functionality to enable it must be delivered in early releases to show commitment to it.

Salesforce Strategy Designer Certification

Salesforce understands that the success of its solutions is dependent on how they contribute to an organization’s overall success. Salesforce provides services to clients to help them achieve alignment using strategy design tools and techniques. To help organizations achieve this, they have developed a curriculum and certification to teach and validate an understanding of strategy design. This certification is called Salesforce Strategy Designer. You can find details of the certification on Trailhead along with resources to learn about this topic. There are links to these resources in the Further reading session.

In the next section, we explore the concept of adoption and its role in a successful Sales Cloud implementation.

The importance of adoption

In this section, we explore what we mean by adoption and why it is important for the success of your Sales Cloud implementation. First, let’s explore what we mean by adoption.

What is adoption?

In the context of a business application, adoption is a measure of whether Users are logging in and using a system, such as Sales Cloud. There are a number of metrics to measure this, the simplest being the percentage of people who have access and are logging in on a regular basis, (i.e., daily, weekly, or monthly). Another approach is to measure activities in the system, for example, record creation or processes completed. In a sales context, this might be the number of companies and people entered (Accounts and Contacts) or calls, meetings, and emails logged (Events and Tasks). These can be tracked as the overall totals to show the overall usage of the system; however, these can also be used as a measure of individual adoption and performance. It can be common to measure the number of meetings booked as a measure of individual performance and future sales performance. The trade on this type of metric can be used to determine how well the system is being adopted, how easy it is for people to perform the tasks asked, and if the implementation of the system is realizing the benefits promised.

It is at the organization’s discretion which measures it uses. The measures and the focus that is put on these will determine Users’ behaviors. A mix of these measures can be used to determine if the system is a living breathing asset to the organization that people want to use or if it is simply ornamental.

In addition to usage, you can also consider adoption as the proportion of the capability you are using. Sales Cloud has a lot of functionalities, which increase with every release. Increasing the functionalities used is another way to derive additional value.

To get the maximum value, consider Salesforce as an additional member of the team. As you would with any team member, regularly review its performance to see if it can take on additional responsibilities and deliver more value. A natural interval to review performance would be helpful but around the time of the new functionality releases. This is a really good time to review what is being released to see if there is a new update that addresses requested system improvements or allows a new process and Users to be brought onto the platform. Salesforce provides a lot of content about its releases in multiple formats. This included Release Notes, Release Readiness webinars, and a Release Readiness Collaboration Group on Trailhead. You can find links to these resources in the Further reading section.

Salesforce releases

Salesforce releases functionalities three times per year. They are the winter, spring, and summer releases, and they happen in September, February, and June, respectively. There is no Fall release. Releases are rolled out over a weekend by Salesforce, so you do not need to be involved or schedule the release. It is worth noting that this happens in the maintenance window that Salesforce specifies. You can’t influence or delay these. Where changes are carried out that might have an impact on your setup, Salesforce will communicate these in advance. You can review changes of this type in Setup > Release Updates. For updates that might have an impact, it is typical for Salesforce to make these available for you to turn on when you choose before mandating the update. The month before each release, Salesforce upgrades sandboxes to allow you to test that you will not see any impact and also test any new functionalities so you can use them in your Production Org as soon as they become available. It is important to know when the release window is and factor that into when you release your functionality so one doesn’t impact the other. We explore planning your deployment in Chapter 10, Deployment Planning.

Now that we understand what adoption is, we will learn why it is important.

Why is adoption important for Sales Cloud success?

Adoption is important because it takes every member of the sales team to deliver sales objectives and targets. The benefits that systems such as Sales Cloud offer can only be realized if they are used consistently by all those who deliver the processes they are designed to enable.

If a small group, or even just one person, doesn’t see the value in using it, doesn’t know how to use it, or just doesn’t want to use it, it means that for some, the data or activities are not complete. Worse, they might revert to a spreadsheet or other system to perform their tasks, sometimes referred to as a shadow system. This means a system such as Sales Cloud isn’t truly the source of truth for a type of data. Users might start to question the information the system holds and decide they would prefer to work in an alternative way of their choosing too.

To get the full benefits from a centralized system, such as a complete and accurate view of customers, an improved customer experience, greater efficiency, and greater collaboration, the data needs to be complete and accurate, and everyone has to be engaged and play their part.

