No two Salesforce implementations are the same. Each of our clients has unique processes and requirements and it's our job as Salesforce consultants in Dubai to design and built CRM platforms that reflect those bespoke requirements. The first step in working with Tenacre is to define the 'Scope of Work' (SOW) for the Salesforce project.

This process can be difficult for many of our clients, so we've written this article to provide assistance. Remember that your Tenacre consultant will walk you through each of these steps, you won't have to undertake any of these activities by yourself.

'Workshop' the requirements

For many projects (such as Sharp Electronics or Fagerhult Lighting), your Tenacre consultant will host you and your team at our office in Dubai Marina for a requirements gathering workshop. The purpose of this workshop is to define the high-level requirements of the project. Your consultant will lead the workshop and challenge your team on what processes are to be included in the project and to categorise them as must have / nice to have / irrelevant. 

The output from these workshops is a Systems Design Document, a detailed system design plan that Tenacre will use to produce a proposal and project plan for the entire implementation. The Tenacre consultant that will lead this project will be an experienced workshop facilitator. 

Who owns the project? 

It's important to define where the Salesforce project 'stops'. By this we mean should the CRM be exclusively for the sales team, or should you include the marketing team also so that they can link up their landing pages and Google Adwords campaigns into the CRM? You could also involve the finance or operations team if that was required. There's really no limit to how deep you want Salesforce to operate in your business, but it is vital that you can define these limits so that Tenacre can produce a proposal for a specific implementation. 

Many of our clients have started with an initial Salesforce implementation that is focused on sales management, but over time they have hired Tenacre to add additional features or upgrades. Creating a 'roadmap' for additional projects is a very good way of controlling scope, budgeting and making sure that the initial project delivers the value that was expected before you move onto the second or third phase. 

Define your 'Standard Operating Procedures'

With many companies, there isn't a written sales process that is universally followed by the sales team. Good processes have logical steps, yet over time these processes get bypassed by the sales team so that they can cut corners. The challenge with this scenario as you get ready to implement Salesforce is that these steps must be defined so that our developers can automate them into the CRM. 

Before you begin the Salesforce project, spend some time to create basic written SOP's. Tenacre will help you with this during the 'requirements' workshop, but it's a good idea to have some preparation work done prior to the workshop.

What reports are required? 

One of the obvious benefits of a new CRM is the ability to produce detailed reports and dashboards.

One way of identifying the project requirements is to list off the detailed reports that you expect to see in the system once it's been completed. Your Tenacre consultant will be able to use these reporting requirements to make sure that the data specified in the reports are actually considered in the design of the CRM (data fields). 

Do you want to restrict access to the CRM for some users? 

Salesforce has world-class security features, and many companies ask Tenacre to design a custom security policy that prevents your data from being unnecessarily exposed to employees that do not need to see those records. 

As a starting point, try to define some simple groups of Salesforce users that require differing levels of access to records and reports. As you work with your Tenacre consultant, that will be able to take this information and work it into the various security features that are available in Salesforce. It's worth knowing that many of our clients tweak the security settings over weeks and months until they are completely satisfied with the combination of ease of use for your team and the security of your data. 

Do you need to integrate Salesforce with other systems? 

When you have documented your standard operating procedures (SOPs), does it look like that your team will need access to data or records that are currently in other systems such as ERP? If that's the case, your project may need to include a systems integration sub-project.

Defining the requirements for integration is difficult to do without help from an specialist. Your Tenacre consultant will work with you on this in detail once we are engaged on the initial workshops. What you can do prior to workshop phase of the project is to create bullet points of the workflows that will be executed once the integration has been completed. For example; 

• Raise an invoice in the accounting or ERP system once an Opportunity is 'closed won' in Salesforce
• Synchronise the 'Products' records in Salesforce with the 'Items' table in the ERP platform
• Update the payment status in Salesforce once money has been received in the accounting system