Salesforce.com is a highly configurable application and does not require the system administrator to write code to make configuration changes. That doesn’t mean configuring salesforce.com is easy. The application allows for the creation of complex business processes but the initial configuration is generic and will not meet the needs of most organizations. Your organization will need to configure salesforce.com in a number of ways to properly address the requirements of your organization.
In a typical implementation there are hundreds of questions that should be answered before any users are given access to the system or any data is loaded. Below is a short list of high level questions you should have the answers to before beginning any implementation:
- Users
- Who should have access?
- Will our hierarchy in salesforce.com reflect our organizational hierarchy?
- What should each user have access to?
- Should the application display different data for different users?
- Accounts
- What is our company definition of an account?
- Who will own each account?
- What will the sharing rules be?
- What is our system of record?
- What accounts will we load into the system?
- Who can create accounts?
- What fields are required and when?
- What custom fields do we need?
- Contacts
- Who will own each contact?
- What will the sharing rules be?
- How will we record activities with contacts?
- What custom fields do we need?
- Opportunities
- What is our sales process?
- How many sales processes do we have?
- Should we associate products with opportunities?
- What fields are required and when?
- How do we track competitive information?
- What custom fields do we need?
- Products & Price Books
- How many price books should we have?
- Should our products in salesforce.com be integrated with our finance system?
- Should we use list price?
- How do we handle discounting?
- What custom fields do we need?
- Forecasting
- How will we do forecasting?
- Will we forecast bookings, revenue or both?
- What organizational level will we forecast at?
- Reporting
- What reports are available?
- What reports do we need?
- Who needs access to the reports?
- How will we distribute reports throughout the organization?
This is just a small, sample list of questions. There are hundreds of additional questions related to campaigns, customer support, document management, lead management, and analytics.
Riptide knows the questions to ask, understands the impact of the answers and can configure the application. Asking the right questions and having the answers is just the beginning. Riptide has the expertise to configure the system properly to ensure the system will accommodate the requirements and present data securely to the correct users at the correct time.
Contact Riptide today to take advantage of any or all of the salesforce.com consulting services offered.
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