As we learned in the section Alignment with company strategy and values, the success of your implementation and Sales Cloud overall depends on how well what you deliver aligns with what and how a company plans to achieve its goals.

In the next section, we learn what gets in the way of adoption and what you can do to prevent these things from happening.

Barriers to adoption

We have established that adoption is an essential component in achieving return on investment (ROI). However, in real-world implementation, there are a number of situations that can arise that create barriers to adoption. The following are some scenarios to watch out for and suggestions on how to mitigate them:

Not engaging with users during the design and build: This means that Users’ voices and needs are not heard during the time they can influence the build. This introduces the risk that the system may not deliver what Users need. It also means that Users feel no attachment or ownership of the system and may decide it is not for them. To avoid this, have User representation present in requirement-gathering sessions and sessions for going over what has been built so feedback can be incorporated.Not enough supporting and training users: This means Users are not provided with enough of the training they need to understand what is expected of them and how to do it. To avoid this, engage with your training team if you have one and develop a plan for training that is appropriate for your users. We explore the role and options for training in Chapters 2and 8.Leadership not engaged with the system: This means that Users are not seeing their leaders also adopt the system, and they may possibly request that information be provided outside of Sales Cloud. To avoid this, ensure that senior leaders lead by example. Examples include running regular sales and pipeline meetings with Sales Cloud on the screen, asking deal owners to talk about the next steps and check that information is up to date, and adopting the philosophy “If it isn’t in Salesforce it doesn’t exist”.Not measuring Adoption: This means that the level of adoption is not known, so high adoption is not being celebrated and low adoption is not being addressed. To avoid this, track some adoption metrics such as those that we stated in What is adoption. If lower levels of adoption are observed, then the root causes can be identified by talking to users and understanding their issues or barriers; and then creating a plan to address them. That might include additional training or system changes.Not having an ongoing maintenance and improvement plan: This means that there is no one to listen to Users’ issues or change the system as processes evolve and new ways of working come about. It also means new functionality is not being used to ensure RIO year on year. To avoid this, someone should be identified to own and administer Sales Cloud. As a minimum, they or your IT teams should support Users with their day-to-day issues, including troubleshooting login problems and reporting issues. They should capture User requests, review the new functionalities in each release, and make recommendations to leaders when updates would be beneficial.

These barriers usually arise because the value of the activities and the impact of not doing them are not appreciated. The scenarios explored here are not an exhaustive list, but they do occur relatively frequently. We don’t cover day-to-day administration and maintenance in this book, but it is important to understand that the implementation is the start of the journey.

In the next section, we consider how your individual approach to an implementation can have a positive impact on the outcome.

What is your approach?

As the leader or a member of the implementation team, you can influence how successful it is; no matter what your role, you can make a real impact. It is important to remember that all Sales Cloud implementations are about providing a system that helps people serve the needs of other people. How you approach your role in the implementation will influence the outcome. The following are some suggestions on approaches you can adopt that will have a positive impact.

Collaboration: Embrace and encourage collaboration with all stakeholders, as encouraging diverse points of view results in a solution that serves a wider audience. It is important to bring Users on the journey, and the later important information is discovered, the more complicated and expensive it is to incorporate.Empathy: Put yourself in the position of the stakeholders you are serving. Most people come to work to do a good job, so when they share their challenges, it is important to listen and try to find solutions, as this is more likely to result in a solution that internal stakeholders will use. It also builds cooperation and trust.Build trust: Build trust with your internal stakeholders by being sure to do what you say you are going to do, listen and understand their requirements, and then play back the functionalities that deliver them. Building trust from the start provides a strong foundation, which is beneficial if more difficult conversations or decisions are necessary later in the implementation.Become an internal salesperson: Part of your role will be to persuade, and effectively sell, the functionality you are building to business stakeholders. You can learn from the information that sales stakeholders are providing about selling and apply it when selling the Sales Cloud implementation to them. For example, this could be the format they use to communicate, the language they use, and how they handle objections.

In Chapter 2 – Defining the Approach, we will learn how you define the approach to your implementation, which includes aspects such as selecting a development methodology and exploring Change Management and training. Many of the topics in that chapter expand on what we have learned in this one.

In this final section, we will explore another essential component: scope.

