Alignment with company strategy and values
In this section, we will explore why it is important to not only focus on the details of your Sales Cloud implementation but also to ensure that your delivery and solution align with your company strategy, goals, and values. Ultimately, you want your Salesforce strategy to align with your company strategy; the former should enable the latter. This sounds quite obvious, but when the implementation team gets into the details, it can be easy for the focus to deviate. In some cases, it is also possible that the Sales Cloud implementation team doesn’t have visibility of how what they’re building contributes to delivering the company strategy. This can easily happen if the implementation is being delivered by an external supplier. When your Salesforce strategy aligns with your organization’s strategy, you can expect that Sales Cloud will help you achieve your goals sooner and you will be able to demonstrate how it is doing that.
The first step in developing alignment is to understand your company’s strategies, goals, and values. For example, your organization might have a goal of reducing operational costs or it might have transparency or collaboration as a value. Once these are understood, the next step is to determine how the Sales Cloud implementation supports these. For example, you might be looking to reduce the time, the number of steps, or the number of clicks required to complete a process to gain operational efficiency, you might implement an open data-sharing model to ensure transparency across the organization, or you might deliver collaboration functionalities in early releases to show commitment to them.
It is highly likely that the benefits expected by the Sales Cloud implementation are aligned with business goals, or else the purchase would not have been approved in the first place. During the implementation, it is essential not to lose sight of what we promised, as this is how success will be judged.
It is worth remembering that companies are made up of people, and companies only achieve their goals when people work together. While diversity of thought can be a strategic advantage, it is also essential that people pull in the same direction to achieve company goals.
Achieving business alignment
To achieve business alignment internally, Salesforce uses a process called V2MOM, which stands for Vision, Value, Methods, Obstacles, and Measures. Everyone in the organization completes a V2MOM, which aligns so that every person understands how their actions contribute to the overall goal. Salesforce provides information on why and how to create a V2MOM on their public learning platform, Trailhead. You can find links to this information in the Further reading section.
To achieve a successful implementation, everyone on the project, and the stakeholders, should understand what the implementation is trying to achieve and how their role contributes.
There are a number of steps that can be taken to help achieve this: communicate the goals of the implementation regularly to all stakeholders, bring stakeholders on the journey by including them in defining requirements and requesting feedback, and train and support users so they both understand the value and can perform the tasks asked of them. We explore how you can do these in subsequent chapters in this book, starting in Chapter 2 – Defining the Approach.
To ensure the focus throughout an implementation is on the overall goals, it is common to have regular steering committee meetings to keep track of progress, make decisions, connect to the business, access additional budget, and get commitment from other areas of the business. Depending on the scale of the implementation, these meetings happen weekly or monthly and include senior members of the organization, typically the executive sponsor and senior members of the implementation team.
These meetings ensure that any issues or decisions can be identified early and appropriate actions can be taken. One of the benefits of having a clear vision is that it makes prioritization easier. It is worth noting that some stakeholders may be personally invested in the success of the implementation, as it either has an impact on their role or their reputation.
For example, if your organization prides itself on transparency, then you will probably find your data model will be quite open, allowing people to view most records. If your client confidentiality is core to your business, you are likely to have a private model with restrictions on who can see what data. If collaboration is important, the functionality to enable it must be delivered in early releases to show commitment to it.
Salesforce Strategy Designer Certification
Salesforce understands that the success of its solutions is dependent on how they contribute to an organization’s overall success. Salesforce provides services to clients to help them achieve alignment using strategy design tools and techniques. To help organizations achieve this, they have developed a curriculum and certification to teach and validate an understanding of strategy design. This certification is called Salesforce Strategy Designer. You can find details of the certification on Trailhead along with resources to learn about this topic. There are links to these resources in the Further reading session.
In the next section, we explore the concept of adoption and its role in a successful Sales Cloud implementation.
