A Salesforce Health Check is often recommended for businesses that have been using Salesforce for a while but find it no longer as effective or aligned with their evolving needs. The system may no longer match the current business processes, or perhaps the organisation has outgrown the functionality that was set up initially.
Whether a business has pinpointed specific issues or is simply aware that things are not running as smoothly as they should, the true value of a Salesforce Health Check lies in revealing what you may not know. As the saying goes, “It’s impossible to know what you don’t know,” and this is where a Salesforce consultant can offer significant insight.
Adapting Salesforce to a Growing Business
As businesses grow, their requirements change, and Salesforce must evolve accordingly. During an initial deployment, the focus is often on keeping costs low and avoiding unnecessary functionality. However, what may have been deemed unnecessary at first can become essential as the business scales. A Salesforce Health Check ensures that your system keeps pace with your business growth.
For example, many organisations start with simple lead and opportunity processes, but as their customer base grows and the sales team expands, a more structured and efficient process may become necessary. A Health Check identifies areas where advanced tools, such as automated workflows and lead scoring, can streamline sales activities and boost efficiency.
Restoring Confidence in Salesforce
When Salesforce stops meeting the business’s needs, users may lose trust in the system. As a result, they often stop updating data, which diminishes Salesforce’s value as a business resource. A Health Check can help restore user confidence by realigning the system with current requirements and introducing time-saving automation features that make it easier for teams to stay engaged with the platform.
For instance, automating the logging of emails, creating renewal opportunities, or generating proposals not only saves time but also ensures more consistent use of the system, which leads to higher-quality data.
Forecasting: A Common Issue
One of the most frequent challenges uncovered during a Salesforce Health Check is the inefficiency of revenue forecasting. Many businesses start with basic opportunity tracking, but as they mature, they set revenue targets and need to monitor performance against those goals. Instead of using Salesforce’s native forecasting tools, some companies export data into spreadsheets for manual manipulation, which is time-consuming and produces instantly outdated information.
A Health Check can help businesses transition to Salesforce’s forecasting capabilities, offering significant benefits. These include more accurate reporting, improved data housekeeping, and enhanced visibility of sales performance. The more reliable the data, the more value users will attribute to Salesforce, boosting its overall effectiveness.
Ensuring Full Use of Salesforce Features
Maximising the use of Salesforce’s built-in features is key to its success. A Health Check evaluates whether your organisation is taking full advantage of tools such as Einstein Activity Capture, to automatically log emails and events, reducing the manual input required from your team and providing a more complete view of customer interactions.
Additionally, businesses may not be using features like web-to-lead forms, which streamline the process of importing leads from a website into Salesforce. A Health Check ensures that your Salesforce instance is optimised for efficiency and that all useful features are being fully utilised.
Aligning Salesforce with Business Processes
Another common issue is the misalignment of Salesforce objects with business processes. Some organisations use Salesforce objects, such as leads or opportunities, for purposes they weren’t designed for—such as tracking project statuses. This makes it difficult to measure key performance indicators (KPIs) specific to sales activities.
A Salesforce Health Check helps realign the use of objects like leads and opportunities with the roles of the sales team, ensuring the system supports clear, measurable KPIs and avoids operational clutter.
Enhancing Reporting and Dashboards
Enhancing Reporting and Dashboards
Effective reporting is one of the key advantages of Salesforce, but without proper setup, it can also be a source of frustration. During a Health Check, the focus is often on enhancing dashboards and reports to ensure they deliver meaningful insights without overwhelming users. A few well-designed reports can improve user adoption, making Salesforce more valuable as a tool for business intelligence and decision-making.
A crucial part of any Salesforce Health Check is ensuring that users are fully engaged with the platform and understand how to use it effectively. Sometimes, specific individuals or teams may not be utilising Salesforce to its full potential, either due to a lack of training or unclear expectations. A Health Check can include recommendations for additional training or tailored support to help users get the most out of the system.
Integrating Third-Party Tools
Integrating Third-Party Tools
Salesforce’s capabilities can be greatly enhanced by integrating third-party tools, and a Health Check can identify where this would be beneficial. Common integrations include document generation tools, telephony solutions, and data backup services, all of which create a more robust and efficient Salesforce environment.
Managing Large Volumes of Leads
Managing Large Volumes of Leads
For organisations experiencing a high volume of leads, managing them effectively can become challenging. A Salesforce Health Check might recommend tools like Sales Engagement, which helps businesses manage leads based on a structured cadence and track interactions more efficiently. Additionally, integrating marketing solutions like Marketing Cloud can automate email journeys and track engagement with marketing content, improving lead management.
Conclusion
Conclusion
A Salesforce Health Check is an invaluable process for ensuring that your Salesforce instance continues to support your business as it evolves. Whether it’s aligning the system with your current processes, optimising efficiency through automation, or improving forecasting and reporting, a Health Check ensures you’re making the most of Salesforce’s capabilities. By maintaining a well-configured, secure, and efficient Salesforce environment, you can improve user adoption, drive business growth, and maximise your return on investment.
Forecasts can be based on revenue or quantity measures and can support team selling/splits. There are additional options to group by sales territories and products. This means the business can have visibility of banked sales and pipeline across product lines, territories (either geographical, vertical-based or other types of territories) and, as we will explore below, across revenue-scheduled models like subscription revenue.
