As we approach the end of the year, every business leader knows it’s crunch time. EOY planning is about setting the stage for a strong, successful 2025. But let’s be honest – it’s a beast of a task. Every successful business strategy boils down to one thing: clarity. Clarity on what worked, what didn’t, and where there’s room for more.
Before jumping into action, take a step back and evaluate: did you hit your targets for 2024? If so, how do you repeat or expand that success? If not, where did things fall short?
Strategic planning is about defining clear, measurable outcomes. The most effective companies use tools and frameworks to create plans that are agile yet robust – able to flex with market changes while staying laser-focused on top business goals.
This article provides a practical framework and actionable steps to maximize your Salesforce investment and align it with your key business objectives for 2025. Read on to learn how to leverage Salesforce as a strategic powerhouse to drive growth, improve efficiency, and achieve your most ambitious goals in the year ahead.
The Role of Salesforce in Strategic Planning
If your organization uses Salesforce, it should be front and center in your 2025 planning. Salesforce isn’t just a CRM – it’s a powerful ecosystem that, when used strategically, drives everything from sales growth to operational efficiency and data-driven insights.
Here’s how to plan out your Salesforce usage for maximum impact in 2025:
1. Translate Your Business Goals into a Salesforce Roadmap
Any effective Salesforce roadmap starts with clear business objectives. In today’s dynamic market, this clarity goes beyond typical KPIs – it’s about linking CRM initiatives to your strategic priorities to create measurable impact.
Ground Your Goals in Core Business Objectives
- Growth and revenue goals: Outline things like revenue targets, specific sales goals, and expected customer retention rates. Map these objectives back to Salesforce functionalities like sales pipeline optimization, account-based marketing, and customer engagement features.
- Customer-centric goals: If customer satisfaction and loyalty are critical, focus on CX metrics. Use Salesforce to identify gaps and high-impact moments in the customer journey and create targeted, personalized engagement that aligns with KPIs.
- Efficiency goals: Streamline operations by assessing where automation, workflow efficiencies, and data analytics can reduce costs and improve operational agility.
By purposefully linking Salesforce to strategic goals, you can transform it from a transactional tool to a growth catalyst. A Salesforce consulting partner can also help evaluate the investment needed to optimize or expand Salesforce capabilities – and forecast the impact on growth, retention, and long-term customer value.
2. Get a Salesforce Reality Check
With your objectives set, it’s time to gauge how well your Salesforce setup can serve your goals. Think of this as a strategic audit rather than just a technical check – it’s about ensuring your platform can support your ambitions and align with your roadmap for 2025.
Audit Key Areas
- Advanced feature utilization:
- Start by understanding the Salesforce features you’re currently using. Are there underutilized capabilities like AI-driven insights or workflow automation that could support your goals? What does adoption look like for your teams?
- Evaluate alignment with business goals for each feature, and assess whether it supports a core objective. For example, if customer personalization is a goal, is Salesforce’s AI or predictive analytics being leveraged to improve targeting?
- Document which features add measurable value and which could be more impactful with greater use or training.
- Data readiness and cleanliness:
- Identify where your data is coming from, such as customer service records, sales data, and marketing interactions. Ensure each source integrates seamlessly with Salesforce and provides reliable, up-to-date information.
- Check for data quality issues. Look for duplicate entries, incomplete records, or outdated information. Use powerful solutions like Salesforce Data Cloud to clean up inconsistencies and improve overall data accuracy.
- Establish a routine data audit schedule (monthly or quarterly) to maintain data quality and break down any departmental silos.
- Org reliability and flexibility:
- Stay on top of error messages. Every org sends out its fair share of error messages, and while some need quick action, plenty don’t. Are Apex exception emails landing in a shared, accessible inbox? And are fault paths set up correctly in your flows? These small steps make error management a lot smoother.
- Tech debt happens as your org grows. Fields lose relevance, automations get disabled, and old packages fall out of use. Scheduled automations might even be redundant. Regularly reviewing your tech debt with the right tools means you’ll catch these issues early, keeping your org lean and efficient.
- Identify deferred maintenance across your org and tackle it now. A little upkeep today goes a long way toward keeping your org reliable and flexible for what’s next.
These steps provide a structured approach to assessing your Salesforce environment’s readiness for 2025. Coastal’s complimentary Peak Performance Diagnostic offers a deeper dive into these areas, helping you map specific optimization opportunities across your Salesforce org.
3. Align Stakeholders and Foster a Strategic Salesforce Culture
Strategic planning is most effective when cross-functional teams share the same vision. Create a Salesforce culture where both technical and business leaders are aligned, informed, and empowered.
Steps to Engage and Align Teams
- Loop in the decision-makers – leaders from sales, marketing, operations, and customer service – at the start. Define clear priorities and success metrics that reflect each team’s goals within the bigger picture, ensuring everyone is aligned from day one.
- Set up collaborative workshops where teams can refine objectives, tackle data gaps, and dig into Salesforce use cases together. By pulling insights straight from those in the trenches, you’re not only creating alignment but also uncovering the practical needs that drive real outcomes.
