4 Salesforce Implementation Obstacles

August 1, 2011 by · Leave a Comment

Overcoming obstacles building salesforce

Our Salesforce.com consulting clients vary in how they do business and with this comes implementation successes and obstacles in our many stories.  Though Salesforce.com is a system which can automate many processes, many things have to come together to make it successful in your business.

From our vantage point we have seen some obstacles to implementation that are worth noting as you are seeking to grow your business.  Consider the following:

1. Lack Of Salesforce.com Design

You can build your system field by field and keep throwing requirements together as you go along.  You may end up putting pieces on the board for the puzzle at the expense of truly building a complete picture.

Your Salesforce.com system should have an overarching strategy supported by its design.  The interdependencies of your system will reveal poor design over time.  Furthermore, as you add more complexity, you create more work for your team.  Now there are more fields that need to be filled out for every interaction.  The details should be considered for their merit and the design should reflect an integrated approach with the simplest path possible.  Good design does this.  There is such a thing as overengineering and creating a lack of adoption from a lack of motivation.

2. Loss Of Momentum

Launching Salesforce.com is a rigorous push towards a goal.  There is a lot of hard work to make it work in your organization.  When there are stop and go type of activities, then enthusiasm can wane and requirements can get lost quickly.  Momentum is critical for implementation.  Salesforce.com is as much a people and organizational management issue as it is technology which should bend to your processes.

Avoid momentum loss by being responsive to generating and delivering requirements.  Within the scope of work to make Salesforce.com work, it is important to keep accountability with everyone involved.  Anyone that does not do their part of customization, development, testing, validation and training can bottleneck the entire implementation process.

3. Fear Of Failure

Salesforce.com started a revolution.  Now instead of the old days of having to be perfect in our requirements, we can be flexible and fail quickly.  The reason is that Salesforce.com affords iteration quickly.  It is less about perfect software coding and more about clear business process thinking.  If you are unclear on your thinking, this shows up.  However, that is ok.  You can change things quickly.

It is amazing how many people are still focused on perfection.  It is costly in this age of speed.  It is better to put things into play and get feedback quickly.  You can change them in Salesforce.com to get to perfection after your plans meet reality.

A great way to do this is to launch and watch how users are working in the system within your process.  If they tend to not use features, have a different way of doing things or complain about how things work, then changing Salesforce.com with high responsiveness can bring delight, buy-in and eventual perfection.  Using Salesforce.com is the key issue.  Your users and your customers will help you shape it.  Having a talented implementation team will help you get perfect over time.

4. Complex Not Simple

Salesforce.com solves many problems.  If you presume one solution that is more complex than another, then you have embedded those options into your business.  For example, if you choose a route of custom developing a document merging system rather than using Conga Composer, then your team has to live with the results.  The choice is less than optimal.

Obstacles in a lack of sound advice or knowledge can take you down a pathway which is not only inefficient but cumbersome and a deterrent to adoption.

Simple means there is awareness of options and elegance in the design approach.  Instead of 4 fields, you opt for one that makes sense and gets to the goal.  If there are endless data trails you will never look at then the work over time of your users is for naught if there is not analysis and action behind their efforts.  Think simple.  There is likely a solution already built which integrates that can be easily plugged in or pulled if it doesn’t work.

Push Through The Obstacles

Salesforce success is not an elusive goal.  It is an obstacle which needs to be pushed through with determination, leadership and change management.  If you have weak leadership and management then the obstacles will be daunting.  However, if you are clear on the goal and collaborative then you can push through the various obstacles which inevitably come up when dealing with people, process and systems.

Think about thes 4 key obstacles and commit to leading through the changes in order to make Salesforce.com work in your organization.

What obstacles are you facing?

 

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Salesforce Automation Steps

February 16, 2011 by · 7 Comments

Buying Salesforce.com is easy; automating your business processes using Salesforce.com has a natural progression.  In our Salesforce consulting, we like to help our customers to walk their process manually before automating.  This allows for control and mastery before coding, scripting or creating a routine process structure.  Approaching your own organization with the goal of automating your business processes should have steps accounting for the impact of change on your team.  Here’s how.

