Mike Boyle: Which is where I kind of wanted to go next, Josh. We talk about this… I have written about this in Ad Victoriam’s blogs and it’s something that comes up a lot. It’s user adoption. You just mentioned it. So let’s talk about maximizing user adoption. In the world of ROI. What are some effective strategies for encouraging user buy-in and engagement?
Josh Eich: Yeah, it’s such a great question. It’s such a great topic because if you’re not getting user buy-in and you’re not getting user adoption, you’re actually not getting all of the data that you want to get out of the platform. The power of having a CRM and the power of leveraging Salesforce for your selling team is to be able to glean insights and then be able to make changes to your selling motion or to your selling strategy based on those insights that you get. And so if you don’t have people, your AE’s, your reps, your BDRs, whoever else may be a part of your selling motion if they’re not entering data, you’re never going to be able to get to those insights. And so one of the ways that I always think about this is you have to, there’s, there’s kind of the stick in the carrot, right? There’s the stick approach, which is you kind of force accountability, you force teams to go enter it in. And I think there has to be some level of that, right? You have to, as a leadership team, you have to have a kind of top-down approach that says this information is very important, it’s critical to our process and we have an expectation that this is included. Right. That’s one side of it. I think the stronger side. And the secondary thing that I would say is you have to give the users of the system a carrot for why they want to go use it. If you can share with a set of sales reps that you are going to be able to give them better insights, tell them which customers to target, which, products to try to sell, and which customers are ripe for expansion opportunities, you’re going to actually give them data that’s going to make them more effective in their selling motion and hopefully put more money in their pocket at the end of the day. And that’s what they’re going to really care about. And so I think as you think about that change management, it’s got to be a balance and a combination of those two things. Accountability from the executive leadership team pushed down to the entire organization, and you have to provide the sales team a carrot afterward that they really truly find value out of. If you do one or the other and you’re not giving both the accountability from the leadership side and the incentive from the rep side, you tend to see much lower adoption and you ultimately get poorer results out of the data that you’re capturing.
Mike Boyle: You briefly touched on this a moment ago, leveraging data. Let’s talk about how businesses can leverage data and analytics within Salesforce to drive very specific ROI-focused outcomes.
Josh Eich: I think when I think about ROI-focused outcomes, one of the things that I always coach my sales teams today, as well as sales teams that I’ve run in the past, is we need to really understand our customers and the company objectives that they’re trying to achieve. If we can tie back our solution to that, we can help that company be very successful. And so when you think about that, most organizations simplify their overall targets, right? They want to drive more revenue, they want to reduce costs, they want to eliminate risks, and they want to increase productivity in general, most organizations are trying to achieve those four topics, right? And so as you think about a Salesforce-driven implementation and driving ROI back in that you got to start looking at benchmarks that help you tie back to those goals. So, how can I make my selling process more efficient so that I can, one, engage more customers and two, close more business? Those two things both drive revenue up. How do I help all the extended teams that are helping my sellers be more efficient in the process so that we can drive more productivity and ultimately hopefully drive costs out of the business because we can scale without adding as many new headcounts, right? And so if you can start with some of those benchmarks as an organization, capture your current state where you’re at today. And then as you go through the implementation and as you start to roll this out to your sales team, start to look at where those improvements are coming in. Are you seeing positive improvements? Are you seeing some negative improvements at first, which does happen from time to time because there’s an adoption curve that has to kick in and then look at that information and say, how do I make consistent and continual tweaks to our process and our technology to allow us to hit those goals that we’re ultimately setting out in the beginning? So start with benchmarks. Consistently look at those changes that you can make to the system and make sure you know what your end goal and your end target is so that you’re making appropriate changes to the platform as you go. And so if you’re tracking all of those things, I think it helps companies really show the value that they’re getting out of the platform. And so often companies do that work ahead of time and they know what they think they’re going to achieve, but then they don’t continuously track it throughout the process and it becomes really hard to justify that investment later because they stop tracking it once they get going.
Mike Boyle: Well, let’s dive into that a little bit further by talking about measuring true ROI of the Salesforce investment that you’ve just implemented. Talk about some of the key metrics to tracking and how they should be interpreted.
