Let’s Debunk Some Salesforce Myths

Salesforce is a platform that helps businesses track the journey their customers take. It can help you effectively track and monitor your marketing and sales pipelines, optimizing the workflows for everyone in your company.

But that’s only if you’re using Salesforce to its fullest potential. Most companies implement Salesforce to solve one need, and never fully explore the other ways it could help them automate processes, integrate with other software applications, or optimize activity tracking within cross-functional teams. That’s because you’re still believing some of the Salesforce myths that are out there.

Let’s dive in and debunk the Salesforce myths still out there and set you up for success with it.

Myth: Salesforce is *just* a sales tool

Reality: Salesforce does more than just “sales”.

Salesforce offers different cloud solutions that can benefit a variety of industries and business channels. It’s actually a suite of services you can use to manage and monitor various aspects of your business, such as Sales Cloud for your sales team, Service Cloud for customer success programs, and Marketing Cloud to manage your marketing pipeline and drive engagement. Then, diving deeper, you can choose an industry platform cloud that’s a best-in-class combination of Salesforce applications created just for specific industries, like healthcare, non-profit, financial, government, and more.

Myth: Salesforce will improve my business right out of the box

Reality: It’s a powerful business tool that needs adjustments and monitoring to get you off the ground and running smoothly.

Salesforce isn’t a true plug-and-play software application; it provides standard features that must be tweaked for every customer, such as standard objects and fields, approval processes, dashboards and reports, forecasting tools, workflows rules, and a process builder for custom processes and workflows.

Companies can use the built-in workflows and processes, can create their own using the point-and-click features of Salesforce, or hire Salesforce developers to create custom ones (this will incur additional costs, but is still an option if the standard features and functionality don’t meet your business needs. – Salesforce is just that flexible).

Myth: We need a dedicated team to manage Salesforce

Reality: While having your own dedicated Salesforce team is ideal, it’s not necessary since Salesforce can automate many of your management processes.

A dedicated team is often outside the budget of a company implementing Salesforce, which is understandable. You can leverage Salesforce to reduce the amount of management it needs by using its automated workflows and processes. This will keep your contacts updated, approvals moving forward, and things working smoothly, so you only need to dedicate a portion of an employee’s time to Salesforce management. If you need to kick up your maintenance up a notch, you can always hire a consulting firm to manage Salesforce for you. Consulting firms are an economical way to manage your Salesforce data and cloud, without busting your budget.

Myth: Salesforce only delivers value to the sales or marketing teams

Reality: It’ll deliver value to many aspects of your business if you take advantage of all it has to offer.

By confining Salesforce to sales or marketing, you’re not taking advantage of all it has to offer your entire business. Each Salesforce Cloud solution is a business-scaling piece of technology that helps each area of a business streamline and optimize their workflows. It automates processes across the business, reducing bottlenecks and increasing the return on investment in Salesforce, even a custom implementation. Salesforce can surface insights across business functions, enabling more collaboration and cross-functional teamwork that’ll help you achieve more positive business outcomes.

Salesforce is a significant investment for any business. Many will only dip their toe into the Salesforce ecosystem for the CRM or Marketing Cloud solution, and miss out on the full value it can deliver. Mainly because you still believe the Salesforce myths that are out there.

These are just some of the ones we hear from our Salesforce clients. If you’d like help debunking your own myths and increase the value on your Salesforce investment, we’re here to help. We’d love to hear how you’re using it now, and what you’d really like to get out of it.

Are you interested to learn more about implementing Salesforce? Download our free eBook Roadmap to Successful Salesforce Implementation.

Thayer Tate

Thayer is the Chief Technology Officer at SOLTECH, bringing over 20 years of experience in technology and consulting to his role. Throughout his career, Thayer has focused on successfully implementing and delivering projects of all sizes. He began his journey in the technology industry with renowned consulting firms like PricewaterhouseCoopers and IBM, where he gained valuable insights into handling complex challenges faced by large enterprises and developed detailed implementation methodologies.

Thayer’s expertise expanded as he obtained his Project Management Professional (PMP) certification and joined SOLTECH, an Atlanta-based technology firm specializing in custom software development, Technology Consulting and IT staffing. During his tenure at SOLTECH, Thayer honed his skills by managing the design and development of numerous projects, eventually assuming executive responsibility for leading the technical direction of SOLTECH’s software solutions.

As a thought leader and industry expert, Thayer writes articles on technology strategy and planning, software development, project implementation, and technology integration. Thayer’s aim is to empower readers with practical insights and actionable advice based on his extensive experience.