Maximize ROI with iCRM Implementation

At HAF Technology Solutions, we understand that the true value of any technology investment lies in its ability to deliver measurable returns. Our iCRM implementation services are designed to not only streamline your customer relationship management processes but also to drive substantial ROI.

1. Increased Efficiency and Productivity

Our iCRM solutions automate routine tasks, freeing up your team to focus on what they do best—building relationships and closing deals. With integrated data and processes, your sales and marketing teams can operate more efficiently, leading to quicker decision-making and faster response times.

2. Enhanced Customer Insights

With iCRM, you gain a 360-degree view of your customers, enabling you to better understand their needs and preferences. This insight allows for more personalized and effective marketing strategies, ultimately leading to higher conversion rates and improved customer retention.

3. Reduced Operational Costs

By integrating iCRM into your business operations, you can significantly reduce manual errors and redundant processes. This not only cuts down on operational costs but also ensures that your team is working with accurate, up-to-date information.

4. Scalability and Flexibility

Our iCRM solutions are scalable and flexible, growing with your business and adapting to your changing needs. This means you can continue to realize ROI as your business evolves, without the need for costly system overhauls.

5. Data-Driven Decision Making

Leverage the power of data with iCRM. Our solutions provide real-time analytics and reporting, giving you the insights needed to make informed, strategic decisions that drive profitability.

6. Faster Implementation with Proven Expertise

HAF Technology Solutions brings years of experience in iCRM implementation. Our proven methodologies ensure that your iCRM solution is up and running quickly, so you can start seeing returns sooner rather than later.

Why Choose HAF Technology Solutions?

We’re more than just a technology provider; we’re your strategic partner in achieving business success. Our dedicated team works closely with you to tailor iCRM solutions that align with your business goals, ensuring that every dollar spent contributes to your bottom line.

Not enough can be said about the importance of the return of investment metric. An iCRM implementation presents a business solution in multiple dimensions. Although HAF is committed to building measurable value from discovery, through deployment and beyond, you may be asking how does your investment in a sales force automation solution translate into an ROI? iCRM is designed to be an intelligent approach to CRM. For that reason HAF will always employ benchmarks as a baseline to provide quantifiable data when measuring the success of your project.

An important part of the value-proposition that HAF brings to the ROI table involves the choice of the best partner(s) to do the job. 

For its part, Salesforce has continued to lead the field in all CRM categories as evidenced by their position in the Gartner Magic Quadrant. The Salesforce platform has continued to deliver impressive ROI results with a continuously expanding product offering.

So, if you build it, will new business come to you? As of 2024, there are approximately 150,000 Salesforce customers world-wide. Salesforce is the #1 CRM platform and along with HAF + iCRM we are all committed to your success! This transformative strategy might not be a field of dreams, but it does make solid business sense.

Let's take a look at some numbers...

Using data and Salesforce Einstein (AI) Heathrow airport increased digital revenue by 30%.

With Salesforce to drive data-powered sales, Bayer achieved a 400% increase in touch-points per doctor per month.

By connecting sales and service data with Salesforce, Formula 1 created an 88% fan satisfaction rating.

Impact on my bottom-line...

So now you might be saying, good for them, what about my company? There's no denying the success that many Salesforce customers have achieved in many dimensions of business. HAF iCRM leverages this success with a robust CRM platform working in tandem with our comprehensive implementation strategies. The best elements of a Salesforce + HAF Technology Solutions consultative offering is driven by your requirements, business objectives and challenges, not solely by the tools used.

 

There are a lot of factors that influence success with sales. As mentioned previously, process improvement is an important, if not the most important factor driving sales. Selecting the right sales tools can go a long way toward implementing a new or improved process.

HAF will engage iCRM methods to implement and measure critical metrics in collaboration with sales operations and sales management, since the two disciplines are very closely linked. One of the first tasks is to define and apply Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to the sales process. Like many sales related processes, KPIs are best driven in iterations. The following are two of the KPI categories that are most commonly used:

• • Activity KPIs
  • Outcome KPIs

Once KPIs have been defined and incorporated into the sales process, Salesforce's Sales Engagement can be activated to provide measured cadences for effectively engaging customers. Sales Engagement and HAF's iCRM can help your sales teams move through the process with relevant information at the right time in the cycle. This tool will assist new reps with limited experience seek an optimum path to closing business as well as provide your more seasoned team members with targeted information to reduce sales cycle duration. Intelligent Customer Relationship Management can then create automated actions to help reduce time-consuming manual tasks while building robust reporting to track and measure your success metrics.

