Exec Summary

Over 11+ years I’ve seen hundreds fail with SF.

These are the things they usually had in common:

• Rushing implementation
• Lack of process
• Lack of metrics
• Delegating to non-revenue leaders
• Technical, not strategic, requirements
• Leadership checked out
• Uploading too much data
• Blame game, then starting over

And the companies who succeeded:

• Committed to make it work
• Had clear vision and processes
• Worked with the right consultants

I spent 3 years at Salesforce watching half my customers waste hundreds of thousands of dollars per year on license fees while failing to get their team to use Salesforce and/or drive any impact on their revenue.

Since then, I’ve spent another 8 years as a consultant implementing Salesforce for hundreds of other companies, mostly growth-stage B2B SaaS.

I’ve seen every angle of this.

I’ve seen hundreds of companies fail to even get their team to use Salesforce.

I’ve seen hundreds more force usage but fail to see any improvement in revenue production.

And I’ve seen many others run their GTM team like a Swiss watch. These companies used Salesforce to drive the right actions to scale their companies to hundreds of millions – sometimes billions – of dollars of revenue.

In those 11+ years, I noticed the companies that failed made these common mistakes…

Implementing Salesforce in 1-2 Weeks

One of the first questions I always ask people is, “When do you want Salesforce fully up and running”. Many want it “yesterday” and press for it to be done in a week or two.

Somehow they’ve grown to tens of millions of dollars in revenue without Salesforce, or without it working properly, but now they need it in place in a week. I’ve never heard a good explanation for why.

Lack of Process

Salesforce, like any tool, is there to help the team execute processes. Typically, they’re the processes for outbound prospecting, routing and managing inbound leads, and/or managing qualified sales opportunities.

Companies often fail with Salesforce because they have no clear GTM process or sales process defined. Their CRM is slapped together with no thought, no strategy, and no foundation. It’s like a body without bones.

Lack of Metrics

Lack of process extends itself into lack of metrics. CEOs consistently tell me their #1 priority for Salesforce is visibility into their business. This usually means they want to see how much pipeline they have, meetings, activity, etc.

Unfortunately, without a clear process, these numbers are almost always meaningless. Reps feel pressure to show pipeline, so every meeting becomes a new opportunity. Or they feel pressure to show a high Close Rate, so they wait until they get a verbal before creating that opportunity. What kind of helpful data can you expect to get from that?

Either way, leadership has zero real visibility into the business.

Delegating to Non-Revenue Leaders

Companies who failed with Salesforce often delegated it to a controller, an EA, office manager, IT, etc.

Revenue leaders see Salesforce as a database to store contacts and opportunities and not much else. There’s no process mapped out so they think they can delegate this to anyone in the organization to hire a consultant and just build it out.

This almost always results in a system the salespeople don’t want to use. And since the person owning the project isn’t their boss, salespeople just ignore them and continue selling the way they always did.

Inevitably this conflict is brought to the VP of Sales, CRO, CEO, etc. and they almost always side with sales and blame the person they delegated the project to for failing to implement it properly. Wow!

I’ve personally been in this situation myself, in my first ever implementation, long before I worked at Salesforce. I was one of the junior members of the sales team and I implemented Salesforce for the company. I understood what we needed to do, but I also understood that the senior salespeople didn’t want to use it. They liked doing things their way and nothing I said or did was going to change that.

I left the company shortly thereafter. Then they called me back. They realized their failure and asked for my help again, this time as a consultant……..six years later. Yep! It took six years to fix this mistake. Six more years running sales from Excel and other failed CRMs!

Slapping Together a List of Requirements

One of the major mistakes I made in this implementation was slapping together a list of requirements. We had a fairly complex pipeline report we were producing in Excel and I was told that migrating this into Salesforce was the top priority.

This translated into a list of requirements for objects and fields in Salesforce to feed this report and the workflow for the team to enter the data. None of this really had anything to do with generating more revenue, only reporting on it, and I’ve seen hundreds of companies approach this in the same way.

I built Salesforce to these exact requirements, even producing an Excel export that perfectly mirrored the one we had, with colors and logos and everything. I thought it was a huge win and we presented the big reveal to the CEO. He was unimpressed. He said “Salesforce is supposed to help us make money, not just produce a report!”

I was embarrassed I’d been so naive. And yet, I’ve seen so many people, with decades more experience than I had at this time, make the same mistakes. Salesforce cannot help the team grow revenue if there isn’t a clear process in place to do it. It’s not magic.

Fits and Starts, Leadership Checked Out

Leadership is often completely checked out of this process and the person or team running the implementation is getting pulled in 8 different directions. The project goes in fits and starts, often taking months or even years to be completed. Leadership then comes in at the 11th hour to review everything, says it’s all wrong, and asks everyone to start over.

This is exactly what happened in my first implementation. The CEO and ELT greenlit the project and then checked out. The only reason he spoke to me again was because we needed more budget for licenses. He said no and checked out again. They he repeated this process multiple times, with other CRMs, for the next six years, with the same results.

Salesforce is the central nervous system of the revenue team and if it’s not treated as the number one priority, the tool driving all other priorities in GTM, then it often fails.

Uploading Too Much Data

Another symptom of a lack of process is trying to get full and perfect data. You want every company and every contact in your Total Addressable Market in Salesforce so you can start working them tomorrow.

Unfortunately, this is often 100X the number of accounts you can work, so you end up spending a lot of time and money for nothing, to just create records in Salesforce that will be outdated long before anyone ever looks at them.

It’s far better to have a clear Capacity Plan and Territory Plans and then upload the data your team actually needs to go execute those plans. This also costs a lot less money.

Blaming the PM/Consultant and Starting Over

When revenue leaders are not willing to commit themselves to making this work, there’s nothing an internal project manager or external consultant can do.

In these instances I’ve seen so many leaders blame these people, fire them, and then hire someone else to repeat the same mistakes all over again. I’ve seen some companies do this 2X, 3X, 4X, 5X times. I saw the company I worked for try and fail at this for 6+ years. They switched PMs, consultants AND CRMs, starting with Salesforce, then trying something else, then coming back to Salesforce.

And the Companies That Succeeded…

Of the hundreds of companies I’ve worked with over the years, the ones that simply committed themselves to making it work succeeded ~100% of the time. I cannot think of a single example of any of them failing.

Sure they might have hired the wrong consultant, or had an integration not work as expected, made some mistakes and had to reconfigure some things. This is all common.

Every revenue leader I have met that had a clear vision for how they wanted to run the GTM process – and how they wanted to use Salesforce to do it – eventually got there.

Why? Because it’s the process that matters, not the tech. It’s getting the team to do the things they need to do, holding them accountable, measuring what works and what doesn’t work, and continuing to iterate.

There is no tool that will magically do that for you.

To learn more about the foundational elements necessary to achieve this, see our Revenue Efficiency Pyramid.