Concept without an application is worthless. If it’s your CRM, it’s worse - it’s wasted budget.
Many companies have excellent concepts on how they want to use Salesforce. But many aren’t anywhere near it today.
I’ve worked in the Salesforce space for 15+ years, including as co-founder and Head of Client Services here at DoubleTrack since 2018.
One common challenge I see follows a similar path:
They’ve been using Salesforce for 5-10 years
Most stakeholders aren’t familiar with the system and much of its sophistication
Only out-of-the-box functionality is used
That last point can’t be emphasized enough: Salesforce has excellent out-of-the-box functionality when implemented correctly and aligned to your business objectives.
But over time, teams think that’s enough - and investment lags.
After a few years, company leaders discover Salesforce isn’t meeting their needs anymore and now they have to play catch-up with major projects.
Click to jump to a section: Ownership | Don't Ignore OOTB | Thinking Through ROI | A Way Forward
An underlying issue: ownership
Ownership in this context applies to the team(s) making decisions on the platform’s future. This can default to the team using it most (or who adopted it first), with others working in their own areas of the platform but in a siloed manner.
For instance, a sales VP may be primarily responsible for Salesforce, but the service team spends plenty of time in the platform, too. Both teams should be interacting and pulling someone else from the client team leadership to help define and evolve their Salesforce org into something more well-rounded than just being a sales tool.
The opposite is true, too: it can’t only be a service tool, led by a Chief Customer Officer or VP of Support, that isn’t used for sales.
We see a lot of one-sided situations where other teams are a bit of an afterthought when it comes to Salesforce evolution.
This leads to:
One team driving the main strategy for this critical platform
Siloed customer experiences that leave CX opportunities on the table
In larger organizations, an independent Revenue Operations function - or at least, a dedicated resource in IT teams - serves best by acting as a “neutral” team working with all others to make progress happen.
But for many companies, this isn’t feasible. We typically see Salesforce-related operations led by someone in the Sales organization (it is called “SALESforce…”).
If this is you, what’s a way forward?
You need buy-in from leadership who has oversight from a company-wide vantage point. This influences decisions around the direction your company's going and brings together disparate teams around similar goals and objectives.
At the very least, Director-level and above for IT, Finance, Sales, and/or Support should work together on the core needs. In many organizations, Marketing is an active user, as well, and should be a participant in these discussions. These can be had via regular meetings or even a more formal Center of Excellence model with representatives from each department chiming in on current and future needs.
Getting Everything OOTB
When I said Salesforce has excellent out-of-the-box (OOTB) functionality, I meant it!
Sales Cloud (a.k.a. Your base instance of Salesforce) features the right modules and data flows necessary to build your business upon, especially from a sales/marketing perspective. This includes lead qualification, opportunity management, basic quoting functionality, and reporting.
Service Cloud and Experience Cloud allow foundational elements for Service and Support teams to have easier access to customer information, route requests, and add new cases from web forms, chats, emails, and phone calls.
Revenue Cloud gives an ability to streamline quoting, automate billing, and enhance revenue management.
All of these bring a lot to the table with a good implementation, yet it’s almost guaranteed that gains are left unrealized.
Take these real-life examples I’ve encountered:
Opportunity Management
A Sales-led implementation of Salesforce went smoothly, and the team was excited to leverage Leads vs. Contacts and Opportunities.
However, the company didn’t edit the Opportunity stages to match their current pipeline stages. They also failed to route notifications to the appropriate leader when a deal was close to the finish line, resulting in additional back-and-forth between reps and managers to figure out what was needed around executing close plans.
In short, the team got a good start, but missed becoming even more effective at selling.
Quoting
A different company’s Sales team previously quoted everything from an Excel-based price book. This made updating pricing a challenge + invited user error if they accidentally selected the wrong item(s).
When they moved to Salesforce, the team failed to properly adopt the basic quoting processes within the tool. They continued importing Excel-based quotes onto Salesforce opportunities because they thought it was “too complicated” to build and maintain a product catalog and pricing.
They missed on:
Speeding up time-to-quote by keeping reps in the same platform for all necessary stages
Bolstering quote accuracy
Advanced capabilities, such as increased automation through Salesforce CPQ and then automated invoicing through Salesforce Billing, that build upon these foundational elements
Support Escalation
A third client added Service Cloud to bring customer support-related conversations into one platform and link with existing sales accounts / contacts.