Josh Eich: Yeah, I’m going to go back to something I said earlier in the discussion. I think it’s really important to start simple, right? And pick metrics that you can easily capture the data and that you can easily action upon as a team and as an organization. And so simple things. these are just some examples, but simple things like how do you, you know, can you measure the cycle time from the moment you have a first engagement with the customer to the moment you close them as a new customer or as an expansion opportunity? What’s the average days it takes from end to end? And what are the average days it takes at each of your selling steps? In that process, if you can do that, you can start to glean some really important information about where you need to focus your enablement efforts, your process change, or go-to-market strategy. All of those things, based on that, other areas are things like, can you start to measure revenue leakage? A very common thing is you have very high pipeline numbers. When an opportunity first comes in, you see that the large dollar amount that it could be, as the selling cycle goes on, that price continuously comes down, competitive pressures come into play, and budgets from your customer come into play. A lot of other factors can ultimately drive that down, but it’s really important if you can track that dollar amount from the beginning and understand where you ended at the end and actually say, are we giving away too much margin? Are we discounting our product too much? Are we not scoping these potential opportunities appropriately in the beginning? Like, that becomes a very valuable measure when you’re thinking about, kind of overall revenue leakage, in the selling motion. I think the last thing that I would say from a starting point is simplistically measuring your win rates and the competitors that you’re up against in those situations. I’ll give an example from the software world, but I think this is true across so many other industries. If you can determine which competitors in the selling motion you’re most commonly up against, and then do some analysis on the deals that you’re losing and say, this is the competitor, you may anecdotally know that. But the moment you can actually start to track the data, see the data, and say, competitor a, we’re losing to 37% of the time. Competitor B, we feel like we’re losing to, but we’re actually only losing to them 12% of the time. That is monumental in how you then drive your potential, go-to-market strategy, your product strategy, all of those sorts of things. And so that can have a lasting effect not only amongst your sales team, but your entire organizational strategy. And so the more data you can capture as a sales team about your customer, about the tools, systems, and other things that they may be leveraging, that’ll help you make really good decision decisions later on in terms of product, in terms of selling strategy, et cetera. So, for me, I always boil it back down to kind of two simplistic things. How do we generate more opportunities and how do we close more opportunities? And if you’re looking at the metrics that tie to those two things, you can then tweak your processes appropriately.
Mike Boyle: You know, Josh, if you’re anything like me, I’m one of those people you would call an aha. Like, oh, I love learning things. So with that in mind, there’s got to be some like really cool advanced features and functionalities within Salesforce that are underutilized or overlooked. How could some of those things offer significant ROI potential? Any examples?
Josh Eich: Yeah, I think Salesforce’s advanced reporting capabilities is something that is just too often underutilized and overlooked by sales teams. And so I think the more that you can get into components like tableau that allow you to slice and dice your data in new ways, like the value that you will ultimately get. Tying this back to the ROI conversation, that is invaluable information. You’re capturing all this data, you’re using it in Salesforce to run your selling motion. Now you want to go mine all that information for all the gold that’s in there. And I think probably the most underutilized platform there is some of those advanced reporting capabilities that Tableau, ultimately brings to the conversation. That’s where I would take it because that’s why you’re driving your entire business in a solution like Salesforce and it allows you to get the information out on the back end.
Mike Boyle: So let’s talk about how Salesforce – this is always a big topic – how Salesforce integrates with other business systems and tools and how that optimizes integrations with ROI.
Josh Eich: It’s a huge driver of ROI because in most complex businesses you can’t run your entire business purely within the Salesforce platform. There’s a reason that Salesforce very smartly created the Salesforce app exchange because it allows them to extend the value of the platform to so many other processes that are relevant or fit into that overall selling motion. And so I’ll give you a really good example and this is one that’s personal to me, given my role at Ironclad. But we recently signed Salesforce as a customer of Ironclad and there’s a big press release recently about that. And one of the big reasons that they chose us is because of our ability to integrate our contracts and that contract management process that happens at the end of a selling motion seamlessly back into their sales teams, efforts within Salesforce. And so they chose us because of the number one, we were the number one integration back into Salesforce and it was going to allow them to actually move through deal cycles faster because we were going to help them negotiate and go through that process at a much faster pace. So we were going to help them increase deal velocity. We were going to help their legal and sales teams actually uncover new insights about the process and just make that overall contracting process seamless. There are thousands of other processes out there in the Salesforce app exchange ecosystem that allow you to do very similar things to what Ironclad and the Salesforce partnership is doing. That is the power of using integrations because you’re not then asking your sales team to leave the environment that they’re used to working and operating in Salesforce. They can do all of those other processes that may not natively be a part of the Salesforce platform, directly within that platform. And there’s a ton of value in terms of productivity and efficiency when you start to think about those integrations.