Map Out Your Process Roadmap

The steps for how a customer is won, a service is provided or a project is completed needs to have an accounting for the specific steps your users will take.  These should be captured in a list and the tasks need to be broken down into concrete and specific wording.  Your team has likely built up a culture.  Your culture has defined meaning for each of the steps.

Thus, your process map should not take for granted the implied meaning of steps.  Rather, imagine using your map to instruct a new person.  They should be able to take direction and execute within your Salesforce.com system from the steps in a sequential fashion.

Customize Your Database With Ease Of Use

Less is better.  This is especially true for data.  Every field that you create unnecessarily or redundantly reduces your chances for adoption by your team.  Think like a user.  You would have to move fast in daily work.  Every form field or step within Salesforce.com becomes tedious at some point if there is a feeling the data is not used or getting work done can be more expediently accomplished without data capture.

Each step in your roadmap should produce a subset of data capture within your Salesforce.com records – Contacts, Accounts, Leads, Opportunities, Cases or any other custom creation.

Picklists should be used if your data is specific and needs to be measured.  Furthermore, it is easier for the user because less thinking is involved.  Conditional picklists are valuable to present dormant fields which may be used in specific cases rather than every time a record is edited.  Think streamlined and less.  Your team will be grateful for it.

Buttons For Communications And Tasks

Every step touches some part of the customer experience.  Often times, your value perception is based on your touch points.  Using Salesforce.com to ready personalized communications to the right people at the right time increases your branding and builds continual value with the stakeholders of your business processes.

Communications will come from documents, emails or calls.  Ensure that each is ready to go and captured within the context of the steps of your roadmap.

Your team is likely doing these things, albeit inconsistently, inefficiently and without account.  Salesforce.com creates the opportunity to create a predictable and rich experience from the inherent functionality of the system.  Use it and watch opportunities grow.

Watch, Refine And Automate

With an agile system in Salesforce.com, the most important thing is not perfection on all the details.  The important thing is launching and getting your users to adopt the system.  Their feedback will allow you to continue refining.  Salesforce.com is not like custom developed software.  It is more flexible and made to be used in real-time.  When changes occur, you can react and redesign.

Watch your users and work with them to drive towards perfection.  The process is collaborative and working closely with your team drives their buy-in because their feedback is seen in the context of real-time changes.

As you see your processes mature, there is great opportunity to drive further efficiency.  Automate the steps by coding, triggers, workflows and refinements.  Each step is an opportunity for creative ways to cut out cycle times in your team’s execution in Salesforce.com.

Automation comes from process maturity and user adoption.  Drive towards it with effective change management and administering Salesforce.com at the pace your culture fails forward with your processes in Salesforce.com.

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Salesforce Process Design

November 29, 2010 by · 2 Comments

It is rare to find people that can make complex things simple.  Look inside most Salesforce.com systems and you will find the reverse.  Many systems are overly complex.

At some tipping point, this complexity affects adoption and, in turn, success.  If you confine your team to the toil of database entry, enthusiasm will wane.  It happens all the time in the Salesforce.com universe.  Overly zealous administrators or a lack of leadership to the goals of increasing revenue, productivity and customer loyalty affect success.

There are too many options in today’s economy, whether with technology or talent, to opt for bad design.  In Salesforce.com, bad design stems from unclear process, strategy and implementation.  Your team needs to enjoy the tools they use.  Apple models this all the time in everything the end user experiences.  Similarly, effective process design will be:

  • Simple
  • Intuitive
  • Measurable
  • Inviting
  • Clear
  • Collaborative
  • Accountable
  • Scalable
  • Malleable

While Salesforce.com can do so much, the art is in designing with clarity and simplicity.  The system needs to be your slave, not your master.  Ensure your process design hits the sweet spot.

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Convergence

November 17, 2010 by · 1 Comment

It is easy to make the simple complicated.  That is commonplace.  It is difficult to make the complicated simple.  That is art.

Too many organizations fail at Salesforce.com because the roadmap for driving processes becomes clouded by complexity and details.  Adding superfluous fields creating numerous and disparate data relationships makes the database the central focal point rather than your people.  Your people are trying to get things done.  There is an inflection point where meaning can disappear and data entry takes precedence over productivity and sales effectiveness.

Success in Salesforce.com requires a focus on convergence.  There should be a central focal point to drive the architecture and customization of the system.  The opposite is divergence.  The minutiae of adding more selections without purpose can overwhelm your team and prevent successful adoption.

