Defining the vision for your Salesforce project

By consolidating your strategy analysis, you should have a good understanding of the potential purposes of your Salesforce project.

To make it crystal clear to yourself, the Salesforce taskforce, and eventually your wider organization, make sure you can explain why now is the right time for your Salesforce project.

Why now?

What is the main reason(s) why the Salesforce project is being considered now?

Common reasons for implementing the Salesforce CRM include the following:

• Loss of competitive advantage:
  • Competitors are gaining market shares by providing a superior customer experience in the buying process and your current customers are demanding to be better served
    • Your market analysis, competitor analysis, and SWOT should indicate whether this is the main reason
• Legacy CRM system reasons:
  • A home-grown CRM system is not maintainable/upgradable to support your company’s digital transformation ambitions
    • Your analysis (or your enterprise architect’s analysis) should have uncovered this
  • Legacy CRM system licenses and support expiring: this could either be due to a decision by your company to not continue with the existing CRM system, or it could mean your current provider decided your (on-premises) CRM system is reaching the end of its life
• No system support:
  • Your company has no CRM system to support your business processes: your business users are using email and spreadsheets to manage their marketing, sales, and customer service operations

For our scenario company, PME, the main reason why now is the right time for the Salesforce project is that the current CRM system is not adequate for the digital transformation ambitions of PME's leadership. In addition to that, several smaller countries are not utilizing the CRM system provided by PME as they find it cumbersome and unsatisfactory, altogether. Instead, they are resorting to emails and spreadsheets, and some have even acquired licenses for other smaller CRM providers and email marketing providers (much to the dismay of the IT team). Finally, customer churn is increasing, CSAT scores are decreasing, and customer service is overwhelmed with customer calls and emails.

Your company may well have other valid reasons for why now is the right time to embark on a new CRM journey. Whatever the reason is, make sure you fully understand it and that your wider stakeholder group is aligned with them.

Having concluded why now is the right time for your Salesforce project, let’s move on to craft the vision for your Salesforce project.

Creating a vision for your Salesforce project

To make sure your vision statement will live up to its purpose, let’s first go through the characteristics of a Salesforce project vision statement.

A vision statement should fit the following criteria:

• Is a short, single-sentence paragraph
• Describes the essence and goal of your Salesforce project
• Should not be technical
• Should be easy to understand for your stakeholders
• Is addressing your employees as the audience
• Should create excitement about the future and the Salesforce project

You and your Salesforce taskforce may make several draft vision statements before settling on the right one.

Tip

Have sessions with your executive sponsor to ensure you get this right.

The Salesforce taskforce at PME has gone through several rounds of information gathering to create a consolidated view of PME’s situation, challenges, and reasons for why now is the right time for their Salesforce project. They have also come to the end of the first main activity in the pre-development phase: they have created a vision for their Salesforce project aligned with their stakeholders:

PME’s Salesforce CRM project will enable us to focus on value-adding, customer-facing activities across marketing, sales, and customer service, which are stimulating to us while delivering delightful experiences for our customers.

Let’s break down the anatomy of PME’s vision statement. Firstly, it makes it clear who the project is intended for, namely employees across marketing, sales, and customer service. It also explicitly states what the project will enable PME to do, that is, to focus on value-adding, customer-facing activities, as opposed to the current state of a cumbersome, manual CRM system. Finally, PME’s vision statement addresses why the project is happening: to stimulate PME employees and delight customers.

With a clear vision for your Salesforce project created, you are ready to move on to the next chapter of your Salesforce journey.