How Banks Can Maximize the ROI of Their Salesforce Investment

The banks and financial services organizations we work with are either adopting Salesforce Financial Services Cloud or rethinking their Salesforce instance to rightsize it for their organization.

That state of affairs points to two essential truths: first, Salesforce has established itself as the de facto system of record for experience management, and second, the platform is potent but not plug-and-play.

As a result, financial services institutions can't simply spin up an instance of Financial Services Cloud and expect results. To maximize the ROI of their Salesforce investment, they need to do three things: choose the right components, train their teams adequately, and implement effective management strategies. Here's an overview of why each step is essential.

1. Choose the Right Salesforce Components

Salesforce is feature-rich, but most banks don't need all its bells and whistles. 
Similarly, investing in the right components of the Financial Services Cloud is critical to maximizing your ROI. So, you must understand the platform's various components well enough to know which ones can improve your team's productivity and customers' experience.

For example, the self-service portal is a feature that benefits most organizations: many banking customers like having a self-service option, and that option also eases the workload on your customer care team.

But what about some of the advanced workflow automation Salesforce offers? If you're serving primarily commercial banking customers, you'll see significant efficiency gains, particularly when onboarding new accounts, as workflows are streamlined across the front, middle, and back offices. If your customer base is mainly retail, a product with fewer customization capabilities for onboarding and a lower price tag may better suit your needs.

The trick here is having in-depth knowledge about your organization (your customers, your existing tech stack, your employees, your goals) and Salesforce's capabilities. The most impactful setup will likely include some Salesforce and non-Salesforce functionality, whether custom-built or via third-party apps.

In other words, the most effective approach to embracing Financial Services Cloud is often to incorporate it as part of a composable architecture: choose the components that suit your needs and combine those with other elements to manage your budget.
However, building the right back end is only part of maximizing your Financial Services Cloud ROI. 

2. Train Your Teams to Use Salesforce

Salesforce is a compelling platform, but subscribing to and implementing it is not enough to deliver the outsized results their sales team promises—just as buying fancy new gym clothes is not enough to get you in shape (trust me, I've tried).

For Salesforce to deliver on its most significant promises, your team has to use it as intended, which means they need to learn and embrace a new way of working.

That won't happen by accident, and it won't happen overnight. I recommend investing in training from the outset. In many cases, the traditional wisdom on change management is best: find early champions to learn your new Salesforce-powered stack, get them excited about it, and use their enthusiasm (and success!) to inspire others.

Provide plenty of real-time and asynchronous support, such as training sessions, documentation, office hours, demos, etc. Communicate clearly when the new way of working will go live. 

Training and support are essential to enjoying ROI. If your team doesn't know how to use Salesforce, the platform will not benefit your bottom line; it will just be a costly data hub.
However, more than training your team to use Salesforce is required; your managers must also lead in a way that makes its use inevitable.

3. Manage for Salesforce Use

Try this phrase: "If it's not in Salesforce, it doesn't exist." Or, more likely for financial services organizations embracing a composable back end that includes Salesforce, "If it's not in our new system, it doesn't exist."

When you run sales meetings, look only at the leads and sales documented in your new system. When you assess the performance of engagement campaigns, look only at those tracked in your new system. And so on.

This leadership approach is crucial for realizing adequate ROI from your Salesforce investment. Without it, what inevitably happens is that a few holdouts continue using the old system, which has ripple effects for the whole team:

- Team morale takes a hit, which can push others to abandon Salesforce, which means,
- You won't be able to experience the efficiency and productivity gains at scale that you calculated when assessing your potential ROI for Salesforce.
- Your team may lose productivity and efficiency as managers try to manage two systems and working methods.

You must also account for the potential financial cost of maintaining multiple platforms and subscriptions that perform the same function.

Managing the new tech stack incentivizes everyone to hop over, even if they don't feel ready. Once everyone is working in the new system, you can focus on improving and looking for ways to maximize ROI.

Right Tech, Right Team, Right Task

For most financial institutions, maximizing Salesforce's ROI requires careful planning and execution, not only in choosing and implementing portions of the Financial Services Cloud but also in preparing your organization to take advantage of its capabilities.

Whether considering Salesforce for the first time or reconsidering your current use, approach your tech stack expecting that whatever you build will have elements of a composable platform: best-in-class software that best suits your needs, brought together by back-end integrations.

This approach lets financial institutions benefit from the high-power capabilities of industry-leading products while keeping IT spending in check—the essential elements of exceeding your ROI goals.

---