Convergence requires leadership.  It requires a clarity of thought and execution on how to capture your processes and make them work without friction in Salesforce.com.  The system works.  The question is whether it converges or diverges in its use cases.

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Overcoming Salesforce Complexity

November 5, 2010 by · 1 Comment

“Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity.” – Charles Mingus

When you see a Salesforce.com system which has been over-engineered and unusable, it typically stems from a lack of clear leadership around process and strategy.  It is easy to make what is simple complex as Mingus states.  A lack of clear thinking and articulation of how a team moves through the sales, marketing or service process they are seeking to execute exacerbates the issue.

A well-designed Salesforce.com system works with complete buy-in from all of the users and managers of the system.  Real-time information is valuable towards a feedback and action loop to drive a result:

- Increase revenue
– Increase customer loyalty
– Increase awareness
– Increase productivity

Many times, the goal is forgotten or drowned in the IT work in Salesforce.com.  Users end up becoming data-oriented rather than results-oriented.  Too many fields or data which is not related correctly can create more wasted energy than useful results.  Thus, complexity can creep easily without a clear structure, strategy and focus.  Doing less with clarity is much more valuable than adding features, forms, fields, or data because they are nice to have.  Over-engineering Salesforce.com can cost you the success you desire and becomes even more costly to undo.  Focus on success which is enabled by simplicity from creativity.

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Added Value

October 16, 2009 by · Leave a Comment

addedvalue310

A few years ago I decided I wanted to do something really nice with my son.  I booked a trip to Los Angeles and purchased floor tickets at the Forum to see our favorite team, the Dallas Mavericks play. I decided it would be nice to stay at the hotel where the Mavericks stay when they travel to Los Angeles, so I reserved a room at The Ritz-Carlton, Marina Del Rey. I would recommend this hotel to anyone. Here’s one reason why.

After arriving at the hotel and checking in, we entered our room and found a nice handwritten card with four warm, freshly baked cookies.

That’s it!

It was simple. Unexpected. Concrete. Credible. Emotional.Los-Angeles-Trip--Cookies270

It met five of the six principles mentioned in the book Made to Stick by Chip Heath and Dan Heath that are essentials to making ideas sticky (memorable). It worked, and is something neither I nor my son will forget.

The Ritz-Carlton, Marina Del Rey understood there is no greater value in the sales process than the discipline of adding value. It was expected to get great service. It was expected to be clean and fresh. It was not expected for us to arrive and receive a personalized welcome card with a gift certificate and four fresh baked cookies.

As in any relationship, the better in tune you are to your customer’s pain (wants) and needs, the more easily you can meet that person’s needs, which develops trust. Rather than looking at how you can sell your customer what you want, ask yourself,  ”Am I selling or providing value?”

When you sell without providing value first, there is no trust, which creates tension and resistance.
When you provide value first, trust will rise and tension will decrease. This leads to acceptance.

If you want more business, quit selling and begin adding meaningful value. It’s your repeated actions over time that lead to less tension and more trust and more sales.

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Simple Not Complex

September 18, 2009 by · Leave a Comment

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“Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity.” – Charles Mingus

I witnessed a beautiful thing today. It is a problem many businesses have. My team at AscendWorks delivered a marketing automation solution which made the complicated simple. They were able to cut through the noise of glamorous marketing and create a buying experience which connects with anyone who is serious about our client’s solution.

The funny thing is that there was a simple and elegant solution which could easily mask how difficult the project was. There was a lot of time, energy, thinking, and most of all, passion, to help get the message simple and to stick. The steps for the buyer were well thought through. The flow of the experience hit on all cylinders in terms of timing, relevance and personal connection. It was art.

We truly are in a time where people are paying less and less attention. It is hard to pay attention when we have so much coming at us. Our challenge as businesses today is to connect and do it immediately and in sync with the buyer’s experience. Companies like Apple win because of this. We hold simple, yet elegant products in our hands from them. They exert their talent and passion to create simplicity from complexity.

I have learned one thing from being in great customer meetings – while everyone else is trying to put up a website, buy a CRM, use social networking, or whatever other fad comes along, we know how to put it together to get the result, a buyer to buy. That’s art and creativity.

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