Salesforce.com: 6 Areas To Watch After Rollout

In most cases, however, the perceived performance of SFDC in your headquarters buildings will likely be somewhat slower than with an on-premises application; conversely, it will be perceived as much faster in remote offices (particularly those located outside the United States). This is because any SaaS or Web 2.0 application tends to have fairly large page sizes, so any packet drops or other latency makes the page refreshes look very slow. These problems are particularly noticeable on marginal WiFi links. SFDC may give you a good excuse to do those base station upgrades you wanted anyway.

4. Access Control and Security

Of course, your team needs to configure the access control and security model, but it's the vendor that is ultimately responsible for enforcement. Salesforce.com has a pretty thorough role and profile-based security model, and it can be configured for access hours, network address, and other access controls. If a good measure of "sufficient security" is "the user's complain about too many access controls," Salesforce supports sufficient security and then some.

One area you'll need to investigate is information leak protection: I know of no SaaS system that includes features in this area. Make sure that your company's ILP software is configured to recognize Salesforce's .csv and .xls files, so that your policies are fully enforced for CRM data.

5. Data Quality As with any large system, data pollution is an inevitability. Business analysts and others will discover corrupted or duplicate data creeping into the system over time. Reports run for executives will start to show contradictory or confusing results. This is poisonous to a CRM system's credibility.

Whether you use temporary coders, data-entry clerks, or overtime hours of internal people, set aside some budget for a health check and cleanup cycle at least once a year. You'll almost certainly want a deduping or data cleansing tool, which at $3,000 per year or more is still money well spent.

You'll also want to devote quality time (from your team or specialized consultants) to identify the source of the data pollution problems, rectify them, and programmatically clean up the data. Data quality issues become dramatically more noticeable when the CRM system is integrated with other production systems. One company I know of had hundreds of duplicate accounts spuriously created every day due to integration problems with business partners' systems.

6. IT Team Skills Some of your staff will take System Administrator or Developer classes to become proficient with the details of the CRM package, of course. However, your team may also need some new lessons at a project management level, especially IT staffers dealing directly with business users who don't know or care much about technology. As more IT pros play roles akin to business analysts, listening and counseling skills will be important.