Why Business Analysis is Essential for Salesforce.com Implementations

Business Analysis and Salesforce

Due to the power and flexibility of the Salesforce.com tool, understanding the role it will play in your organization is the most important piece of a successful implementation.  This is where the skillful use of business analysis can be invaluable.

Salesforce.com is a powerful and flexible tool that can be combined with partner applications to become the primary application for your business.  Salesforce.com can also be implemented to simply support sales force automation, call centers or marketing.  So properly determining the scope of the implementation and defining the success measures will help to ensure a successful implementation.

A business analyst should be used in your organization to ensure you are using Salesforce.com effectively.  This business analyst can serve as an advisor and can become an important extension of your organization and the primary point of contact for your Salesforce users.  The business analyst should learn the goals of the organization and help develop and document a clear vision for the use of Salesforce.

A Salesforce.com implementation project may involve implementation, modification, integrations, customizations and support of the Salesforce.com instance.  It is important to define and document the unique requirements of the business and develop a specific plan to address those requirements.

The business analyst may also analyze the selected Salesforce configurations and make recommendations on best practices and process improvements specifically for your business.

For example, 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?

Of course, 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.

Furthermore, since organizations and processes change frequently due to growth, management turnover, mergers and acquisitions, and restructuring your Salesforce.com implementation will need to keep up with the changing needs of the business.

A typical business analysis may include the following deliverables:

Interviews

·         Executive Sponsor(s)

·         Stakeholders

·         Users

Vision & Scope Document

·         Vision / Goals

·         Business Needs

·         Scope of Implementation

·         Success Measures

Requirements Document

·         Business Requirements

·         Technical Specifications

·         Application Settings

·         Customizations Needed:  e.g. Data migration controls to improve data quality (reduction of outdated and duplicated data, etc.) and Transfer of legacy data

·         Reports Needed

·         3rd Party Applications / Integration Needed

·         Custom Software Development (if necessary)

·         Training

·         Support

A thorough business analysis can be the cornerstone to a successful Salesforce.com implementation.