Beyond capturing and tracking KPIs and building reports to document progress, HAF along with Salesforce's "The 360 Blog" recommends the following sales-centric dashboards as must-have tools providing critical operational visibility, and to help your team monitor sales and achieve revenue targets:

• The "State of the Union Dashboard" is great for providing sales and sales operations management with a holistic view of company performance. This dashboard should be referred to on a daily basis.
  • Audience: Sales executives

• The "Pipe Gen Dashboard" asks the question the name implies, do we have an adequate pipeline? This dashboard provides a 30,000 foot view that is meant to be published at least weekly.
  • Audience: Sales reps, sales managers & marketing

• Referencing the KPI discussion topic above, the "Activity Management Dashboard" is a measure of your sales team's time and energy management. This dashboard has become very relevant in recent years with the advent of remote work. Use weekly or biweekly.
  • Audience: Account executives

• The "Open Pipe Dashboard" is a ground-level look at your pipeline health. This dashboard looks at problem areas: Current deals that are not showing activity or others that are not progressing through sales stages in a timely manner. These metrics should be monitored when necessary.
  • Audience: Entire sales team

• The "Forecast Dashboard" is an essential tool providing management and finance teams with key planning information. Inconsistencies or problems with forecasts can be resolved more effectively with this suite of important performance data. This dashboard should be accessed on a regular basis.
  • Audience: Sales and executive management & finance

• With the "Clean Your Room Dashboard" reps are encouraged to maintain quality data to help move deals through the pipeline and close sales faster with greater efficiency. This dashboard which should be accessed on a regular basis builds accountability with the sales team.
  • Audience: Entire sales team

• The "Sales Rep's Dashboard" is an overview of the account executives' performance and sales objectives. Since the AE owns their territory they need a window into critical metrics that drive their business. This dashboard should be used daily.
  • Audience: Account executives

iCRM Sales Solutions at a Glance

• Any approach to sales or sales operational success has to be an iterative process.
• Assess the process, analyze success metrics and fill and gaps - wash, rinse, repeat....

Wikipedia defines Active Listening as "the practice of preparing to listen, observing what verbal and non-verbal messages are being sent, and then providing appropriate feedback for the sake of showing attentiveness to the message being presented." This definition is probably the best way to describe what it means to engage a customer, because listening is key to understanding what your clients want, need or desire. What happens next is a sequence of comprehension, retention and response. 

Customer service is an omnichannel business strategy, and as pointed out in Wikipedia's definition of Active Listening, ultimately your response to your customer reflects your take on that input. Communication is therefore key to relevant next steps derived from listening - in fact its more like multiple lines of communication.

Once your requirements have been defined by carefully listening to your customer service needs, iCRM will help you create effective lines of communication to respond to service objectives and challenges. These same tenets of listening and communication have helped HAF & Salesforce identify major areas of customer expectations. As part of your iCRM implementation, HAF will build processes to ensure your service and case management efforts provide the levels of excellence you require.

For those companies that rely on Field Service, there are a number of solutions that iCRM can put in place to provide the following:

• Field service mapping & location analysis
  • Visualizing data
  • Tracking live locations
  • Optimizing routes and schedules

• Call center optimization

Best use of data

iCRM Solution

• Review unstructured data
• Enforce customer data protection

The ways that customers view the changing dynamic of their buying experience is vital to your company's marketing strategy. This constantly evolving environment has proven to be a significant challenge for many HAF customers. There certainly has to be a tactical solution that at the very least provides a baseline for your marketing approach - otherwise the strategic view is not sustainable.

• Rising costs and shifting priorities have customers rethinking their relationships with brands.
• Build an enhanced company image
• 62% of consumers have recently reassessed their priorities.
• 80% of customers say the experience a company provides is as important as its products and services.
• What about the impact of personalization?
• Personalization is driving customer loyalty, but favorite brands still have an edge of all others.
• Control of your data is the primary driver for marketing enhancement.

Given the fluid nature of marketing trends and customer demands with respect to both product/service costs and their expectations around the use of their data, HAF's iCRM solutions are increasing recommending a data engine powered by generative AI as the best tactical and long-term strategy to address these concerns.

Applying an iCRM Marketing Solution

• A single source of marketing truth is the only way to truly understand your customer.
• Personalization and automation will go a long way to the customer at the center of all your marketing communications.
• Specify standards of lead generation
• Define performance metrics to measure campaign effectiveness
• Customizable Campaign Influence
• Create Campaign Hierarchies

In this simple example, the top of the flow represents strategic initiatives (product sales and branding), the product launch in the middle, and the bottom shows the campaigns.

