Aligning Salesforce with a company's strategic needs is key to maximizing its value. Replatforming is more than a technical migration: it's a transformation that takes full advantage of platform innovations.
Salesforce replatforming is a key topic for companies looking to optimize their CRM and adapt to technological and business changes. This process is not limited to a simple technical migration;=. This is a strategic transformation to maximize the value of the platform and align its capabilities with user needs.
Laurent Dupuytout, Partner at Deloitte Digital, offers an analysis of the challenges and opportunities related to Salesforce replatforming. This article aims to help decision-makers — CxO, business owners, and project managers — structure their approach, anticipate risk, and take full advantage of Salesforce innovations.
The article is structured around four main questions:
- Why talk about Salesforce Replatforming?
- What are the ambitions for a Replatforming project?
- What are the risks to anticipate?
- What is the implementation process?
Why talk about Salesforce Replatforming?
Since its launch in 1999, Salesforce has established itself as the world leader in CRM solutions, now covering the entire "Product-to-Cash" cycle and meeting the needs of companies in both BtoC and BtoB. Today, more than 80% of CAC 40 and SBF 120 companies use this platform. However, over the years, the gap between Salesforce's current capabilities and how some companies use it has widened.
This is what has noticed Laurent Dupuytout, who has been helping companies for more than 25 years to improve their customer relations around three fundamental axes: acquiring new customers, building their loyalty and increasing their shopping basket. Many companies deployed their first Salesforce bricks several years ago, and many of them are faced with a mismatch between Salesforce's current offering and their current use in their existing application landscape. This discrepancy raises an important question: replatforming.
As a leading Salesforce integrator, Deloitte Digital is regularly called upon for replatforming projects, involving significant stakes and significant risks.
Unlike a simple technical migration, these projects represent real strategic transformations. Poorly prepared or poorly executed, the repercussions for companies can be considerable: aborted projects, squandered budgets, declining adoption of solutions. These consequences are all the more critical in a context where investment budgets and available resources are under great pressure in the face of increasingly demanding end customers.
What are the ambitions for a Replatforming project?
The goal of companies should be to continuously align their Salesforce CRM platform with the current and future needs of their businesses. This strategic alignment aims to create sustainable competitive advantages that drive revenue growth, improved customer experience, and reduced operational costs.
Bridging the gap between current capabilities and strategic needs
However, once the deployment project is complete, a large number of companies limit themselves to so-called "minimal" maintenance of their platform. They neglect the innovations introduced by Salesforce through its three annual updates or its new products, such as Slack or Revenue Cloud. These maintenance activities focus primarily on correcting anomalies and incorporating small changes, without taking full advantage of the opportunities offered by new features or technological advancements in the Salesforce catalog. These new features are also opportunities to review end-to-end processes across the entire application ecosystem in place.
When the gap between the platform's current capabilities and the projected strategic needs becomes too great, companies are forced to launch a replatforming project. This process involves thoroughly revising the Salesforce platform to realign it with business priorities and anticipate future developments.
Salesforce Replatforming represents a major opportunity for companies. It allows them not only to optimize their tools but also to strengthen their competitiveness. This includes improving the customer experience, increasing the retention of existing customers, and driving sales through better leveraging of data and processes.
The causes of replatforming
Multiple Salesforce instances increases costs and complicates management.
At Deloitte Digital, we've identified five main causes that drive the use of replatforming:
The evolution of business needs
Companies must adapt to an environment where competitive pressure continues to grow, while pursuing objectives of increased operational efficiency. This is often accompanied by a desire on the part of the business lines to maximize the adoption of existing solutions. The objective is to provide employees with more efficient and ergonomic tools, in a logic of symmetry of attention, where the employee experience is as careful as that of the customers.
Salesforce's Continuous Innovation
Salesforce stands out for its sustained pace of innovation, which is manifested through several major axes:
- Regular updates: Three new releases per year ensure a platform that is constantly improving.
- Functional expansion with new clouds: Solutions such as Revenue Cloud or Data Cloud enrich the initial scope of the CRM, offering extended capabilities to meet specific needs.
- New products for better interconnection: The acquisition of solutions such as Slack or Mulesoft makes it possible to improve internal collaboration and integration with the entire information system.
- A verticalized offer adapted to the sectors: Specialized Clouds (Financial Cloud, Manufacturing Cloud, etc.) meet the specific needs of certain industries, thus reducing tailor-made developments.
- Artificial intelligence for business processes: With Agentforce and the Einstein Suite, Salesforce automates processes and augments team capabilities with predictive and intelligent tools.
Organizational complexity
Internal dynamics, such as acquisitions or decentralized governance models, frequently lead to a proliferation of Salesforce instances. These bodies, often organized by country, division or business unit, are generally poorly harmonized and poorly interconnected. This fragmentation generates high maintenance costs and limits the ability to take full advantage of synergies between the different entities.
