Assemble a project team to ensure support and representation from each of the business units that will be affected by your implementation. The size of the team will depend on the scope of your rollout, but the basic roles are always the same.

Executive Sponsor
Every project needs a champion to serve as the CRM driver in your company, rallying support and resources for your implementation.

Steering Committee
Your team should also include a representative from each of your user groups such as end users, managers, executives, and IT. If you don’t take the time to learn what your users want or need before your roll out salesforce.com you’ll definitely hear about it after and jeopardize adoption.

Salesforce Administrator
Finally, identify a system administrator who will be responsible for setting up Salesforce. Because Salesforce is so easy to customize and administer this person does not need to be tech focused. It is much more important that your administrator thoroughly understand your business processes.

Salesforce Developer
If you are planning on integrating Salesforce with other systems you may need to include a web services developer from your IT organization or engage salesforce.com's professional services team. Generally speaking this is only applicable for Enterprise Edition customers with advanced requirements.

Downloads

• Preparing for Success (Breeze Presentation)
• Project Team Worksheet (Word Doc)
• Profile of an Ideal Admin (PDF)

Once you’ve assembled your team you’ll need to choose between implementing salesforce.com yourself, engaging our professional services team, or utilizing one of our nationwide implementation partners. Your decision should be guided by your implementation scope, taking into consideration the complexity of your business and the skill set of your team.

We highly recommend that at least one member of the project team attend Administrator Training. You'll gain valuable context for how all the applications work together and will be better able to estimate your project's scope and need for professional services. If you do decide to self-implement, you'll learn best practices from a Salesforce expert so the customization choices you make today will continue to serve your business as it changes.

Self-Guided Implementations
Self-guided implementations are common in companies with straightforward needs and less than a dozen users. These organizations can easily map salesforce.com to the businesses with the help of the Salesforce.com Rollout Guide , online training, message boards and support in the application.

Quick Start Implementation Services
Note that while self-guided implementations are common amongst small businesses, engaging professional services is often a wise investment. We offer a wide range of affordable implementation services for companies of all sizes, and those who take part get up and running faster with higher levels of adoption and business automation.

Enterprise Consulting Services
For larger organizations with more complex requirements we highly recommend engaging salesforce.com professional services or one of our local partners. With a team of specialists and a proven methodology, you’ll ensure that your implementation runs smoothly, and the project is ultimately a success. To learn more please contact your account executive.

The first step in implementing salesforce.com is to gather your project team and conduct a kickoff meeting. This will provide you with an opportunity to make introductions, review the project scope and deliverables, discuss your objectives and critical success factors, define each member’s roles and responsibilities, and set your project timeline. It’s a good idea to prepare a PowerPoint presentation in advance to structure the conversation and set the tone for your implementation.

The outputs of this meeting should include;

• An initital project timeline with milestones identifed
• Defined project roles
• A communication/training plan that will involve and educate your end users
  

Downloads

• Successforce Implementation Map (PowerPoint File)

If you elect to engage Professional Services to guide you through your implementation they conduct a thorough business process review, interviewing key stakeholders, and making recommendations for how salesforce.com can be mapped to your business. If you choose to go through a self-implementation it’s important that your project team go through a similar exercise. On the Successforce.com website you’ll find a Business Process Review Worksheet which should be completed and signed off on.

The goal of this exercise is to document all your system requirements. This list should be prioritized and grouped into phases. The initial phase should address your most urgent needs while taking into account the time line and budget constrains you've set for your project.

Downloads

• Business Process Review Worksheet (Word Document)
  

With a completed business process review document in hand, your administrator can begin to model salesforce.com to your business. One challenge that customers often face is that they aren’t always sure which information goes where.  

For example, what’s the difference between a lead, contact, and account? In Salesforce terminology, a lead is holding pen for unqualified prospects. Leads are used by companies with two-tier sales processes, typical of high volume, business-to-business sales organizations. As soon as there’s enough information to qualify the opportunity it will be converted into a contact with an associated account and opportunity.

There are a number of other business models which would be set up a little bit differently. For example your company might manage relationships with a handful of known accounts or you might work with lots of resellers.

On the Successforce.com website we have a number of different process maps to get you started. If you’re unsure about how to model salesforce.com to your business, it’s important that you talk to your account executive or sales engineer to model it properly.

Downloads

• Modeling Salesforce to Your Business (Breeze Presentation)
• Sales Process Map (PowerPoint File)

Salesforce.com offers free online training to help administrators learn how to customize the application. To find a list of available courses, visit the course list  on salesforce.com corporate website.  

