The Importance of Executive Sponsorship with Salesforce.com

The worst situation I have ever seen in a Salesforce org was due to lack of planning, lack of commitment and a lack of understanding by Senior Management on how the sales process works inside Salesforce.

The first Salesforce org I was an admin inside was an absolute mess composed of the fossils of organic processes built on a “we need this right now” basis which were then paved over with another process that focused on an alternative solution to the previous ones. Management in the sales and marketing departments rarely, if never logged in. The CFO questioned the cost because he had never seen a report, a dashboard, a closed opportunity, or ever heard one good thing from any of the users about the effectiveness of the system. The data was so riddled with duplicates that the Marketing department hired hourly wage interns to hand scrub their campaign lists by manually typing in each name to get the lead/contact Ids for campaign member creation when Demand Tools was an active vendor.

The completed activities were pretty much worthless in terms of exposing the value to the sale as most were dropped in from Outlook on an email by email basis with no status or description as to the value of the interaction with a customer/client. This meant that anyone seeking to find out where the company was with this customer, had to sift through dozens and dozens of emails logged as tasks and make their own determination. Try having the company subpoenaed and having to to print those emails out one by one!

Few sales teams added Contact Roles to Opportunities which meant that the campaign ROI from responses were broken in the system but that was okay because the Marketing department didn’t put the actual costs of their campaigns in there anyway. And worst of all, the whole thing was all pointless. That’s right. My job and the Salesforce org was pointless because the sales teams executed the actual deal closings through emails directly to the contracts fulfillment department and the sales people were reimbursed from another system, again through emails and phone calls, all of which took place completely outside of Salesforce. This means that closed opportunities, while mandated by Sales Management, were an administrative burden to the sales teams, often put into the system weeks after they had closed and did not have the actual in process data that, when enforced and required by validation and workflow, results in that ever valuable analysis of why a deal closed or didn’t.

And no one at the top knew enough about the system to ask the right questions or even interpret my conveyance of the issues intelligently enough to plan out a functional sales process that would have saved them countless hours of analysis and administrative headaches as they constantly rushed around putting questionable numbers together from multiple data sources throughout the company.

The bottom line is that there is a much, much better way to do things and it begins with executive level buy in and commitment to hammering out a solid, no leaks sales process that flows through Salesforce, a process that focuses strongly on data integrity both on the front and back ends, and one that passes information automatically to all parties and systems necessary to get a deal closed and retain all information related to the deal inside the CRM system of record for future analysis and retrieval. Having this executive level commitment is the first step to success and if you don’t have it, you may as well hang up your keyboard and start picking numbers out of the phone book again.

 

PHOTO: Broken glass © by liknes