Growing technical debt
Technical debt is a major barrier to the evolution of Salesforce systems. It is the result of several factors:
- Excessive specific developments: These customizations make evolutions complex. As one customer points out: "Specific developments are like cholesterol: you need them, but only good ones." Avoiding unnecessary customizations is a constant challenge to ensure a maintainable and scalable solution.
- Obsolete features: Some customizations developed in the past are now available as standard on the platform, making them superfluous.
- Salesforce Upgrades: While Salesforce is backward compatible in the long term, getting the latest innovations sometimes requires complex updates:
- In 2015, the introduction of the Lightning interface replaced Classic; however, some customers still partially use Classic nine years later.
- In 2021, the replacement of Process/Workflow Builders by Flow Builder required a significant adaptation.
- More recently, Revenue Cloud is set to replace CPQ, forcing companies to consider migrating to the new solution.
- Old solutions remain usable but limit access to recent innovations, as all new developments are based on current technologies.
- Evolutions of third-party or integrator systems: For example, Tibco's announced end of life is forcing companies to rethink their integration strategy and adjust their technology ecosystem.
The reduction of technical debt also allows for reductions in maintenance costs. For example, replacing custom workflows with standardized Flow Builder features can lead to maintenance cost reductions of up to 30%.
Challenges related to mergers and acquisitions (M&A)
Mergers and acquisitions or other strategic movements often require a profound overhaul of information systems. This includes slicing, migrating, or transforming Salesforce environments to harmonize customer processes and maximize the expected benefits of these operations.
These factors often combine to fully justify a replatforming project, but also underscore the importance of a structured approach to mitigate risk.
What risks should be anticipated?
Replatforming projects mobilize significant financial and human resources. However, the results are not always there. These projects, which are often complex and ambitious, put significant pressure on project teams, who must quickly deliver tangible results while mastering the many challenges inherent in this type of initiative.
At Deloitte Digital, we've identified six main reasons why replatforming projects are struggling or failing. These lessons are valuable for anticipating and overcoming obstacles:
1. Approach replatforming as a simple technical project
Replatforming projects are often perceived primarily as technical initiatives, due to the technological complexity involved.
- These projects require rigorous control of technical environments, optimized release management and the strict application of management rules. To illustrate this complexity, replatforming can be compared to the operation of changing the engine of an aircraft in mid-flight.
- However, this technical dimension should not obscure the essential: a replatforming project must be above all driven by business issues. Success is based on close collaboration between technical and business teams. They must be fully involved from the design phase and throughout the project. Without their support, the project is doomed to failure. Structuring decisions must be taken according to the priorities set by the business lines and aligned with clear KPIs.
2. Underestimating data-related constraints
Data management is a central issue in replatforming projects, particularly in the context of merging Salesforce instances or migrating to verticalized clouds. It is not simply a matter of transferring data from one system to another, but of harmonizing its meaning and use between different systems. This project is often underestimated by companies, which tend to start it too late and with insufficient resources. The implementation of a single and consistent repository is essential to guarantee the quality and reliability of data in the new environment. Poor management of this aspect can lead to inconsistencies, slow down the project, and jeopardize its success.
3. Not integrating the AI issue
AI will profoundly transform the way we work, and this change is already underway. Agentforce is already available on the platform and many "Proofs of Concept" carried out by customers are underway. These new opportunities to improve but above all to rethink processes must be an integral part of future replatforming projects.
4. Forgetting about user experience
A replatforming project offers a unique opportunity to rethink the user experience (UX). Beyond a technical migration, it is also an opportunity to improve the ergonomics of the solution by optimising:
- Information positioning
- Page length
- The sequence of screens
- Or the number of clicks needed to complete a task
Salesforce, in its current versions, offers advanced customization capabilities that allow the interface to be precisely tailored to the specific needs of end users. This is particularly relevant for processes that require specific flows or developments. Neglecting this aspect means missing a valuable opportunity to improve user adoption and overall satisfaction.
5. Neglecting governance issues
Governance is a key factor in the success of a replatforming project. It is directly linked to the perception and positioning of the project within the company. Poorly defined or insufficiently anchored, it can lead to a lack of interest among stakeholders, especially business lines that might perceive the project as a constraint rather than an opportunity. It is therefore crucial to involve all relevant stakeholders from the outset and throughout the project. This not only ensures better coordination between teams, but also anticipates potential resistance and responds to it effectively.
6. Underestimating the importance of organizational change
A sixth critical factor that is often forgotten concerns organizational change management. Replatforming is not only a technological transformation: it is also a human transformation. End users must be supported in this transition so that they can fully embrace the new tools and processes. This involves:
- Clear communication on the objectives of the project and its expected benefits.
- Training tailored to the specific needs of users.
- Ongoing post-deployment support to answer questions and quickly resolve any issues.
