A practical checklist for teams planning a Salesforce rollout or a major re-implementation. Work through it with your admin, your executive sponsor, and your implementation partner. Anything you cannot tick off is a risk worth naming early.
Download the printable PDF checklist
1. Goals and scope
- Write down the top 3 business outcomes (not features)
- Name an executive sponsor and a day-to-day owner
- Agree on what is out of scope for phase 1
- Define success metrics and how you will measure them
- Agree on the budget range and the change-control process
2. Data
- Inventory data sources (spreadsheets, old CRM, ERP, marketing tool)
- Decide what to migrate and what to archive
- Clean duplicates before migration, not after
- Map every source field to a Salesforce field
- Define a unique key for each object to prevent duplicates
- Run at least one full test migration and compare record counts
- Plan a rollback if the cutover fails
3. Process and design
- Document the current sales, service, and handoff processes
- Agree on definitions for lead, account, contact, and opportunity
- Design page layouts per role, not one layout for everyone
- Pick stages and required fields that sales will actually fill in
- Decide where Flow, validation rules, or Apex fit (declarative first)
4. Security and access
- Define roles, profiles, and permission sets
- Set sharing rules and field-level security
- Turn on multi-factor authentication
- Plan sandbox access and who can deploy
5. Integrations
- List every system that must connect (ERP, email, marketing, billing)
- Choose native connector, middleware, or API for each
- Decide sync direction and who owns each field
- Plan error alerts for failed syncs
6. Testing and training
- Write test cases from real user stories
- Run user acceptance testing with actual end users
- Test reports and dashboards against known numbers
- Train by role, with short recorded sessions
- Create a one-page quick-start guide per team
7. Go-live and after
- Set a cutover date that avoids quarter-end
- Freeze changes in the old system during cutover
- Assign a hypercare owner for the first 30 days
- Set up an issue log and a weekly triage
- Check adoption (logins, records created) weekly
- Review data quality at 30, 60, and 90 days
- Plan a release calendar for future changes
- Schedule a post-launch retrospective
- Document admin runbooks (backups, user onboarding and offboarding)
- Revisit the roadmap at 90 days
Planning a Salesforce rollout or a clean-up of an existing org? Talk to the Ashapura Softech team.