Hi, everyone.
My name is Sahara.
Today I'm gonna talk to you about implementations.
Whether that's you using Salesforce or a similar technology,
we know it's critical to achieve long-term success,
accelerate value, and reach your business outcomes.
So I wanna share five tips you need to know
to implement technology faster
with examples of how we do it here at Salesforce.
Welcome to Salesforce on Salesforce,
an insight look at our sales, service, marketing,
and IT businesses with helpful how-to tips
you can use for your business.
For customer success leaders,
we'll have tips on things
like how do you efficiently onboard your customers,
automate your renewal process,
and so much more.
As always, you can learn more on Trailhead,
Salesforce's online learning platform,
for more information on this topic
and many others that you may find useful for your business.
Our Salesforce Professional Services team has worked
with thousands of customers including our own internal teams
to deploy new technology solutions and business processes.
With our help,
our customers have gone live
with their implementations 35% faster.
So you may wanna know, how do we do it?
Well, let's dive in.
Tip number one,
drive organizational alignment.
I wanna let you in on a secret.
The key to success is to gain and maintain alignment
between all involved stakeholders
across different parts of your organization
from the start of your project.
To drive alignment,
you must build trust
to those who are going to be directly impacted
by the technology.
Simply put, alignment allows for a shared understanding
around the what, the why, the how,
which all can be tied to quantifiable business outcomes.
At Salesforce,
we use the V2MOM framework
to create alignment across our company
as well as for our customers.
V2MOM stands for vision which defines what you wanna do,
values, meaning the principles and beliefs
that help you pursue your actual vision,
methods, the actual actions
that you need to take to get the job done,
obstacles, which are the challenges
that you need to overcome to reach your vision,
measurements,
the measurable results that you're aiming to achieve.
The V2MOM drives alignment in a way
that is simple to follow,
easy to understand,
and gets everyone committed and engaged.
Tip number two, leverage your data.
In our experience,
we found that most companies have inconsistent data
and they struggle to use it in an actionable way.
When you don't have clean and accessible data,
you're essentially making gut decisions
rather than measured and insightful ones.
With data, your organization can
uncover intelligent insights,
inform strategic decisions,
drive business improvements and innovation,
as well as access a 360-degree view
of your customer or user.
For example, here at Salesforce,
we heard from many of our new hires
that the employee experience can be improved.
But we didn't know exactly what the pain points were.
So we leaned into our data to identify the gaps
and learn exactly how our new employees are navigating
their onboarding journey.
These data-driven insights allowed us to create a plan
and choose the right technology to solve for those issues.
We were able to enhance the new employee transition,
simplify processes,
and automate communications by using Marketing Cloud.
Tip number three, design human-centric experiences.
Too often the design of new products and services start
from a business or technology-first perspective.
But what about the customers and the employees?
Leveraging human-centric insights
to inform your platform design can help
better understand the technical scope
of your transformation.
At Salesforce, we build solutions that are desirable,
meaning that it's wanted by the end user,
feasible, which means that the solution can be built
with relative ease,
and viable,
meaning that the business benefit outpace the effort.
Our Salesforce Professional Services team has worked
with our support organization
to reimagine support engineer experience.
We conducted research to identify common needs, gaps,
and pain points.
These interviews helped us create a strategy
that was grounded in what employees wanted
and what they were actually willing to use.
The result,
the platform redesign led to streamline processes,
increased productivity, and reduced manual task.
Tip number four, build momentum with quick wins.
With technology implementations,
it can be challenging to know where to get started.
But I always say, "Progress, not perfection."
In this world of fast-evolving technology,
companies must innovate regularly
to stay relevant and deliver success now
for their customers.
The key is to move away
from delivering fewer larger chunks of work
and instead produce more frequently consumable portions.
That way you can quickly prove the value of the solution
instead of waiting for months to have something usable.
That is why our Salesforce Professional Services team
created an outcome-based engagement model
that accelerates the speed to value for our customers.
The goal of this proven approach is
to stand up new capabilities in production
in under 120 days.
Yep, you heard that right.
120 days.
This quick win release is designed
to help customers demonstrate
continuous delivery and innovation
and redefine what it means to achieve value.
Tip number five, plan for changes.
Everyone knows change is difficult and inevitable.
So it's important about how you navigate it.
There will be unforeseen bumps
that will impact your anticipated outcomes.
But you need to be flexible to embrace those changes.
At Salesforce, we built a change prioritization framework
to help inform how and when to implement change strategies
for our customer.
A model like this one uses consistent criteria
to score use cases based on the level of effort
and the impact to the business outcomes or the customer.
We prioritize the low effort,
high impact work to the top left quadrant first,
and then we move to the long-term strategies
that require you to invest more money or effort.
That was a lot, but we made it.
These are our top five tips of how to achieve speed to value
and long-term success when implementing any new technology.
And this was brought to you
from our very own Salesforce Professional Services team.
Be sure to check out our other episodes in the series.
And you can continue learning about this topic
by joining us on Salesforce 360 blog or on Trailhead.
And we'll see you next time.