Ignoring this aspect can lead to limited adoption of the new tool or active resistance to change.
These six difficulties can have a heavy impact on a replatforming project: delays, budget overruns, or even abandonment of the project. In all cases, they generate dissatisfaction among stakeholders (customers, internal users or management), thus compromising the expected added value of replatforming.
But by adopting a structured approach and following a few key principles, it is quite possible to avoid them and secure the success of the project.
What approach should be adopted to guarantee the success of a Replatforming?
Implementing a Salesforce replatforming project is a complex strategic initiative that requires careful preparation. To ensure success, it is essential to plan each key step well.
The Planning Phase
The planning phase is crucial to lay the foundation for a successful project. It should include a thorough analysis of the needs, objectives, and available resources:
- Assess your specific needs: Identify the business goals and problems that replatforming needs to solve. This includes improving the customer experience, optimizing internal processes, and reducing operational costs.
- Analyze current business processes: Map your existing processes to understand how they work and identify inefficiencies or redundancies.
- Identify gaps and opportunities: Compare what already exists with what Salesforce can offer to identify gaps that need to be filled and maximize value.
- Set short- and medium-term objectives and identify the associated KPIs that should serve as a "compass" of the project to make the right arbitration decisions when necessary.
- Build a solid business case: Evaluate the costs (licenses, internal/external resources), the expected benefits (efficiency, ROI, cost reduction) and anchor everything in a logic of measurable value.
- Develop a solid project plan with a realistic timeline and key milestones.
- Allocate the necessary human, financial and technical resources.
- Establish a clear governance structure to align the interests of all stakeholders.
- Choose your integrator carefully based on their understanding of your business challenges, the assets they offer to accelerate and secure the project, and their commitment to your success.
Defining your technological approach
The planning phase is crucial to lay the foundation for a successful project. It should include a thorough analysis of the needs, objectives, and available resources:
Replatforming a Salesforce platform requires a thorough analysis of the available technology options. Here is a breakdown of the main elements to consider when choosing the right technological approach:
- Adopt a flexible architecture: Composable or microservices approaches allow for rapid adaptation to business needs. An API-first strategy is to be preferred and the use of native connectors, using native connectors as much as possible.
- Strengthen your data strategy: Data extraction, cleaning, transformation and validation must be thought out before it is integrated. For example, in a recent project led by Deloitte DIgital, the use of an internal Deloitte Digital SFDCUtility™️ accelerator combined with a Conemis (a market tool dedicated to automating migration tasks) reduced migration costs by 50%.
- Automate your workflows: Relying on low-code/no-code tools allows you to quickly create automated workflows with tools like MuleSoft RPA or Einstein Automate
- Integrate AI by design: Agentforce and Data Cloud boost the business value delivered by the replatforming project. The use of AI to facilitate developments on the platform (in compliance with compliance rules).
- Deploy CI/CD pipelines: Tools such as GitLab, Jenkins or Azure DevOps help accelerate the secure deployment of new features.
- Secure quality with automated testing: Test performance, security, scalability, and features continuously to ensure a smooth and surprise-free go-live. This allows the performance, security and functionality of the new platform to be validated before it goes into production. Scale-out testing ensures that the platform can handle the expected volume of users and transactions without performance degradation.
Conclusion
Salesforce replatforming is a major strategic opportunity for companies looking to align their CRM with their business ambitions, while capitalizing on Salesforce's technological innovations. However, this requires careful preparation, robust governance, and proactive risk management to ensure success.
At Deloitte Digital, we support our clients in these complex projects thanks to our in-depth expertise, our technological accelerators and our in-depth knowledge of the business issues. Our goal is to maximize the value of your Salesforce investments, while minimizing the associated risks.
Diagnose the maturity of your platform now
If you are considering replatforming or want to assess the maturity of your current platform, we suggest you start with a strategic diagnosis. The objective of this first step is to identify opportunities for improvement and define a clear action plan. We also offer you the opportunity to benefit from an exploratory workshop with our experts to delve deeper into your specific challenges and discover how Deloitte Digital can support you in this transformation.
Do you want to transform your challenges into levers for growth and innovation?
80
%
More than 80% of CAC 40 and SBF 120 companies use Salesforce.
Major Salesforce updates are released every year.
60
%
of CRM transformation projects fail due to a lack of change management.
Laurent Dupuytout
Laurent accompagne ses clients dans leur transformation digitale pour améliorer les pratiques de management et de relation client. Il a mené plus d’une centaine de projets dans ce domaine notamment en partenariat avec Salesforce. Avant de rejoindre Deloitte, Laurent a eu plusieurs postes de direction dans les sociétés de services et de conseil. Laurent a débuté sa carrière chez L'Oréal comme auditeur interne puis comme contrôleur de gestion au Royaume-Uni et en France.