Mike Boyle: Well, sweet. Congratulations on the Ironclad-Salesforce news. That’s great. Wonderful….
Josh Eich: It’s a fantastic partnership.
Mike Boyle: Two more questions for you on ROI, Josh. Let’s talk about something that some might consider a pain point… Ongoing costs of maintaining and optimizing a Salesforce implementation. How can these costs be balanced against the potential ROI?
Josh Eich: Yeah, I think it’s a great question. Earlier in the conversation, I mentioned not over-engineering from the start. I would add to that not, immediately going down the route of custom coding every single process. Right. The more engineering and the more custom coding that you generate in the beginning, it’s going to create ongoing costs for you to maintain and manage that code base, in future years. And so I think being really smart about investing in the engineering and investing in the custom code, in the processes that have high value for your business, that’s where you want to invest in custom code. The rest of it you want to allow. The value of the Salesforce platform is they are coming out with the three major releases per year. They are spending hundreds and hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars on research and development and innovation. Let them do that. They are fantastic at that. Let them continue to innovate. And you spend the time custom engineering and custom coding on the areas that are really, truly specific to your business and value drivers for your business. I think that’s probably the most important thing that I could tell you around maintaining and managing ongoing costs. If you can do that, you can then spend more of your time and more of your dollars focusing on really high-value enhancements later on in the process versus managing and maintaining that code base that you already have in place. I think the one other area that I would call out is I’ve seen a lot of customers get in trouble with too many custom hierarchy solutions. that creates a lot of maintenance issues later in the ongoing IT maintenance management process. I would be really careful about that upfront as well.
Mike Boyle: I think for a company considering Salesforce, this is probably going to be the key question for them as they listen to this podcast. But for companies that are on a tight budget, talk to me about some of the cost-effective ways that companies could get started with Salesforce and still achieve a positive ROI.
Josh Eich: Yeah, Mike, I think for me, and this was not prompted by you or the team, I think the most important thing for me is find a partner that you trust and that is looking out for your best interest. I’ve seen too often customers try to go about a Salesforce implementation on their own and there’s a lot of complexities there, not only in technology and what you can do, but also process and change management that I mentioned at the beginning. And so for me, the number one thing to control cost is to find a partner that you really enjoy, like Ad Victoriam, to come in and help you think through what you need to achieve. What goals you’re trying to ultimately end up with, and what’s that ROI you’re trying to hit? And if you have a partner that’s thoughtful, they’re going to challenge you on your way of thinking. They’re not just going to say, yes, whatever you want to do, we’ll go do it. They’ll go out there and they’ll challenge you and say, hey, I’ve seen other customers do it this way and it’s really effective. That is, the value in bringing in a partner and not trying to do it on your own is you have someone who has a ton of experience leading and guiding you along the way. And while it may feel like you’re spending a little bit of money, a little bit of money upfront, you’re actually going to save significant dollars by doing it right versus doing it yourself, potentially making mistakes, and then trying to fix that later. That will cost you more money in the long run. So if it were me, that’s the way that I would handle it and I would bring in a thought leader that was going to help me go through that process.
Mike Boyle: Josh Eich from Ironclad, what a pleasure. Thank you so much for stopping by today and talking with us about Salesforce ROI. You have an absolute open invitation to come back anytime, and I think, we probably have found a reason to do that with your, Salesforce and Ironclad, little partnership there. Get your feet wet, and we’ll come back and talk more about that another time.
Josh Eich: I’d love to, Mike. Anytime you want to have me back, I’d love to chat more. Really appreciate everything you and the team are doing.
Mike Boyle: Thank you so much… And, to the audience, if this happens to be the first time that you’re listening to our podcast. Well, thank you first. And, we’d really appreciate it if you’d consider giving us a five-star review on Apple Podcasts or on Spotify – but only if you think Josh and I earned it. And don’t forget, subscribe to the podcast anywhere you get a podcast. We’re on all of those platforms… I’m Mike Boyle from Ad Victoriam Solutions. Thanks for listening to the Salesforce Simplified podcast… Our next episode is just around the corner.
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