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7 SALESFORCEFACTORS BEYOND THE SOFTWARE

By Don Dalrymple

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“Success Not Software.”The Salesforce MantraBy Don Dalrymple

Salesforce.com had a mantra for the longest period of time, “Success Not Software.” This slogan was focused on their market challenge of helping organizations see the benefits of cloud computing versus the constraints of client-server architecture.

While there are many organizations waking up to the reality that cloud computing affords them

the ability to keep up with the change our new economy continues to produce, success is something that is elusive.

Our team at AscendWorks has spent thousands of hours helping organizations become successful with Salesforce.com. We want to take the opportunity to share the success factors which affect teams that may

have bought the software or are thinking of signing up. Your attention to these factors will help you keep on track towards your goals of having a fully functioning business system.

Factor 1: Build A Roadmap

To know where you are going in the physical world, you need a map. It tells you which routes

The journey towards success has all the ingredients with these 7 success factors.

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make sense and what direction to take. Likewise, building your system needs a roadmap to help you understand how you are moving towards a predefined goal or set of goals.

Salesforce.com takes care of many of the issues that custom software programming presented - slow implementation, expensive, lack of control and cryptic. You can build what you like to enable your business. However, you can also build a mess. Clarity on the steps your people should take to execute need to be clearly defined and captured.

Factor 2: Identify The Champion

It is difficult, if not altogether impossible, to decouple Salesforce.com implementation from change management. Effective change management requires leadership. A person on your team that has been identified as a strong, charismatic personality is ideal. They must be able to influence and set expectations with the team.

Furthermore, they have to facilitate requirements definition clearly and decipher between what is necessary and what is needed.

Factor 3: Say “No” As A Default

There are always things you can put into your Salesforce.com system. The more you create, the more work your users will have to be engaged with on a daily basis. More fields, features or software integration inversely affects your teamʼs adoption, motivation and execution.

The best practice is to say, “No,” and find ways to reuse or simplify your system. This is where the art and the discipline come in. Saying, “No,” keeps your system clean.

We have seen organizations that lack clarity or discipline and overengineer their Salesforce.com system to their

“The best practice is to say, “No,” and find ways to reuse or simplify your system.”

Don Dalrymple

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Identify the Champion

Effective change management requires leadership.

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detriment. It is common, and unfortunate.

A strong champion will help you keep this discipline and allow you to have a system that stays agile.

Factor 4: Customize, Integrate, Then Code

There is an order of priorities by which implementations of requirements should be done. The first is to customize. This is the quickest and easiest to change if your requirements later change. Adding fields and data objects and their relationships are inherent in the system.

Integrate third-party applications when customization will not meet the requirement. This is done with the thousands of Apps on the AppExchange. The integrations all work differently. Another software company has pre-packaged methods for solving your specific problems.

The last recourse is to code on top of Salesforce.com. A developer can program scripts or applications to meet the specialized requirements. This is the last option, for it has cost and is hard to change. However, it is valuable if the requirement is that important for driving your business.

Factor 5: Fail Forward Fast

In the past, we had to build systems that were precise. It is an old mindset. With

Salesforce.com, the beauty is that we can iterate quickly. To get to success then, the best strategy is to commit to failure quickly. Your team will not use the system perfectly at first. Allow them to have the freedom to fail and drive feedback.

Furthermore, observe the failures and design your system around the behaviors if mandating a behavior is too high of an obstacle. Empirical data is valuable for validating what really will work rather than what you guess will work.

Factor 6: Process, Process, Process

Salesfore.com is an enabler for business process. Business process is how you serve your customers or ship products out the door. It is the understanding between everyone in your organization

for how things get done efficiently.

Continually think about how any changes or requirements will affect an overall process. Keep your system on rails rather than an open road. Ensure every task, communications and form have context within an overall process.

Factor 7: Manage In Real-Time

We donʼt have to wait for someone to build reports. Reporting is real-time in Salesforce.com. Ensure you have the key metrics identified.

Early in your implementation, you will want to measure tactical things like overdue tasks and outstanding tasks. Review this with your team and help them see it visibly so they

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can understand that their actions are impacting your team.

Over time, you may change the metrics as you want your team to focus. Pipeline Revenue, Operations Delivery Dates and Marketing ROI may be options among many to keep your team focused on what matters.

People, Process And Salesforce.com

An organization is only as good as its people and process. This develops

culture. Culture can be felt when a new person joins a team. They fall in line with how the team works and uses its tools as well as communicates.

Add Salesforce.com and you have a powerful enabling technology to drive your people and processes.

The journey towards success has all the ingredients with these 7 success factors. Be sure to learn more at our blog, www.salesforcesuccess.com. We wish you much success.

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