Learn the Basics

• Salesforce Fundamentals (ADM 100)
  
• Sales Representative Training (SFA 101)
• Customer Support Fundamentals (ADM 180)

Learn how to Customize the Application

• Admin Fundamentals: Setup (ADM 110)
• Admin Fundamentals: Customize (ADM 115)
• Reporting Fundamentals (ADM 120)
• Dashboard Mechanics (ADM 125)
• Advanced Importing (ADM 150)
• AppExchange Mobile

Hands-On Workshops
For those who really want a solid foundation in Salesforce skills or who are ready to implement smart features like workflow and approvals, salesforce.com offers live training in 3-5 day hands-on workshops.

• Administrator Essentials for Enterprise Edition (ADM 201)
• Administrator Essentials for Professional Edition (ADM 202)
• Force.com: Application Laboratory (FDC 320)

Outsourced Administration
Salesforce.com also offers the ability to outsource your system administraton to one of our premier support administrators. Contact your Account Executive for more details.

Custom Fields and Page Layouts
With Salesforce, creating custom fields and modifying page layouts is a breeze. Though much of this is covered in the training, here are a couple of tips to keep in mind.

• Keep it simple. Do you best to minimize the number of fields per page and organize your page layouts, grouping fields in a logical manor. Hide irrelevant tabs, making it as simple as possible for your users.
• Standardize information, whenever possible using picklists vs. free text fields for better reporting. For text fields such as opportunity name, work on standardized naming conventions.
• Setup sales stages that reflect your methodology and create assignment rules to route leads and cases to the appropriate people.
• Establish a folder structure for documents, reports, and email templates so it's not a free for all.
• It's easy to forget, but customizing tasks and activities goes a long way towards promoting user adoption.

Processes and Workflow Rules
There is a considerable amount of structure and automation you can build into Salesforce; everything from lead assignment rules, to sales stages, to case escalation rules. Work closely with your project team to ensure that their processes are accurately reflected.

Documents and Templates
As part of your implementation, work with your project team to create a folder structure for the document library and populate key materials such as forms, PowerPoint presentations, and other collateral. It’s also a good idea to add some email templates and mail-merge documents. Setting these tools up makes the application more valuable for reps and helps drive early adoption.

Users and Roles
For Team Edition customers and small implementations, this might be as easy as adding your users. For larger organizations you’ll want to setup roles, profiles, and sharing rules to ensure people see only what they are suppose to. Once again, if you can, keep it simple. The fewer roles and profiles you have the easier it will be to manage. Also, try to error towards openness. A system that’s too restrictive can impede collaboration and lead to usability issues.

Related Resources

• Administrator Training
• Engaging Professional Services
  

Identify Your Data Sources
Start by listing the various data sources that you’re thinking about migrating into Salesforce. For example you might have information in a legacy CRM application, homegrown databases, excel spreadsheets, or in individual contact managers. It’s important to spell out exactly what you hope to migrate, what format it’s in, and how clean it is.

Data Migration Strategies
Once you understand the data you’re working with you’ll want to think carefully about the migration strategy you want to take. Using Salesforce.com for the first time is like moving into a new home. You could bring everything in your old home or you could start fresh, leaving your old information behind. You could also take a hybrid approach where you look through your belongings and determine what to keep and what to leave behind.

Each approach has its merits and will depend on your particular situation. The key is to  keep your new home as clean as possible and only move what is absolutely necessary. Discuss with your team, how valuable is that information? Will your end users really benefit from the data or would it clutter the new system? Would it be alright to archive it elsewhere?

Exporting Data from Your Legacy System
Many customers need help getting data out of their legacy system, the strategy for which is going to vary depending on the application. Most of the time you will be able to export your contacts and accounts to an excel worksheet which can be scrubbed and imported into Salesforce. Note that you'll want to save your excel worksheet as a CSV file, also know as comma seperated value or comma delimited. This makes it easy to import into salesforce using the standard import wizard.

There are other situations where you have to purchase a third party tool such as Goldbox for Goldmine to unlock the relational information. As an alternative we recommend looking into two AppExchange Partners who significantly decrease the time and effort it takes to migrate your data. There's ActNow for Act! users and OKERE which works with both Act! and Goldmine data. These services start at about $195. For more advanced data migration projects such as SalesLogix or proprietary applications it’s probably a good idea to talk to your Account Executive and see if it makes sense to engage a data migration specialist.

Scrubbing Your Data
Once you have your data in an excel spreadsheet, it’s a good idea to scrub it before importing it into saleforce.com. First, going through and weed out dirty data, de-dupe people who may be in the system multiple times, and work on consistent naming conventions. If you find yourself really struggling with de-duplicating and cleansing your data there are a number of great partners on the AppExchange who focus exclusively on data quality.

Another trick to make the import process run smoother is to label the columns in your spreadsheet so that they match up to the corresponding fields in Salesforce (example). If there is a column heading in your spreadsheet which isn't represented by a field in Salesforce, create a custom field. 

