People, Processes, Technology - Lessons Learned during Salesforce Sales Cloud Roll-out

A Few thoughts on PPT

PEOPLE - PROCESESS - TECHNOLOGY

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What can go wrong when you are implementing a Sales Cloud Solution in an Organization? Probably a lot. i will just cover a few thoughts I had thinking about this.

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1. PILAR I - PEOPLE

People could be any type of Stakeholder, The ones that accept the project deliverables or system users that will be working on the lead pipeline and actively trying to move the potential customers to the next stage in marketing process.  I would argue that taking care of stakeholders is the most important part of the three pillars. The reason for that is in most small businesses its a small group of decision-makers who make the final decision to implement the salesforce solution and then they engage and inform other employees that this is going to happen. They are the ones that are being part of the salesforce consultants presentations, they learn the benefits of having this system and then try to communicate this to others across the Organization. In Real life this is not a perfect process so when we come in to the mix to implement the Sales Cloud Solution we have to pick up all the loose ends between all the people all the stakeholders and connect the dots and fix the miscommunications. If we don't do it at the right time it will definitely come back to bite us in the ass in the future.

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STAKEHOLDER (PMI definition)

individuals and organizations who are actively involved in the project, or whose interests may be positively or negatively affected as a result of project execution or successful project completion

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2. PILAR II - PROCESSES.

My experience is that small businesses do not have well established processes and this can havea devastating fact on Salesforce Sales Cloud  Roll-Out. On One hand this is perfect for the very reason you would Choose Salesforce as your CRM platform, Meaning that even if the current Sales Process in the Organization changes often it can be quickly implemented from vision to "Call Center floor".

The flexibility to adjust lead and opportunity objects record types, marketing processes, sales processes, page layouts, lighting pages, validation rules, Etc. is ideal for this purpose.

This testing, experimenting and playing around with different Setup options is the key to finding the right ones. That's good in my opinion. That is what the system is build for.

PROCESS (Cambridge Dictionary)

a series of actions that you take in order to achieve a result:

But I want to warn you about a trap that I fell into...

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‍if the stakeholders are sure about what they want and they're pushing you to implement a specific process that requires custom coding, appexchange integrations or other custom apex code solutions..... be careful. This Happened to me. Even though the business model  was working at the specific time . Changes came as they always do, Covid attacked with full blast and its business and economic impact was felt. There was no real need to implement all those cool Flows, inventory calculators and so on.

Simply put experienced developers put in a lot of hard work into delivering very impressive technology solutions that after a few months were not relevant to the business need. The business model changed and everything we created became obsolete. Despite the personal pain for me and the developers working on this project was the fact that this caused the adoption of the platform to drop. People quickly started to disengage . the managers were not pushing forward or did not even want to work on the platform.  In fact all communication became terrible and this became a devastating issue really quickly.

The other thing is ....and this is highly recommended that you always involve and engage the executive team or at least go as high as you can. It is absolutely essential for them to feel and understand the benefits of the Sales Cloud . they have to feel the value for their organisation. Because when things get tough and processes fail bad communication and poor adoption happen.... and very soon when the time comes when key decision-makers will need to make the decision to push forward and renew the contract with Salesforce for another year or cancel it altogether.

‍They have to understand that despite the challenges the value for the business  is much higher than the potential cost of the Solution.

Summing up the second pillar in one sentence. Make sure that the business requirements and processes you're working on are mature enough for planned Development.

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3. PILAR III - TECHNOLOGY.

The technology that is being developed has to always consider who is using it, whether it's the guy in the CallCenter adding another task changing the stage converting to opportunity or the manager who is looking at the Opportunity forecast or performance dashboard/reports .

One tip I wanted to share here with you is about training. This is how you bridge the gap between technology and people. This will help with user adoption.

Think about the fact that there are good "Sales people" that are not used to working in a system as advanced as Salesforce. And spending enough time on training the right staff is the absolute key.

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CONCLUSION

People, Processes and Technology are all depended on each other and go hand-in-hand together.  You have to look at them holistically and keep in mind that balance is the key to harmonious and successful life as well as a Sales Cloud Implementation.

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