However, OOTB functions such as implementing service-level agreements and automated escalations based on certain events (i.e. a ticket goes unresolved for 3 business days), meant certain cases weren’t quickly resolved.
Churn rate improvements didn’t come as quickly as expected from implementing this new technology - because the full scope of processes wasn’t built to take advantage of everything available!
Calculating ROI
You’ve likely heard consultants - including ourselves! - talk about getting greater ROI. The challenge is identifying how to stay accountable to it.
In other words, what goals should Salesforce investments and initiatives be held to?
The answer defines every engagement. For instance, if a project’s sole focus is to enable the Sales team to quote faster, the KPIs will be far different than if you’re integrating Service Cloud and Experience Cloud so customers have more self-help options streamlined issue management and tracking.
Here’s a few suggestions on relevant KPIs that might apply to you, based on the team impacted by your project:
Sales
The ultimate aim is greater closed-won revenue, but that alone isn’t enough to understand if your CRM investment is working.
Look at average time-to-quote, sales cycle velocity, customer retention, margins, customer long term value. These highlight if you’re growing your customer value, making customers more loyal, losing deals to faster competitors and/or if you have specific stages of a sales cycle where things tend to get stuck.
If you have a robust Operations function, how insightful is the analysis your team can do?
Related, can you trust your forecasting metrics?
These aren’t necessarily “measurable” KPIs, but having confidence in your pipeline and tracking metrics goes a long way to building a successful Sales motion.
Service
Many clients have a goal of reducing their churn rate and increasing client retention. This can be done with faster, more efficient, and personalized customer support with the use of intelligent work routing, self-service knowledge base, and giving agents a 360-degree view of their customer.
It also allows agents to interact in a variety of ways at the customer’s choosing, with a multi-channel approach spanning email, phone, chat, social media, SMS texting, and much more. In addition, they’re supporting Field Service (when applicable).
Metrics worth watching:
Time-to-reply for support tickets + overall volume of these cases
Average time to resolution
Percentage requiring escalation (especially useful in identifying what topics to expand self-help content around)
Customer engagement with self-service options
There’s also a case to be made around customer upsells as a Sales-Service shared metric, with the teams working together and communicating around happy customers interested in expanding their investment in your product or service.
Marketing
When Marketing gains full insight into the lead-to-cash process, it better aligns to the revenue goals of the company - and naturally works more closely with Sales as a result.
This is vital for the team to adjust go-to-market strategies around what’s driving more closed-won deals, because they can adjust target audiences, messaging, content development, and more around the right data.
Some metrics worth watching:
Leads, Pipeline, and Closed-Won revenue by source
Lead-to-Opportunity conversion rates (and by source)
Opportunities influenced by campaigns (using the Campaigns object in Salesforce)
Other relevant metrics might include lead-to-opportunity rate, disqualification rate of leads, and lead engagement reporting that shows increased activity.
More
While it’s not as straightforward, other departments - all the way up to the full C-Suite - stand to gain by evaluating:
Accounting: Time to invoice, time until payment received (especially around Salesforce Billing)
IT: Number of Salesforce-related requests completed, Time spent on platform development
C-Suite: Quick access to accurate top-level reporting,
The way forward
Having a neutral third-party facilitate these discussions - and provide expert-level commentary - leads to progress. It’s why a roadmapping engagement (such as The DoubleTrack Roadmap) is popular with both C-Suite executives and primary users of the platform.
Aligning leadership and stakeholders who use Salesforce regularly drives a natural connection between business objectives and Salesforce needs.
If you could take:
Business KPIs
External and internal influences
Customer demands
Market challenges
Process improvements
…and distill that into a project plan that prioritizes your Salesforce needs based on impact, would you?
What would the impact be on your everyday?
The “ah ha” moments stemming from interactive discussions and interviews about how Salesforce is used today vs. ideal use cases are many. And the cross-functional alignment that comes out of a unified effort leads to better business results.
Roadmapping is a more strategic investment, too, so it's a great way to put a consulting organization to the test and see if they understand your entire business before starting any work in your Salesforce instance.
One tip
If you’re engaging an outside vendor to help with your Salesforce, ensure they’re measuring their project against a set of goals you both agree to before work begins.
It ensures your project will have measurement and accountability baked into every step.
Even better: the initial discovery process should make it clear the vendor is trying to understand what success looks like to you + how they align to your objectives.
This is one component of our Customer Success Guarantee - reach out and ask us about it!
Kommentare