5 Tips for a Successful Implementation | Salesforce on Salesforce

Hi everyone, my name is Sahara. Today I'm going to 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 want to 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 inside 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 to 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 and 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 want to know, how do we do it? Well, let's dive in. Tip Number one Drive Organizational Alignment I want to 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. V2 mom stands for vision, which defines what you want to 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 V2 mom drives alignment in a way that is simple to follow, easy to understand, and gets everyone committed and engaged. Tip. Number 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 streamlined processes, increased productivity and reduced manual tasks. 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 5 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.