Implementation Best Practices eBook

By: Tal Frankfurt, Founder and CEO of Cloud for Good

The purpose of this eBook is to share lessons learned and recommendations for best practices as you move forward with your implementation. These recommendations are globally applicable recommendations for the implementation of any new technology tool.

The first question any time that we hear phrases like “Best in Class,” “Best of Breed,” or “Best Practices” is: who decided the best? What we have learned in our many years of CRM consulting is that best is relative and often dependent upon experience, trials and, most often, failures. We believe that one has to go through a challenging if not difficult experience at least once in order to learn how to do it better the next time.

The eBook covers the following topics:

Executive Sponsorship:

The most critical variable for the success of a new implementation is executive sponsorship. Whether the new implementation is a tool or a process, successful adoption is greatly influenced by whether or not the end users perceive importance, value, and visibility of the initiative by the executive team.

Business Processes:

Your technology should never define or drive your business processes; rather, a tool should facilitate, support and automate your business processes.

Data:

Data is one of the most critical aspects of any implementation and must be considered, not only for the initial migration, but also for ongoing integrations and data entry. Nothing sinks a new implementation faster than bad data. Users will quickly lose faith in the tool as well as those leading the implementation effort if incomplete, incorrect, or irrelevant data is present.

Usability/Scalability:

Usability considerations include the flow of data on a single page, as well as the flow of data from one page to another, the ease of search, navigation, identification of critical data on a page, visual alerts, and minimization of clicking and scrolling.

Scalability is, in our opinion, even more critical. When you are making usability decisions, make certain to also think about scalability; is the solution you have developed to address a usability issue going to be sustainable as the number of users and the complexity in your organization grows and evolves?

Automation:

Your CRM should work for you and not vice-versa. Leverage approval processes, workflows, formula fields, triggers, and more to operate faster and smarter.

Analytics:

Just as with our data considerations noted above, we also want to ensure that the analytics we implement are accurate, clear, concise, relevant, and purposeful. Further you want to make certain that the analytics are easy to access, easy to interpret, and easy to collaborate on within the organization so that teams can work together to address found issues or celebrate successes.

This eBook highlights best practice recommendations for implementation including considerations for executive sponsorship, business processes, data, automation, usability/scalability, and analytics based on our and our customers’ success stories and lessons learned.

Download the Ebook

About the Author
Tal Frankfurt is Founder and CEO of Cloud for Good, a certified B Corporation and an Inc.500 company, that works with organizations to create and implement strategic Salesforce solutions. While working as a spokesperson and director of resource development for a nonprofit organization, Tal was looking for tools to better manage his constituents (donors, volunteers, the media etc.). He heard about The Salesforce.org and this started a snowball effect. The rest, as they say, is history. He founded and led a Salesforce Nonprofit User Group and was exposed to the growing need for many nonprofits to integrate technology tools such as Salesforce to achieve their mission. Subsequently, Tal founded Cloud for Good, a consulting firm that works primarily with nonprofit organizations and educational institutions.

​​Tal ​was chosen in 2010 to be one of the first Salesforce MVP Program members and has maintained that status to date. Learn more about Cloud for Good.