Salesforce is more than just a CRM tool for sales teams—it’s a leading cloud computing provider with a range of out-of-the-box products to streamline sales, marketing, customer service, and more. The platform can be a Swiss Army knife for your sales team, but even as turnkey as Salesforce integrations can be, customization helps unlock its full potential.
That’s where a freelance Salesforce pro can step in and help. With access to your CRM, a freelancer can upgrade your system to work exactly the way you need, support your sales team’s day-to-day, and help them overcome challenges unique to your business.
Here’s a look at a few ways you might engage a freelance Salesforce consultant to get the most from your Salesforce integration.
Customizations to Get You Up and Running
Customizations and automations, reports, and tailored qualification processes are just a few ways you can engage a freelancer to tune up your standard Salesforce implementation right off the bat. The more you can control how your integration delivers insights, shares data, and automates key processes, the more competitive advantages you’ll get.
Specific customizations to try include:
- Automating certain business processes. Time-saving automations are one of the most effective ways to make a Salesforce integration work harder for you. Using the Process Builder, developers can create automations that are triggered by certain actions. For example, when an account address is updated, that address can be updated across all of that account’s contacts.
- Custom fields for different dashboard snapshots. Need to see 30-day revenue broken down by week instead of month? A developer can create custom fields within an interactive dashboard to show that data in a way that’s relevant to your team.
- Dashboard layouts per role in an organization. Your CEO likely needs a different snapshot than your division manager does. A developer can create dashboards tailored to each person that control who sees what with object permissions.
- Tailored reports. Reports should answer your business’s key questions—and the questions of the people reading them. A CEO might want a report to help with the annual plan, while an account exec might want a report to help plan the day’s calls. A freelancer can customize reports to include the data relevant to each person’s role.
Tip: A big part of getting up and running with Salesforce is transitioning users from an older system. If your team needs training, be sure to specify this in your job post.
Ongoing Salesforce Maintenance
A freelance Salesforce administrator can also be invaluable as you continue using the platform, whether tidying databases or fine-tuning processes so day-to-day entries stay consistent.
Ongoing administrative work can also include:
- Critical updates. Salesforce periodically releases updates to improve its performance and usability, but sometimes these updates affect existing customizations. A freelancer can be on hand to ensure a smooth transition during version updates.
- Cleaning up existing records. Human error happens, and in Salesforce it can significantly affect the value of your integration. In particular, the quality of what you get from your data can depend on how it’s input into your system. A Salesforce pro can go in after your sales team to make sure their entries are thorough and tidy.
- Creating wizards to ensure consistency. Building on the above, a developer can create a wizard that ensures your data is entered consistently. Wizards can require sales team members to include certain inputs when they log in to capture leads after an important call. Because they might not always enter data in the exact same way, putting a process with set values can ensure more consistency. A developer can accomplish this with Apex and Visualforce or Visual Flows.
- Integration with third-party systems. Salesforce holds a lot of your critical data, but you likely have data in other systems as well. A developer can help connect them all on demand or in real time by deciding on the best method and approach for integrating your external data.
Chances are, more Salesforce customizations will pop up over time as your team gets familiar with the platform and finds ways it could be improved. When engaging a Salesforce freelancer, be sure to communicate your current challenges and concerns so that they can find the best solutions for you.
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