Best Practices: Your Yearly Salesforce Org Check-Up

It’s one year after implementation. Your new-account trainings have wound down, your users are adopting, and most of the pre-implementation pain-points are just fading memories. But as seasonal releases unveil new features, users request more fields, more functionality, and turnover chips away at the original team — you and your org can find yourself at a crossroads. Without attention, your org runs the risk of going “legacy” — not because its unsupported or outdated, but because it just “seems like too much of a headache to try to get back in front of it”.

That’s where regular check-ups can help! Like your annual doctor’s visit (is this still a thing?), or your annual professional review — checking in, taking stock, and coming up with a plan for the next 12 months is an important part of maintaining your edge.

And just like Janet down the hall, your Salesforce org is an important part of your team. Check-ins, maintenance, and performance reviews keep it running smoothly and that keeps your team running smoothly. This is something most customers know, but a lot of people get hung up on the “how”.

In today’s post we’ll run through a typical annual org checkup, and how you can use what you find to improve your ROI, streamline your org, and keep your team happy. Let’s get to it!

Getting Input:

First up is deciding how you’ll conduct your review. The insight of your users is invaluable — they’re in the system daily, they know their use-cases like the backs of their hands, and they’re painfully aware of every bottleneck, duplicated effort, and pain point.

When it comes to gathering your braintrust, you’ve got a few options — which works best for you will likely come down to the size of your user-base, your company’s preferred workflow, and your personal preference.

Surveys

First, and probably simplest, is surveys. If you already have Salesforce Surveys as part of your org (it’s available a la carte and included with Health and Financial Services Clouds), then whipping up a check-up survey will be a snap! (And your results will already be in Salesforce where you can track, report, and dive into the data — as well as give everyone visibility into the upkeep process and the roadmap for your future improvements — that’s pretty cool too).

If you don’t have Salesforce Surveys — you can whip up a quick (and free) “ask-around” with Google Surveys (our pre-SF fave), Survey Monkey, or your personal survey of choice. Just make sure you pick something that’s simple, straight-forward, and to the point. Remember, your survey’s only as effective as your results, so err on the side of brevity, readability, and ease-of-use.

Meetings

If you’ve got a small enough team, a big enough conference room, or all the stakeholders in town for the holiday party — having a meeting is also a great way to get everyone’s insight.

Meeting as a team allows for that buildable brainstorming where one person’s note sparks ideas, or confirmations, or qualifications in others. Like a self-moderating survey of sorts that distills the important info down to its essence. The only thing you have to watch out for is that you don’t let the meeting get swept away by its own momentum and turn from constructive assessment to complaint-fest (but you know who to watch out for on your team).

Hybrid

The third option is a blend of the first two and has the potential to deliver the best of both worlds. A hybrid check-up like this opens with a survey, ideally super-brief, and uses those responses to organize and schedule break-out meetings with the groups that share common issues, concerns, or ideas for improvement.

For this to work you’ll really want the survey to be as simple as possible to avoid forcing people to repeat info, ideas, etc… in the follow-up meetings. Also, the fewer questions your survey has, the more likely each respondent is to commit to a thoughtful response. For many clients then, this survey will simply be one question, “What, in Salesforce, is preventing you from accomplishing more of your goals/KPIs/etc…?”

If your users all share a role, it’s easy to make that question more specific (…closing more deals?, increasing your CSAT results?, qualifying more leads?, etc…). If you have a few user-groups either keep it vague as above, or just whip off a survey unique to each group. Keeping it super short makes that easy.

And once you’ve got your results, your meetings basically organize themselves. Small groups, selected by their shared issues will make it easy to hold meetings that don’t descend into gripe-fests and do give you the ability to roadmap solutions that will alleviate their pains. Making these follow-up meetings about improvements keeps them positive and sparks more engaged participation from attendees who start to think about their quality-of-life in the “post-op” org.

Whichever method you choose, the details you’re looking for are the same. Your annual check-up can basically be broken down to four core questions and, whether you opt for a survey, sit-down, or the hybrid, these are the things you need to know before you can make your diagnosis and start planning your improvements.

What You Need to Know:

What’s Working?

What do your users love? Finding out what’s making their lives easier, their days more effective, and their jobs more do-able will give you helpful insight into what kind of improvements to make moving forward. It’ll also let you know exactly which pieces of the workflow are off-limits. Knowing which pieces your users consider essential helps you build some initial project boundaries, keep scope manageable, and gives you a guide to follow when cleaning up the org to make your pain points work more like ‘favorite-feature-x’.

The “What’s Working” query also typically yields some ground-floor ROI data that’s useful for echo-ing up the chain to show off Salesforce’s quantifiable results and help you justify any additional licenses, features, or development you decide to pursue.

What’s Not?

What are the bottle-necks, pain points, or just-plain-abandoned fields, workflows, etc…? Minimizing superfluous objects, records, and fields can make adoption easier, processes faster, and users happier. Identifying areas where your company’s internal processes are the limiting factor can help you plan to develop automation to accelerate the necessary steps. And hearing straight from the users what their biggest issues are ensures they’ll be on board when you roll out a plan to alleviate those complaints.

Again, the goal here isn’t to descend into negativity but simply to find the real, actionable issues your users have to work around every day so you can get in there and remove the roadblocks.

What’s Missing?

You’ll want to leave some room on the survey or meeting agenda for this one — these answers will give you the best insight on how your users imagine their dream system. Sure, some of the responses here will be a bit too ambitious, but you’ll also be surprised how many are simple fixes (and often ones that your users can do on their own!).

Re-arranging fields, automating records to auto-update on an entry somewhere else, reports people wish they had on their dashboards, etc… You’ll probably field requests for integrations, new functionality and, with the info you picked up in questions 1 and 2, it’s easy to determine which recommendations will yield the most immediate improvements and be able to plan your roadmap accordingly.

What’s Changed?

The last bit of info you’ll want to hear from your users is what’s changed. It can be impossible to keep track of every tweak, update, and customization, especially when you’ve got empowered users making their own improvements and regular releases rolling out new functionality. Hearing how things have changed (for better or worse) will give you visibility into how your org’s functionality has changed in the eyes of your users over time. It makes it easier to identify important functionality that’s been deprecated, hidden, or forgotten and it also helps you see what changes have had positive effects, so you can use those same principles in your development.

Conclusion

And that’s it! With that info you’ll now have insight into where your users are thriving, where they’re being held back, and a great jumping off-point for planning the next 12 months of your org’s life.

In an upcoming post we’ll run through planning your dev/improvement roadmap and, if you need a hand getting your org back into fighting form, give us a call! We specialize in helping clients get their orgs back on track and finding that new ROI in year 2, 3, and beyond!

Until then, happy working — and we’ll see you in the cloud.