From Salesforce: How Marketing Cloud Engagement Can Build Better Relationships (and Business)

• Grow relationships and revenue. Being able to adapt is critical when it comes to customer relationships. But this can’t happen in silos. With Marketing Cloud Engagement, your teams can meet each customer where they are, increase customer lifetime value, and turn customers into raving fans.
• Know your customer. Having a single source of truth to fully understand and empathize with your customer has never been more important. Marketing Cloud Engagement helps you do this by bringing together known and unknown data to create a single, complete profile for each customer. And because our marketing platform is part of Einstein 1, that profile is shared across your business—powering every part of the customer journey.
• Humanize every moment. In order to put your customer at the center, you need to put your data to work. Marketing Cloud Engagement does just that—using AI to take personalization to the next level and create meaningful customer journeys. And that means engaging in real time, using what you know about your customers to adjust your messaging based on their behaviors.
• Reach peak growth. Everything Marketing Cloud Engagement offers—seamless experiences, AI-powered insights, a single customer profile—is made more impactful by unparalleled visibility into marketing performance. Unified marketing and business analytics give you the information you need to make the most of your marketing investments and increase productivity.

From McKinsey 2012:

The most powerful applications of social technologies in the global economy are largely untapped. By using social technologies, companies can raise the productivity of knowledge workers by 20 to 25 percent.

The average interaction worker spends an estimated 28 percent of the workweek managing e-mail and nearly 20 percent looking for internal information or tracking down colleagues who can help with specific tasks. But when companies use social media internally, messages become content; a searchable record of knowledge can reduce, by as much as 35 percent, the time employees spend searching for company information.

• Reduce operational costs
• Reduce service management costs
• Monetize refined data management
• Measured reduction or reassignment of resource overhead

Strategic team alignment is crucial for the successful implementation of any CRM solution, especially when partnering with HAF Technology Solutions and using Salesforce. Here's how customers can leverage strategic team alignment in this context:

Strategic Team Alignment with HAF Technology Solutions and Salesforce

Unlock the Full Potential of Your CRM Investment

Strategic alignment between your business teams and the technology solutions they utilize is key to maximizing the value of your CRM. At HAF Technology Solutions, we partner with you to ensure that your Salesforce design is not just a tool but a powerful driver of strategic goals across your organization.

1. Aligning Business Objectives with CRM Strategy

The first step to successful CRM implementation is ensuring that your Salesforce design aligns with your business objectives. We work with your strategic teams to understand your company’s vision, goals, and KPIs. This collaboration allows us to tailor Salesforce solutions that directly support your business strategy, ensuring that your CRM system drives the outcomes that matter most.

2. Cross-Departmental Collaboration

Effective CRM strategies require seamless collaboration across all departments—sales, marketing, customer service, and beyond. HAF Technology Solutions fosters this cross-departmental alignment by designing Salesforce workflows that integrate and unify these functions. This holistic approach ensures that every team member, regardless of department, has access to the same accurate and up-to-date customer data, leading to more coordinated and effective actions.

3. Customization for Role-Specific Needs

Different teams have different needs, and Salesforce's flexibility allows for customization to meet those needs. HAF Technology Solutions ensures that your Salesforce design is tailored to the specific requirements of each team. Whether it’s sales forecasting, customer service management, or marketing automation, we align Salesforce functionalities with the unique objectives of each strategic team.

4. Training and Change Management

Strategic alignment isn’t just about technology; it’s about people. HAF Technology Solutions provides comprehensive training and change management support to ensure that your teams are fully aligned with the new Salesforce processes. We make sure that every team member understands how to use Salesforce effectively in their role, fostering adoption and driving long-term success.

5. Continuous Feedback and Improvement

Strategic alignment is an ongoing process. We help you set up continuous feedback loops within your teams to monitor the effectiveness of your Salesforce implementation. By regularly reviewing performance metrics and gathering user feedback, we can make necessary adjustments to ensure that your Salesforce design continues to align with your evolving business strategy.

The HAF Technology Solutions Advantage

At HAF Technology Solutions, we don’t just implement Salesforce—we ensure that it becomes a strategic asset for your organization. Our expertise in Salesforce design, combined with a deep understanding of business strategy, positions your teams to work in harmony, driving collective success.

Alignment is critical when designing a new process, and in fact is key to simplifying that design. One of the first considerations is to create both top-down as well as bottom-up support for any proposed design strategy.

