Solve Business Problems with Salesforce
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Explain industry pressures businesses face as they grow.
- Define “digital.”
- Discuss factors an organization needs to consider to move to a digital front-office solution.
As organizations grow, they often accumulate systems to handle their day-to-day business needs. Initially, they purchase systems, like a CRM, to do particular jobs. Then as other needs arise, they build or adopt other solutions to handle those jobs, and over time, they bolt on even more. Many times, the systems they adopt don’t talk to each other, some require heavy customization, and most importantly, incompatible systems make sharing data nearly impossible. These factors lead to inefficiencies. Employees must learn and move between multiple systems to do their work; time-to-market for new products and product updates slows; and maintaining multiple, aging systems increases IT costs and takes time away from innovation.
In this module, you explore some of the industry pressures businesses face with their current systems. And then see how Salesforce addresses these challenges with its full end-to-end (E2E) front-office suite of products.
Front office refers to the customer-facing side of a business. It includes sales, marketing, commerce, and customer service. It’s often discussed separately from back office functions like accounting, human resources, and supply chain, and so on.
Front-office systems hold data that’s relevant for front-office tasks and back office data that’s relevant for front-office usage (like inventory stock levels) and data from financial systems (like the last payment posted). It’s important that some of this back-office data is made available to the front office.
Industry Pressures and Digital Bottlenecks
To better understand the industry pressures and bottlenecks many organizations face, let’s look at Cloud Kicks. This footwear company sells custom, stylish trainers directly to customers and to business resellers like university and sports team merchandise shops. Cloud Kicks has been in business for nearly 25 years–long enough to predate many modern business solutions.
Over time, as the company and the industry evolved, Cloud Kicks adopted solutions here and there to help it innovate. This created a kind of “digital mashup” of systems and software that are bolted on top of each other with inconsistent or nonexistent degrees of compatibility. A number of years ago, Cloud Kicks replaced its outdated homespun CRM with Salesforce Sales 360 and adopted Service 360 for its customer service needs. But the company still uses a mix of other products and spreadsheets for its marketing, quote-to-cash, commerce, manufacturing, and revenue needs.
Concept-to-Cash Delays
When Cloud Kicks recently introduced a new trainer to the market, it took 8 months from the time the company conceived of its new style to start receiving money from its sales. The data needed by different teams and departments was siloed in a variety of tools and wasn’t consistently kept up-to-date.
Employees switched from system to system to brand and market the new shoes, reach clients, get quotes, and work with suppliers, manufacturers, and fulfillment teams. The inability to partner and share data across the business and manufacturing hindered their ability to innovate.
Cloud Kicks’s numerous systems kept operating expenses, especially IT costs, high, which lowered profit margins and kept the company from being able to react to market changes, like a competitor’s seasonal discount campaign.
The time-to-market problems Cloud Kicks faces are common across organizations. It’s not unusual for companies to spend 70% to 80% of their budget maintaining or, in other words, “keeping the lights” on in their legacy systems rather than supporting the business with new innovations and business models.
Innovation is complex and it takes research, planning, budget, and executive sponsorship to make it happen, plus a comprehensive change management plan to aid adoption. But Cloud Kicks knows that in order to remain competitive, it needs to do something.
A Digital Front-Office Solution
What if the data in Cloud Kicks’s various systems was housed and kept current in one central location? What if employees could move seamlessly from one system to another to do all of their work? What if integrated artificial intelligence (AI) could help employees with complex tasks, improve sales efficiency, and analyze data across the organization? How much could they reduce the time-to-market for a new style of trainer if Cloud Kicks moved to a digital front-office solution?
At Salesforce, we frequently use and hear the word digital, but what does it really mean to customers? Digital is the ability to use and share data and intelligence across the enterprise in a way that empowers better and faster decisions. It does this by using AI to expose data and intelligent insights to any channel to improve operations. Digital breaks down traditional business silos across sales, service, marketing, product management and more by sharing data and streamlining processes to make them faster and more iterative.
Considerations for a Digital Front-Office Transformation
Cloud Kicks leaders know it’s time to move to a more cohesive front-office solution, and they’ve seen the benefits Sales 360 and Service 360 have brought to their bottom line. They decide to investigate replacing some or all of their outdated tools with other Salesforce products for their marketing, revenue, commerce, and internal communication needs.
As Cloud Kicks begins to explore the transformation to a digital- and AI-forward front-office solution, their CIO and IT manager work with their Salesforce account executive (AE) and other Cloud Kicks leaders to create a plan. A digital transformation takes preparation and can take from 2 to 5 years to implement.
Cloud Kicks’s Salesforce AE helps the IT manager and CIO come up with a list of considerations to take back to their stakeholders. These include:
- What type of solution fits best—a suite of products that work together, or a few products that may require integration with remaining systems?
- What capabilities are we looking for in new solutions?
- What are our key performance indicators (KPIs) that need to be improved?
- Who are our stakeholders? What are their roles?
- What kind of budget do we need?
- What kind of return on investment (ROI) do we expect over time?
- How will we clean our data and where will we house it?
- Will this transformation address all or most of our technical debt?
- What is our change management plan?
These considerations and others can help guide the business toward the solution that best fits the company’s needs. In the next unit, you explore what implementing an E2E Salesforce front-office solution for a business-to-consumer (B2C) organization looks like for Cloud Kicks.