Choose an Import Tool
Salesforce.com offers a number of tools to help you import your data. With the Import Wizard is the most common tool by which customers add their data. You can easily map information from an excel worksheet (CSV File) into leads, contacts, accounts, solutions, and custom objects. If you have information that’s relational in nature, such as activities or opportunities, mapping data is a little bit more complex. You’ll need to use the AppExchange Data Loader (Enterprise Edition) or a popular open source tool called the Excel Connector (Professional or Enterprise Edition).

Import Your Data
Now that your data files are in pristine condition and you’ve chosen your import tool, you’ll want to begin the process of loading data into salesforce.com. Make sure you start with a small sample set to test. You don’t want to import a large amount of data until you’re sure what it will look like. If you get stuck at any point, turn to the online community or engage the Salesforce.com Professional Services Team.

AppExchange Data Migration Services

• ActNow: Act!
• IntegrationServices.com: Act! and Goldmine
• View the complete list of Integration Tools on the AppExchange

When rolling out Salesforce you will want to provide training for your team. To assist in this effort we offer free web-based training which can be found in the Training Section of the Successforce.com Site. You may want to identify some specific classes which you want your users to start with such as;

• Salesforce Fundamentals (ADM 100)
  
• Sales Representative Training (SFA 101)
• Customer Support Training (ADM 180)
  
• Reporting Fundamentals (ADM 120)
• Outlook Edition (ADM 140)
• AppExchange Mobile

By attending these training sessions your team you can provide a primer for how the application works.

In parallel it’s also a good idea to develop a hands-on training session for your kickoff meeting. This will serve to reinforce your processes and terminology, and highlight specific features which are especially applicable to your users. Run though a handful of typical business scenarios and make sure your reps are confident navigating. Also use this forum to answer any outstanding questions that they have.

Training your users on how to effectively leverage salesforce.com as a business tool is on of the most cruitial steps of your implementation. Ensuring your team understands what is expected of them, how they will be measured, and how to use salesforce.com to accomplish those goals will help ensure user adoption and a successful implementation.

If you are interested Salesforce also offers instructor-led training, custom training, or train the trainer courses. Visit the Education Services home page on our corporate website

Downloads

• Kickoff Meeting Email Template (Word Document)
• Kickoff Meeting PowerPoint Template (PowerPoint)
• Modeling a Training Program (Word Document)

AppExchange Apps

• InfoCenter - This Free AppExchange App is a great way to distribute training, documentation, and FAQ's inside the App

To make users more productive Salesforce is tightly integrated with popular Microsoft applications including Outlook, Word, Excel, and of course Windows. 

Outlook Edition: Outlook Edition is a free plug-in which you can install by visiting setup | personal setup | desktop integration. This powerful utility performs several important functions that help Salesforce and Outlook work hand-in hand together.

• Email Integration: Add emails from Outlook to a Contact or Lead record inside Salesforce by clicking on the “Add to Salesforce” that appears in your toolbar. It will look up the contact based upon an email match and give you the option of associating it with the opportunity or case. This helps you catalog important emails and provides a tremendous boost to effective collaboration.
• Address Book: When sending an email from Outlook you can look up a contact from inside Salesforce and add them to the To Line of your email.
• Synch your Contacts and Calendar: Outlook Edition allows you to select which contacts and calendar events you want to synch with Salesforce. Synching can be automated at scheduled intervals and a dynamic icon indicates whether a record is up-to-date. 

Auto vCard: Auto vCard is a  free AppExchange component that allows you to create an Outlook contact from the contact record inside Salesforce. It takes less than 2 minutes to set up and will be a big hit with your users.

Export to Excel: Any report inside of Salesforce can be exported to excel with the click of a button.

Excel Integration with Office Edition: Office Edition is a free plug-in which you can install by visiting setup | personal setup | desktop integration. This tool creates a new menu in Excel that allows you to import data from a report in Salesforce as well as refresh data. Many customers will create one worksheet containing their source data and one with their calculations and charts. This allows them to refresh their Salesforce data with a single click without having to re-write their spreadsheets.

Excel Integration with the Excel Connector: The Excel Connector is a hugely popular open source tool which takes Office Edition a step further by allowing for bi-directional synching. If you’re importing data or doing data cleanup, it’s well worth taking a look at.

Mail Merge: For creating form letters, proposals and quotes, Salesforce offers mail merge functionality. To create a mail merge document visit setup | administration setup | communication templates. Note that if you are trying to print mailing labels, your best bet is often to export the data to excel, create your mailmerge document in Word, and then point it to the excel file as your source data.

Sales Folder: A Salesforce Partner by the name of Invisible CRM is doing some exciting stuff around Office Integration. A tool of theirs called Sales Folder allows you to drag and drop files from Windows or Outlook, adding them to the attachments section in Salesforce. For example, you might want to associate a contract or a proposal with an opportunity record.