If you decide to adopt Salesforce, the world’s most popular CRM, you should be ready to face multiple implementation challenges, ranging from data migration complexities to user adoption issues. Navigating and solving all these possible challenges can be difficult, especially if your team members are not experienced enough, which can hinder the return on your CRM investment.
Therefore, it is no surprise that the majority (97%) of Salesforce adopters involve professional consultants to support their implementations, according to IBM’s State of Salesforce 2024–2025 report. After all, a reliable provider of Salesforce advisory services is well aware of all implementation pitfalls and risks and can leverage their deep platform expertise to help you solve these hurdles efficiently.
This article specifies the common Salesforce adoption challenges and highlights how professional consultants can address them.
1. Choosing the right Salesforce product and edition
The rich Salesforce ecosystem includes dozens of software products, with Data Cloud, Marketing Cloud, and Service Cloud as examples, each offering a different set of features. The functionality of the same Salesforce product can also vary depending on the specific CRM edition, which are presented by the Essentials, Professional, Enterprise, Unlimited, and Unlimited Plus plans.
If your company has not been using Salesforce previously, you can be confused when looking for a Salesforce product to address your key business needs. And in case you make the wrong selection and adopt an unsuitable product, your overall adoption ROI can be reduced. Luckily, a Salesforce consultant can help you make the right choice.
An experienced consultant can visualize the workflows of your marketing, sales, and service teams by using techniques such as workflow mapping and analyze these mappings to identify the teams’ pain points precisely. Based on the business analysis results, a consultant can recommend the most appropriate Salesforce product and edition, thereby ensuring that the adopted CRM solution fully meets your business requirements.
2. Migrating data to Salesforce seamlessly and securely
Migrating data from a legacy CRM system into the Salesforce CRM solution is a challenging and risky implementation activity. After all, without setting up proper data transfer, you risk corrupting or losing valuable customer data, which can lead to devastating consequences for your company, from serious business process disruption to reputational and financial losses.
A reliable Salesforce consultant can help you ensure seamless data migration and significantly reduce the associated risks. To begin with, a consultant can conduct a thorough audit of the data you are going to move, followed by data mapping to understand how to transfer and integrate this information into Salesforce efficiently. After that, a consultant can help you identify the right migration strategy and tools, estimate a migration budget accurately, and run data cleansing to prepare legacy data for migration.
On demand, third-party experts can also provide guidance throughout data migration to Salesforce. A consultant can help ensure that the migrated data is backed up properly before the transfer to safeguard it against the risk of data loss. Experts can also supervise the ETL process to ensure that the data is extracted from your current system and loaded into Salesforce faultlessly. Additionally, consultants can guide your team on how to perform post-migration testing to ensure the quality of transferred information and that the migration process went as intended.
3. Ensuring high Salesforce adoption among business users
Maintaining high user adoption is essential to the success of any software implementation project. After all, if your sales, marketing, or customer service reps refuse to use the new Salesforce CRM system in their day-to-day work or cannot leverage all its capabilities efficiently, you won’t get the expected Salesforce implementation ROI. Fortunately, you can achieve an advanced level of user adoption with the help of a professional Salesforce consultant.
Specifically, a consultant can conduct surveys and hold focus groups with your employees to accurately determine their functional and non-functional requirements for a future CRM solution. A consultant can then provide recommendations to your team on how to customize a Salesforce solution so that it fits the defined functionally and UI design requirement.
A consultant can also provide your business users with role-based training covering marketing, sales, data analytics, and other business functions in order to help you ensure that employees can use Salesforce efficiently. It can also guide your team on how to embed context-sensitive hints and guidelines right into the Salesforce interface to help users perform their tasks.
Once the Salesforce solution is deployed, a consultant can also help you assess user adoption metrics (user login counts, actions taken within the system, etc.) so you can check how employees get used to the new solution. A consultant can also collect feedback from your business users directly and use it to help your team further enhance the solution’s functionality, performance, or UI, thus helping you achieve even higher user engagement and retention rates.
Final thoughts
Whether you are going to adopt Salesforce CRM in order to streamline sales, field service, or other customer-facing processes, you will inevitably have to deal with the common Salesforce implementation challenges. You can either try to solve them on your own, which can be complicated for non-experts, or get support from certified consultants with a solid understanding of the Salesforce platform.
A reliable partner will navigate you through the common Salesforce adoption pitfalls and guide you on how to overcome them quickly and efficiently. A consultant can also take on the most challenging implementation aspects, from data migration to user onboarding and training, to help you ensure smooth and trouble-free Salesforce adoption.
