Maximize-Your-Salesforce-ROI-Why-Regular-Assessments-Are-Key

Maximizing Salesforce ROI with Regular Assessments

Salesforce is more than just a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool; it's a strategic platform that unifies sales, marketing, support, and even entire enterprises around shared customer and revenue goals. However, the initial excitement often gives way to complacency. 

Many companies mistakenly believe that Salesforce will automatically deliver excellent value without constant oversight. This autopilot approach can frequently result in outdated processes, missed opportunities, and substantial financial losses.

So, how can you ensure that your CRM remains a competitive advantage rather than a liability? The key is to conduct regular assessments—periodic health checks to make sure that you're fully leveraging Salesforce's ever-changing features. Let's delve into why these assessments are important and the tangible benefits they provide.

Potential Risks of Running Salesforce on Autopilot

The initial excitement around Salesforce often fades, leading many companies to use only a fraction of its capabilities. They may add users, modify a few workflows, and run standard reports, ignoring the plethora of advanced features and integrations available. However, this complacency can lead to significant risks.

  • User Dissension: If the interface becomes too cluttered or confusing, staff members might resort to separate tools or personal spreadsheets. This can lead to incomplete records and inaccurate data, which research estimates can cost around $16,000 per disengaged employee.
  • Systemic Complexity: Your system can become cluttered with obsolete custom code, duplicate processes, and poorly integrated programs. This not only slows performance but also bloats maintenance costs.
  • Fragmented Data: When teams operate in silos, they lose the visibility that Salesforce provides. As a result, critical data gets dispersed across multiple technologies, making it challenging to generate reliable and timely insights.
  • Foregone Advantages: Salesforce releases three main product updates annually, each with features designed to simplify processes or generate new revenue streams. Ignoring these updates means missing out on potential market advantages and cost savings.
  • Reduced Return on Investment (ROI): These issues collectively compromise data integrity, erode system confidence, and diminish the overall impact of your CRM. In the end, what should be a pillar of your technological investment ends up yielding a declining return.

Recognizing these risks is a necessary first step. Next, we'll explore why neglecting Salesforce maintenance can have significant business costs—and what's really at stake when you skip regular checks.

Why Regular Salesforce Assessments Are Essential

Adapting to Business Changes

Your business is constantly changing. You might have launched new products, reorganized your team, or expanded into undeveloped areas. If Salesforce doesn’t keep up with these changes, your CRM processes and automations could continue to target outdated goals. In fact, 29% of IT projects are delayed due to misaligned systems, underscoring the importance of continuous re-evaluation.

Enhancing Decision-Making

Even the most attractive dashboards fall short when the data is incorrect or incomplete. Over time, duplication, inconsistent fields, and poor naming standards can accumulate, undermining analytics. Regular reviews enable you to detect and rectify data issues before they escalate, ensuring that leadership gets accurate, real-time information to make strategic decisions.

Improving Team Collaboration

Salesforce is designed to connect everything from marketing efforts to post-purchase follow-ups. When correctly adjusted, different departments can effortlessly communicate information and observe how their efforts complement each other. Without regular checks, each department might customize the CRM in its own way, resulting in conflicting fields, overlapping automations, and operational inefficiencies.

Understanding the risks highlights the importance of ongoing vigilance. But how can regular assessments lead to meaningful returns on investment? Let's look at three primary approaches.

How Ongoing Assessments Drive Higher ROI

Boosting Operational Efficiency and Reducing Costs

Cluttered page layouts and slow loading speeds waste time and frustrate consumers. Regular assessments uncover inefficiencies, enabling you to remove or improve outdated elements. This often results in:

  • Reduced Manual Work: Automation eliminates tedious tasks, allowing sales representatives and support staff to focus on building stronger customer relationships.
  • Lower Support Costs: With fewer technological problems, there’s less time (and money) spent on constant debugging and patching.

Enhancing User Adoption and Productivity

Employees seldom oppose good technology; they oppose technology that’s poorly aligned and difficult to use. By regularly reviewing how teams engage with Salesforce, you can tailor the system to meet their specific requirements, making workflows more intuitive and reducing repetitive tasks. 

As usage increases, data quality improves, and reports become more accurate. Salesforce becomes a key driver of success, creating a cycle of "better tools → more engagement → better data → stronger decisions."

Leveraging New Features and Integrations

Salesforce's triannual updates usually include cutting-edge technologies like AI-driven insights and enhanced analytics dashboards. Without a framework to evaluate these innovations, businesses miss out on significant improvements. Regular assessments help determine which new capabilities are most beneficial and how they will integrate with your existing infrastructure, ensuring a smooth transition and maximum impact.

Transformative Success Stories: Major Companies Using Salesforce

L’Oréal

The Challenge

L’Oréal faced a significant challenge with their numerous beauty brands operating in silos, which made coordinated cross-brand marketing difficult. They struggled to personalize customer experiences at scale, relying heavily on traditional mass media that provided limited real-time insights. Without a consolidated view of customers' interactions, it was hard to drive meaningful one-to-one engagement.

The Outcome

By implementing Salesforce Marketing Cloud, L’Oréal was able to unify data across 28 brands, creating more personalized experiences for their customers. They also began tracking over 40,000 daily social conversations, which provided valuable insights. With the launch of Makeup Genius, a virtual product try-on app, they reached an impressive 500,000 downloads in just six weeks. Real-time social listening and automated campaign journeys allowed L’Oréal to engage with customers more effectively and respond to their needs in a timely manner.

Toyota

The Challenge

Toyota had a vision of creating a connected car experience but lacked a platform for real-time communication between vehicles and their owners. Additionally, employees across 170 countries had minimal collaborative tools, which slowed innovation sharing. Car owners were mostly reactive, contacting dealerships only when they encountered issues.

The Outcome

With the help of Salesforce, Toyota introduced Toyota Friend, a feature that allows cars to “tweet” battery alerts and maintenance updates directly to their owners. Salesforce Chatter also enabled hundreds of thousands of Toyota employees to collaborate more effectively, improving solution development across global teams. The result was a more interactive and proactive approach to vehicle ownership and a more unified workforce.

KONE

The Challenge

KONE initially relied on a basic Salesforce CRM for sales force automation. However, as business demands grew, they struggled with manual workflows. Reactive elevator maintenance often meant potential downtime and inefficient service. Additionally, data about customers and equipment was scattered across different systems, which limited cross-team visibility and coordination.

The Outcome

With the expanded deployment of Sales & Service Cloud, KONE gained full visibility into deals and automated contract renewals, significantly enhancing sales efficiency. They integrated IoT data from over 1.1 million connected devices, enabling 20,000 technicians to perform predictive maintenance using AI alerts. This shift to proactive service boosted equipment uptime, transformed field operations, and improved customer satisfaction.

Final Thoughts

Regular Salesforce assessments are more than just a "nice to have"; they are necessary for staying competitive. By consistently refining data, automations, and user experiences, you can transform Salesforce into a powerful growth engine, boosting efficiency, fostering innovation, and increasing ROI.Even a small investment in these assessments pays off, especially when you want to leverage the latest Salesforce features or respond swiftly to changing situations. Contact YugaShift today to learn how our experts can customize solutions—from Sales Cloud to Data Cloud—to keep your CRM on track for success.