Defining the scope of your implementation

In this section, we will consider what we mean by scope, why it is important to clearly define at the very beginning of your Sales Cloud implementation project, and the importance of managing this throughout the life of the project. Let’s start by understanding what we mean by scope.

What is scope?

The scope of work defines what is included and, ideally, you would also state what isn’t. Defining the scope of work is a very important step in defining a piece of work, like a project, that will be carried out. Having a documented scope makes it easier for those working on the project to understand what they should and should be working on, it sets boundaries. This helps with overall alignment with the company goals which we talked about in the Aligning company strategy and values section.

It is common to get key stakeholders to sign off. In Chapter 7, Getting Sign-off, we look at getting formal sign-off as a method of confirming that stakeholders understand and agree to what is and isn’t in scope. Sign-off is also involved for scope changes, in the form of change requests.

Defining the scope

Defining the scope of your Sales Cloud implementation project is an essential first step. This typically happens during the Sales Cloud purchasing process or directly after the decision to purchase Sales Cloud. This early definition means allowing for the hopes and aspirations of the sales process to be captured.

The scope will typically include the business functions business processes, and the teams. For example, sales and marketing, the sales and lead generation process, and US and European sales teams. It matters less how it is written, and more that the stakeholders affected understand what it means. If your organization has a standardized way of defining project scopes you should follow that format. Wherever possible you should aim to avoid ambiguity or areas for interpretation. Although not always included it can be very valuable to include what isn’t going to be included. This might include data from specific systems, automating complex processes that are carried out infrequently, or certain groups of Users. Explicitly stating these means that anyone who wasn’t expecting these exclusions can raise their concerns earlier so the reasoning can be explained or they can be brought into scope.

Now we will learn about the role of managing scope in delivering a successful implementation.

Managing scope

Throughout the duration of the implementation, it is important to manage the scope of the work. During the life of an implementation, things change; for example, business conditions or team members change. Also, Stakeholders’ expectations can easily expand to features, functions, and capabilities that are not in the original plan. This often happens as people become more familiar with Sales Cloud capabilities and imagine how they can help them. It is also common for those working on the implementation to want to add extras they think will help Users and improve the end solution, even though they are outside the gathered requirements.

Deviating from the original scope is known as scope creep. This leads to increases in costs, as these are spent on delivery functionalities but not on what was agreed or what the business expected.

In practice, managing scope means listening to the requests that come in from stakeholders, but before agreeing to deliver them, comparing them to the original scope to ensure actioning them is an appropriate use of resources. Where requirements are in scope, they can be actioned. Where they aren’t, or where it is unclear, it should be communicated to the requester that they might not be in scope but will be captured and assessed. The requests and requirements should be logged in a backlog and brought to the attention of an individual or team of business stakeholders who can assess them in terms of business importance. This assessment might be carried out by a steering committee, which we introduced in the Alignment with company strategy and values section, or a Product Owner, who we will describe in more detail in the next chapter, Chapter 2, Defining the Approach. Where it is agreed that a change should happen, the scope should be changed, and the change should be signed off by the relevant stakeholders. If there are any external suppliers involved, this sort of change may require a contractual change, even if there is not an increase in effort or cost.

In summary, defining and managing the scope of your Sales Cloud implementation is an essential part of securing success. Even if you are not responsible for the overall scope of the implementation, you can still play an important part in ensuring that what is delivered is within the agreed scope.

Summary

At the beginning of this chapter, we started by exploring how the expectations of sales have changed, some of the common challenges sales leaders and teams face, and how Sales Cloud can help solve these. We moved on to learn about the importance of aligning your Salesforce strategy, goals, and values with your company’s and how failure to do this can prevent you from being able to demonstrate overall implementation success.

We went on to define what is meant by adoption when it comes to business applications and how Users’ willingness to use the system determines if they succeed or fail. We also explored some of the common barriers to adoption and how to address them.

Finally, we learned about scope and the importance of clearly defining this at the beginning of an implementation and then managing it throughout to ensure your implementation doesn’t deviate too far from the original expectation. We learned that scope creep can be a reason why implementations run over time and budget expectations and result in you not delivering the original benefits promised.

In the next chapter, we will learn about the decisions you need to make and define how you approach your implementation. This includes your implementation delivery methodology, what environments you use, how you test what you’ve built, and how you prepare your Users to adopt the system.

