Using Salesforce CRM in a Global Corporation
Start with an operating model. Establish a cross-functional Center of Excellence with an executive sponsor, product owners for Sales, Service, and Marketing, and a release manager. Define a quarterly roadmap, change-control process, and non-production sandboxes for dev, test, and training. Treat Salesforce as a product with stakeholders, SLAs, and measurable outcomes.
Choose your org strategy. Decide between a single global org (one customer truth, shared processes) and multiple regional orgs (data residency, autonomy). Many enterprises use a single org with region-specific record types, page layouts, and permission sets, plus strict sharing and data residency controls.
Design a global data model. Standardize Accounts, Contacts, Leads, Opportunities, Products, Price Books, Cases, and Campaigns. Implement a global account hierarchy (ultimate parent → subsidiaries), account teams for complex relationships, and territory management for coverage rules. Define picklists, validation rules, and naming conventions to keep data consistent across regions. Integrate with your master data solution for de-duplication and golden IDs.
Harden security and compliance. Map the role hierarchy to your organizational structure. Use permission sets (not just profiles) for least-privilege access; layer org-wide defaults, sharing rules, and territory rules to control visibility. Apply field-level security and encryption to sensitive attributes. Capture consent and communication preferences and enforce regional privacy requirements with data classification and retention policies.
Operationalize sales excellence. Document the lead lifecycle (MQL → SQL), qualification criteria, and hand-offs. Build guidance around opportunity stages, close criteria, and mandatory fields. Use forecasting categories, territory-based assignment, and quotes/CPQ where applicable. Automate approvals for discounting and non-standard terms. Provide managers with pipeline health, coverage, and aging dashboards.
Deliver world-class service. Model entitlements and SLAs by product and region. Route Cases by skill, language, priority, and channel (email, web, chat, messaging, voice). Leverage Knowledge for reusable answers and deflection; expose it to customers via a portal. Track first-contact resolution, backlog, and SLA attainment. For field service, extend with work orders, scheduling, and mobile.
Unify marketing and revenue. Connect campaigns to leads and opportunities for multi-touch attribution. Enforce campaign member statuses and lead source hygiene. Provide a closed-loop dashboard that shows pipeline created, conversion rates, and ROI by segment and region.
Automate with intent. Prefer declarative tools (Flows, assignment, escalation, and validation rules). Use code only when necessary, and wrap it with robust tests. Establish integration patterns—APIs for synchronous updates, middleware for orchestration, and event streaming for near real-time sync with ERP, data lakes, and analytics.
Raise data quality. Apply deduplication, required fields at the right stage, and scheduled stewardship reviews. Monitor address, email, and phone validity. Publish data contracts to downstream systems and enforce schema tests in the release pipeline.
Think global: currency, language, and fiscal years. Enable multi-currency with dated exchange rates; define corporate and regional fiscal calendars; localize labels and help text. Provide language-specific templates and knowledge articles.
Drive adoption and insight. Embed dashboards for every role: reps (next actions), managers (forecast accuracy), executives (growth and churn). Train with real data, set usage KPIs (activity logging, forecast submission, data completeness), and celebrate wins tied to the dashboards.
Plan for scale. Mind platform limits, archive historical activities, and partition large data volumes by region or time. Review performance and security quarterly.