Salesforce implementation guide: phases, timeline and checklist
The five phases of a Salesforce implementation, what happens in each, what drives the timeline, and a checklist to use before you sign a statement of work.
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We help Madison-area software, insurance, manufacturing and health organizations get more from Salesforce, working from St. Louis in the same time zone.
Photo: Josh Sorenson / Unsplash
Abstrakt Solutions is a Salesforce Consulting Partner that serves companies across the Madison region, remotely and on site. Madison is one of our focus markets.
Madison is roughly a six-hour drive from our St. Louis office, or a short flight, and we share Central Time, so on-site sessions are simple to plan.
Figures cover the Madison, WI Metro Area (WI).
Information is the largest private sector in the Madison metro, with finance and insurance second, an unusual mix driven by software and a major insurer. The Madison Region Economic Partnership (MadREP), whose regional economic development role passed to the Greater Madison Chamber of Commerce in December 2025, listed a health-records software developer in Verona and a national property and casualty insurer in Madison among Dane County’s largest employers, next to the flagship university, its academic health system and state government. Its information technology page cited Forbes naming the region one of America’s top five locations for information jobs, with strengths in healthcare IT, software publishing, computer systems design and games development.
MadREP’s bioscience page said the sector is driven largely by the flagship university and named a cancer diagnostics company, a life-science reagents maker, a drug development services firm and a scientific equipment supplier among its major employers. MadREP also described the university as consistently ranked among the top ten universities for research and development, with over $1.3 billion in research investment in 2019, and University Research Park, a university affiliate founded in 1984, supports early-stage and growing companies. In its wider eight-county region, MadREP counted national catalog brands in Dodgeville, selling apparel, and in Monroe, selling food gifts. Its priority sectors included advanced manufacturing, agriculture and food, bioscience, ICT, healthcare, and logistics.
Largest private sectors, 2024 GDP share.
Software and health IT companies here, from large platform vendors to consultancies and game studios, need partner, subscription and customer success processes that Salesforce can tie together.
With a national insurer in the city, insurers, agencies and financial firms in the region need agent management, policyholder service and compliant marketing.
Advanced manufacturers and food and beverage producers across south-central Wisconsin need dealer and distributor management, quoting and ERP-connected service.
Health systems and diagnostics and life sciences companies near the university need patient, provider and customer service workflows built around privacy rules.
Regional target sectors: Advanced Manufacturing, Agriculture, Food & Beverage, Bioscience, Information Communications Technology, Healthcare, Logistics & Distribution (Madison Region Economic Partnership (MadREP), archived site (Wayback Machine) homepage, 'Primary Industry sectors' (capture 2025-12-29); covers MadREP's 8-county Madison Region, broader than the Madison MSA)
In a software-heavy economy, Salesforce orgs often accumulate custom code and integrations over time, and a health check helps decide what to keep before adding AI.
Insurers and agencies commonly need agents to work their own books privately while leadership sees the whole pipeline.
Life sciences firms spun out of university research typically need to add sales and support processes quickly as products reach the market.
Client names are anonymized and these projects are not specific to Madison. All case studies →
Written by the consultants delivering the work.

The five phases of a Salesforce implementation, what happens in each, what drives the timeline, and a checklist to use before you sign a statement of work.
Read the full post →Yes, although core Salesforce is not a professional services automation tool on its own. Many firms add a PSA product built natively on the platform from the AppExchange, or a lighter custom model for resources, skills and assignments. Store consultant certifications and availability as structured data, then link weighted pipeline to projected demand by skill so leaders see gaps before contracts are signed. Tableau can report utilization and bench time from the same records.
Financial Services Cloud includes an insurance data model with policies, claims, coverages and producers, so teams avoid building those objects from scratch. Policy administration and claims systems remain the systems of record; Salesforce draws on them to give agents and service staff a complete household view. An Experience Cloud portal can serve independent agents or policyholders, and consent tracking matters for any marketing. Abstrakt usually phases service workflows ahead of agent-facing features.
Research buyers are individual scientists inside large institutions, so relate principal investigators and lab managers to both the lab and the university account. Revenue Cloud or B2B Commerce can handle quotes and repeat orders for reagents or instruments, while collaboration and material transfer agreements work well as their own tracked records. Marketing Cloud Account Engagement suits the technical content scientists respond to, and grant cycles are worth capturing as fields because they often drive purchase timing.
Last reviewed September 26, 2026.
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