Further reading

Trailhead:

What is Trailhead?:

https://www.salesforce.com/blog/what-is-trailhead/

V2MOM:

Organizational Alignment (V2MOM):

https://trailhead.salesforce.com/content/learn/modules/manage_the_sfdc_organizational_alignment_v2mom

Salesforce Strategy Designer:

Trailhead: Salesforce Strategy Designer: About the exam:

https://trailhead.salesforce.com/en/credentials/strategydesigner

Adoption:

Adoption Metrics – Trailhead:

https://trailhead.salesforce.com/content/learn/modules/user-adoption-metrics/measure-salesforce-usage

Preparing for a Salesforce Release:

Release Notes:

https://help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?id=release-notes.salesforce_release_notes.htm&language=en_US&release=248&type=5

Release Readiness webinars:

https://www.salesforce.com/plus/experience/release_readiness_live

Release Readiness Collaboration Group on Trailhead:

https://trailhead.salesforce.com/trailblazer-community/groups/0F9300000001okuCAA?tab=discussion&sort=LAST_MODIFIED_DATE_DESC#

Alignment with Company Strategy:

Trailhead: Alignment as a strategic craft:

https://trailhead.salesforce.com/content/learn/modules/alignment-as-a-strategic-craft

2

Defining the Approach

Sales Cloud and the Salesforce Customer 360 platform have a lot of capabilities and can seem quite complex. It can be daunting to work out how to approach the customizations you need to implement, from ideation through to successful deployment to the end users. Some changes to the platform can also be very simple, so it is easy to dive right in and only realize the consequences later.

In this chapter, we’ll start by learning about Salesforce’s application life cycle management (ALM) to give you a framework you can use to think about the stages of your implementation. With this understanding, we’ll explore the topics you need to understand and make decisions about at the start of your implementation before any building work is carried out. We’ll look at the characteristics of two commonly used development methodologies, Agile and Waterfall, and how these are applied in practice. We’ll also learn about the environments Salesforce provides to develop and test changes and Sandboxes, as well as when to use them.

By the end of this chapter, you will understand the key areas that you need to be aware of as you approach Sales Cloud implementation. You will understand the native tools that Salesforce provides to develop your solution, as well as how you can approach your testing and training to ensure quality and adoption. We’ll cover the latter two in greater detail in later chapters.

In this chapter, we’re going to cover the following main topics:

Salesforce ALMSalesforce environment strategy and DevOps toolsDeveloping a testing approachChange management and training

Supporting tools and information

To complete this chapter, you’ll need to have knowledge of the development methodology and the tools that are used to support it. You must also know what your Salesforce edition is and how to use Sandboxes.

Salesforce ALM

ALM describes how the life cycle of a business application such as Sales Cloud is managed – that is, how an idea or requirement gets defined, built, tested, and delivered. It is a combination of people, processes, and tooling. Having a structured approach to delivering your Sales Cloud solution provides predictability and repeatability in a way that enables teams to work together to deliver appropriate high-quality solutions. The following diagram shows the ALM. This diagram is based on the Salesforce ALM process document on Trailhead but we have expanded it beyond deploying the solution:

Figure 2.1 – The ALM process

Figure 2.1 shows the key stages of the life cycle at a high level. Within each stage, there are several other well-understood activities and actions. Although testing is listed as a separate stage in the preceding diagram, we will discuss why it can be beneficial to incorporate testing into the build stage in the Developing a testing approach section.

The following table shows what activities relate to which stage and who is typically responsible for them. Although the stages of the ALM are in chronological order, the foundational activities that support them often begin while earlier stages are in progress. An example is change management. Although the purpose of this is to secure adoption, which is the fifth stage, actions related to change management start from the planning stage and run in parallel to the other stages. This is because people need time and information to accept a change. So, if it was only started when everything else was finished, it would add notable and unnecessary time to an implementation:

Plan

Develop

Activity

Typical Owner

Activity

Typical Owner

High Level Requirement Gathering

Functional Lead/ Business Owner

Detailed Requirement Gathering

Functional and Technical Lead

Scope

Project Lead/ Business Owner

Architecture Design

Technical Lead

Development Methodology

Technical Lead

Solution Design

Functional Lead

Environment Strategy

Technical Lead

Build

Configurators/Developers

Testing Approach

Technical Lead