Beyond the benefits of productive alignment when crafting a design strategy, the ability to simplify the processes that make up a large part of that design are gaining significant traction among your peers. 

• Recent studies have shown that 95% of IT management surveyed have prioritized workflow automation for their companies.
• Automation is a primary driver in process streamlining and a major contributor to operational efficiency.
• With efficiency comes cost reductions that can amount to considerable savings over time.
• Process simplification through automation provides an overall improvement in data quality.

HAF will use iCRM to bring you back to your original requirements. This way we can conduct a side-by-side analysis of your current state with the requirements that define your future objectives. We have found that this method will help reveal key tactical elements that can be simplified through process automation.

One of the first key elements HAF evaluates in the course of developing an iCRM solution is project scale. It is an important process component that is documented in the SoW, and scale is a driving factor when establishing project objectives and the necessary boundaries for success. Every iCRM solution is built with an ability to scale over time, and how that can grown with an increasing range of capabilities is critical if your business model is to effectively align with future requirements.

Performance Assistant

• Scalability with Salesforce
• Performance Testing

Salesforce Optimizer

• Simplify customizations
• Periodic maintenance

What to do about scope creep...

Its an unfortunate fact of life that projects often "go off the rails" when scale is improperly planned or the scope of work is breached. So, how can we stay on-track and scale a need without losing project focus, and risking failure? HAF will carefully plan and define the kind of benchmarks mentioned in our ROI assessments when crafting testing methods as well. Stakeholder collaboration, a thorough understanding of the requirements, quality testing across all impacted business/technical units, followed by well documented feedback will insure that a project objective can scale while keeping scope in check.

What to do about large data volumes (LDV)...

One thing that you can expect, if you haven't already, is the impact on data volume on scalability. System performance, searches, queries, list views, and even sandbox refreshing is a product of the build up of lots of data. Record locking can occur if large data volumes are required to satisfy an record update or a sharing requirement for example. HAF will work with your team to accommodate the data model changes, or implement an external data option to reduce the resource load in Salesforce.

If your organization is processing large amounts of data in excess of 10,000 child records for the same parent, "Skews" can occur that will negatively impact performance. HAF will provide guidance when designing a data model to solution the 3 types of data skews:

• Account data skew
• Ownership skew
• Lookup skew

The impact of Hyperforce on Scalability

We've already mentioned that Hyperforce represents the next generation of Salesforce standards for compliance, security, agility, and scalability. What does that mean, and how can HAF assist in implementing Hyperforce?

 

• Acceptance
• Unit
• Regression
• Beta
• API
• Sanity
• Security

• Onboarding
• Adoption
• Empowerment
• Measuring progress toward goals
• Prioritize goals
• Modify tabs and field names to align with your company’s conventions and processes
• Push and Pull help guidance
• Embed videos with Einstein Analytics

Here’s a summary of the top 10 points from the Salesforce Well-Architected Framework on resilience:

1. Resilient Systems: Focus on building systems that can recover from failures quickly.
2. Failure Isolation: Ensure that failures in one part of the system don’t affect the whole system.
3. Redundancy: Implement redundancy in critical components.
4. Automated Recovery: Use automation to recover from failures.
5. Scalability: Design systems to scale to handle load without failure.
6. Monitoring: Implement continuous monitoring to detect and respond to issues.
7. Incident Response: Develop a robust incident response plan.
8. Testing: Regularly test for resilience.
9. Change Management: Use change management practices to prevent unintentional disruptions.
10. Documentation: Maintain up-to-date documentation for recovery procedures.

 

Technical debt can be an unfortunate by-product of complex development or process modifications. It can create inefficiencies with operations at many levels, potentially impacting performance and functionality. HAF's iCRM will incorporate safeguards to reduce or eliminate associated risk.

Changes in business process can lead to technical conflicts within a CRM application. As part of iCRM methodology, HAF will document modifications or changes in settings that may lead to technical debt or loss of data. This document is easily accessible as a sequential (date defined) reference to track updates that impact complex updates. In addition, setting up Audit History can provide additional tracking information as well.

Below is an example* of how certain ongoing operations in Salesforce can impact Opportunity Splits and what steps need to be taken to avoid activation failure:

"Check for mass operations in progress, and make sure that all mass operations are finished. While splits are being enabled, a script temporarily disables validation rules, Apex triggers, and workflows for opportunity team records; mass reassignment of opportunity team members; and mass transfer of accounts and opportunities. If you enable opportunity splits while you’re running a mass operation, such as Mass Transfer or Mass Reassign Team Member, enablement of splits can fail."

*Available in Salesforce Help