WE ARE NOT GETTING VALUE FROM OUR SALESFORCE! WE’VE BURNED THROUGH A LOT OF MONEY!

These are some of the comments I get from CEOs, CFOs, CROs, CSOs and other executives.

Why?  Well it’s because they believed the grand statements of the Salesforce sales team, BUT instead of improving things and helping their teams succeed, they have:-

• ended up with something that is difficult to use,
• not helping the teams and,
• not providing the information that management needs.

In other words a very expensive dump for customer data!!

So how did this occur? and how can you avoid this and get things right?  Let me explain some of the key issues, and then provide an approach that can enable you to get your Salesforce solution correctly in place and really help to improve your business results.

HOW DID THIS OCCUR?

Well there are lots of reasons as to how, and I thought I would illustrate them with some of the more frequent comments from clients:-

• Finance thought we needed this, we bought the licenses and someone in finance configured it….but the finance team never spoke to sales or marketing on what we needed
• Our implementation partner, recommended by Salesforce, said they could get the solution in place really quickly using their ‘Agile’ approach…they did a couple of workshops and then started setting up the solution..they told us they needed to do customisations because of the way we do things, which cost us more money..and then told us it was ready and left…nobody in our team quite knew what was done..and there was no documentation
• We ended up with a whole set of fields that the sales reps had to complete which was taking up lots of their time…and no one knew why that data was needed…it became so tedious that the sales reps reverted back to their own spreadsheets
• Everything was free format entry and everyone used their own terminology…so the data became unusable…and hence we extracted to spreadsheets and after some manipulation did our reporting offline.

Sound familiar? I am sure there are other similar comments.

So how can we avoid this same situation on your Salesforce implementation & solution?

HOW TO GET YOUR SALESFORCE SOLUTION RIGHT FOR YOUR BUSINESS

As you might expect there are several things that you need to get right and I could not really do justice to the full set in this short post.

So what I would like to concentrate on is the ONE thing that from my experience is pretty much top of the list.

That is 

“Focus and map the key end-to-end process or processes that will drive business improvement”

 What do we mean by this.  Well too often the approach is to configure ‘the technology’, because it’s new, ‘easy’ to set up, has lots of features and it’s gotta work right?

Well NO - we’ve just noted above that it doesn’t work.

So what you do is:-

• Work with executives and business leaders to define the key objectives and improvements that are critical for their strategy
• Then map those to the functional areas that are going to be involved - so typically that would be Marketing, Sales, Service and Finance
• Then run workshops to determine how the tasks/activities are performed currently
• Then use process analysts and Salesforce consultants to join up the steps that lead to the output desired
• Once you have that draft end to end process, then review that with the business leads to get the pains & issues surfaced, then simplify the process
• That gives you the simplified end to end process!

Once you have that then everything else flows in alignment - the key data, details like approvals, integrations, and key reporting.

So there you have it - note that the technology (Salesforce) supports this rather than taking the lead.

This has worked successfully for me in small, medium and large Salesforce programmes… and also through the various experiences I have developed my version of an optimised ‘Lead to Cash’ process.  I would be happy to discuss - just reach out to me.

So don’t end up with a sub optimal Salesforce solution - focus on the end to end process…and see the improvements follow.

Try it out - Good Luck!