- Design a roadmap that lays out Salesforce’s role in hitting company-wide goals and maps each team’s contributions. Prioritize initiatives using a simple impact-effort matrix, helping teams stay focused on the work that delivers the most value. When everyone is tuned in to the same vision, it’s easier to keep projects on track and the outcomes front and center.
- Establish a Salesforce center of excellence (CoE) or steering committee. Form a dedicated team with representatives from key departments. This CoE acts as a central governing body to ensure alignment on Salesforce strategy, best practices, and prioritization of initiatives. This fosters cross-functional collaboration, breaks down silos, and ensures consistent communication and decision-making.
By building a strategic Salesforce culture, you can drive organization-wide adoption. Then Salesforce becomes more than just a CRM; it evolves into a vital asset, unifying departments and empowering everyone to achieve shared goals.
4. Prioritize Your Salesforce Projects for Maximum Impact
With business goals clarified and stakeholders aligned, prioritize initiatives to balance immediate wins with long-term value.
Use an Impact-Effort Matrix to Prioritize
- High impact, low effort (quick wins): These are projects with clear benefits and minimal resource demand, perfect to build momentum and showcase early wins.
- Example: Implement Salesforce dashboards that simplify how data is shared across teams. A few hours of configuration can lead to widespread improvements in efficiency.
- High impact, high effort (strategic projects): Major projects, like advanced AI integrations or custom workflows, require planning and more resources. Sequence these over time, phasing them into your roadmap with quarterly milestones.
- Example: If you’re working on automating customer engagement through AI, start with a pilot in Q2. Measure the results, gather feedback, and refine before scaling further in Q3 and Q4.
- Low Impact, High Effort (Resource Drains): These initiatives may seem promising but yield limited benefits for the resources required. Review each with a critical eye to avoid resource sinks that don’t align with your larger goals.
- Example: Rethink complex, custom configurations or manual data work that add limited value to end users. Sometimes, simplifying processes can lead to better usability and fewer maintenance needs.
With these practical steps, your roadmap becomes more than just a list of tasks – it’s a dynamic, prioritized strategy aligned with your company’s key goals. The result? A Salesforce strategy that’s optimized for impactful results, both in the immediate term and long term.
5. Build a 2025 Salesforce Roadmap That Drives Business Strategy
Set Quarterly Priorities
Start Q1 with quick wins that deliver immediate value without heavy resource demands. These initial projects build momentum and show results early, laying a strong foundation for the year. Examples of impactful quick wins include:
- Optimize key dashboards and reports so that they reflect the metrics driving your 2025 strategy. Small adjustments to make data clearer and more accessible can go a long way in empowering teams to make faster, data-driven decisions.
- Streamline lead assignment rules to ensure leads are routed efficiently to the right teams, helping shorten response times and improve conversion rates – no heavy lifting needed.
- Refine the email templates you use in common customer communications to improve engagement with minimal effort.
- Host a training session focused on Salesforce features your team might be underutilizing. Quick guides or refresher workshops boost productivity and empower users to get more from the platform.
Establish Monthly and Quarterly Milestones
Break each initiative into monthly or quarterly targets to keep everything on track and ensure consistent progress toward your 2025 goals.
Allocate Resources and Assign Responsibilities
Define clear ownership for each initiative. Set up regular review sessions with stakeholders to monitor progress and make any necessary adjustments. By balancing quick wins with larger projects, your Salesforce roadmap remains an active, evolving asset contributing to immediate and long-term business goals.
Go Beyond the Basics With a Strategic Framework
Don’t let your Salesforce investment become just another line item in your budget. Make 2025 the year you unleash its full potential. By aligning Salesforce with your business goals, conducting a thorough audit, fostering collaboration, and prioritizing high-impact initiatives, you can transform it into a strategic powerhouse that drives results.
Coastal’s 2025 Salesforce Planning Toolkit is designed to support your EOY planning with strategic insights and a practical approach to Salesforce alignment. It’s not just about tools – it’s about a framework that delivers meaningful outcomes for your entire organization.
Toolkit Highlights:
- Quick wins guide: Practical adjustments to boost Salesforce effectiveness immediately.
- Self-assessment quiz: A guided quiz that identifies strengths, weaknesses, and untapped opportunities in your Salesforce instance.
- Peak performance diagnostic: A deep-dive evaluation to ensure your Salesforce instance is in top shape and fully aligned with strategic objectives.
- Data and AI workshop: Hands-on learning to leverage Data Cloud and AI to support 2025 goals.
Ready to supercharge your 2025 strategy? Download the toolkit here.
Summary
Supercharge your 2025 growth with a strategic Salesforce plan. Most businesses barely scratch the surface of what Salesforce can do, this guide shows you how to unlock its full potential and maximize your Salesforce ROI.
Connect Salesforce to your biggest goals, get your team’s full buy-in and support, and make it a core driver of your 2025 strategy.
This post was originally published on Salesforce Ben.
