Achieveit

Building a business requires two vision and execution. But according to analysts, 70% of all companies fail to reach the goals defined by their vision because they're too siloed. So how do you get big thinkers and big doers to get together and get things done? Achieve. It was founded to do just that, with software that creates visibility on where everyone stands on projects so the entire organization works together and achieves together. I sat down with two leaders from achieve it to see how their business is not only achieving its own goals, but using Salesforce to scale and succeed at every step.

Our system is a results management platform that enables leaders to focus on really executing their plans, initiatives and projects, rather than just maintaining them. So if you think about doing that process, you've got to automate the plan creation, distribution and tracking so that you can know at any particular point in time, in real time, how things are going towards your objectives. So we do that for lots of companies across the country.

Going back five years, as you were flipping on Salesforce, what was salesforce there to solve?

It was always around what leads are coming in and what are we going to do with those leads. And when it comes to how salesforce solved that issue, it was giving us that full picture. From lead creation to deal closed, we knew that the pipeline, where everything stood and how it was going through that channel along the way.

How are you using salesforce now?

You think about small businesses, they go through different phases. So phase one is proving out the product, proving that you get some demand, working through price points and things like that. But at some point, you get to where you're scaling the business up, and that's where achieve it is. So we're scaling the business up dramatically. And what that requires is a more systematized approach to how we're selling. And so we use Salesforce very effectively to measure our conversions to demonstrations. So we measure what are the sources that we use to get to different demonstrations. Do they come from marketing? Do they come from sales? What does our sales pipeline look like? What are our close rates? What are the length of the sales cycle? And so when we know all those intermediate measures that lead up to a closed deal, we can then diagnose things that we want to change. So I think just the visibility saves a lot of time, interactions between different employees in the organization.

The biggest thing, it sounds cliche, is it becomes your one version of the truth because you don't have any missing data. Every opportunity that's ever come through, every closed opportunity is there so you can run these analytics and forecast your business moving forward because you have the whole step. You have the full story of how historically you've been able to close business. You can see what levers to pull, which ones to move forward on as you start to scale and expand as a company. So it's been nice to always be able to run a report and know that you have the full history. There's not anything missing. Everything is accurate. You know exactly who's been able to contribute and how you can collaborate as you move forward. The thought was that it was never going to stay a small business. The goal is to grow it and scale it over time. What tools are going to get you in the right spot from the very beginning. So that process, those challenges at the very beginning are all about identifying what steps should you put, what tools are going to support those steps and how can you scale and grow over time.

Who says you can't achieve it all? Certainly achieve it can with a little help from Salesforce. To learn more, visit salesforce.com smallbusinesssolutions.