CASE STUDY 01 · SALESFORCE · CRM TURNAROUND
Turning Around an Underperforming Salesforce Investment
From poor adoption and unreliable customer data to a global CRM platform.
The Challenge
The organisation had already invested in Salesforce for its US sales team, but the implementation wasn't delivering the expected value. Users disliked the system, adoption was poor and confidence in customer information was low.
The CRM functionality within the organisation's ERP wasn't a viable alternative for a global sales organisation. Important capabilities were missing, including effective opportunity forecasting and a suitable mobile experience.
The challenge wasn't simply choosing the right CRM application. It was understanding why the existing investment hadn't worked and what the sales organisation actually needed.
The Diagnosis
I began by talking directly to Sales users to understand how they worked, what information they needed and why they weren't using the existing solution.
This revealed a fundamental problem with the customer data model.
The previous implementation had effectively created a one-to-one relationship between ERP ship-to records and Salesforce Accounts. That reflected the ERP's transactional structure rather than how Sales understood and managed customer relationships.
Consequently, salespeople encountered multiple apparently duplicate Accounts for the same physical customer, undermining their confidence in the system.
Salesforce had also been implemented largely as a standalone application rather than as part of the wider enterprise architecture.
My recommendation was to retain Salesforce, but redesign and reimplement it around the needs of the sales organisation and a more appropriate customer model.
The Approach
I took responsibility for the Salesforce reimplementation from initial discovery through to deployment and ongoing support, without relying on an external implementation partner or internal Salesforce delivery team.
I began by working directly with Sales users to understand their business processes, requirements and frustrations. I then developed an architectural approach that addressed the underlying problems rather than simply recreating the existing solution.
I explained my findings and recommendations to senior leadership, securing support for retaining Salesforce and redesigning the implementation around the needs of the global sales organisation.
A central architectural decision was to establish a reliable customer model that reflected how Sales managed customer relationships, rather than reproducing the ERP's transactional structure.
I implemented Salesforce Enterprise Territory Management to assign customer Accounts appropriately, giving salespeople clearly defined portfolios and a dependable foundation for Opportunities, forecasting, activities and reporting.
My responsibilities extended across business process modelling, solution architecture, Salesforce configuration, data modelling, security and permissions, reporting, dashboards, integration design, testing, deployment and user training.
I also designed the integration approach for Demo Requests to flow from Salesforce into the ERP, with ERP Order information subsequently made available within Salesforce.
Throughout the implementation, I combined architectural decision-making with hands-on delivery, ensuring the solution was practical, supportable and aligned with the wider enterprise landscape.
The Results
~3 months
Initial rollout
First meaningful Salesforce implementation delivered
~70
Initial Sales users
Supported by the first rollout
100+
Salesforce users
Following subsequent expansion
From an unsuccessful implementation to a global CRM platform
The first meaningful Salesforce implementation was delivered in approximately three months, initially supporting around 70 Sales users. The solution subsequently became the organisation's global CRM, supporting Sales teams across the US, UK, Europe and the rest of the world.
One of the most important improvements was also one of the simplest: salespeople finally had a reliable list of their customer Accounts.
Clearly assigned customer portfolios gave Sales greater confidence in their information and established a dependable foundation for managing Opportunities, forecasting and customer relationships.
Salesforce also became embedded in operational processes, including the submission of Demo Requests into the ERP.
The platform subsequently expanded to include Marketing Cloud and Service Cloud, with the Salesforce user population growing to more than 100. Later investment in deeper ERP integration enabled a more complete Customer 360, bringing Orders, Service Requests and CRM relationship information together.
Architectural Judgement & Lessons
The success of the reimplementation reinforced an important principle: choosing the right CRM platform is only part of the challenge. The solution must also reflect how the organisation works, how its data is structured and how CRM fits within the wider enterprise architecture.
Not everything could be delivered in the initial implementation. In particular, the more complete Customer 360 I wanted to provide depended on ERP integration investment that wasn't available at the time.
As the Salesforce estate subsequently expanded, further architectural questions emerged about the appropriate boundaries between CRM and ERP.
I challenged the increasing replication of ERP data and functionality within Salesforce, recognising the longer-term implications for system responsibilities, integration complexity and maintainability.
The experience reinforced the importance of making architectural decisions in the context of the whole business, not simply the capabilities of an individual platform.
It also demonstrated the value of combining independent judgement with practical delivery experience: understanding what should be built, why it should be built and how to make it work.