The capacity building approach to implementing Salesforce

At the risk of making myself sound old, I’ve seen a lot of charities go through the process of implementing Salesforce over the years. In this post I want to share what I take to be the most sustainable way to do this.

This approach is particularly suited to implementing a CRM like Salesforce, which sits right in one corner of the capability-complexity axis I’ve written about before (Salesforce is high capability, high potential complexity). Salesforce is not the right choice for every organisation, but for the purpose of this post I’ll assume it is. The question then is how to maximise capability and minimise complexity.

A conventional implementation of Salesforce might go like this. A charity gathers requirements in house. Staff recognise this as the opportunity of a lifetime, so the requirements document very quickly gets very long. But because people also don’t know what they don’t know, lots of things that could make a big difference also don’t make it into the sprawling list of requirements. The charity then puts out a tender (fixed budget, of course) for an implementation partner.