Lessons From the Field: Customer Success with Salesforce

The sociotechnical (people/process) system that delivers the system that in turn delivers the value to customers is what matters. It’s more important than ‘temporary/short term’ tools, products, etc. that are getting built in the moment.

- John Cutler

In my eight years in the Salesforce ecosystem, my team and I have worked with a broad range of organizations, and interacted with many more on the Salesforce platform. Some organizations are successful and some are not.

What factors always lead to customer success on Salesforce? Skillfully developing your team. Taking the right approach to build and maintain Salesforce. And leveraging the Salesforce platform and ecosystem.

Below, I outline what I view as customer success with Salesforce and detail the indicators of this success. I then share the factors we’ve seen lead to customer success and what work can be done in the ecosystem to improve this even more. Let’s dive in.

Customer Success Indicators

How do we measure customer success? Or, perhaps more accurately, the customer’s perception of success? It’s really the business value an organization sees with Salesforce. I call this Value Satisfaction (VSAT) — an ongoing way to assess whether customers are getting high value out of Salesforce. This is a combination of outcomes and ownership. In this case:

• Outcomes are the business benefits an organization realizes by being on Salesforce. Examples for nonprofits include raising more resources, saving staff time, delivering better programs to clients, communicating more effectively with constituents, etc. In for-profit companies, it’s higher sales close rates, better customer support, staff time saved, and so on.
• Ownership means an organization takes responsibility for the system, knows how to decide what features matter most, and can set up the system to effectively meet its goals. An “owner” views their system as an asset to the organization, and invests in growing that asset.

I have a few ideas on how to measure this VSAT, however that’s a topic for another time. The reason I brought it up is that it’s the end goal. But VSAT can’t be directly controlled because it is a lagging or trailing indicator of customer success. We also can’t see this indicator of customer success (business value) until after the organization is on Salesforce. If the implementation hasn’t gone well up to and through launch, it’s lots of work to fix the situation. Users are wary, management is tired, and the project is likely already over budget.

VSAT will give you an overview of the final result, but what it pays to focus on are the leading indicators of customer success. In other words, we want to look at the behaviors and actions early on that create the trailing indicators we’re after.

The best leading indicators of customer success are:

• internal alignment around project goals, outcomes, and challenges.
• adoption of an Agile project approach that focuses on transparency, continuous learning, building to maximize value, asking why, building Lean, and taking a build-measure-learn approach.
• consulting partner fit, partner expertise at getting customers involved in an authentic Agile approach, and partner technical skills.
• investment in internal team (Salesforce admin, product owner, measurement and learning roles).
• taking advantage of the secure, feature-rich, and stable platform features that Salesforce offers (multiple clouds, clicks not code, strong ecosystem of ISV/SI, Trailhead, and, for nonprofits — NPSP, HEDA, and the Power of Us Hub).

These leading indicators can be grouped into three areas: team, approach, and platform. Executing well on these reduces project complexity, improves organizational alignment, and creates strong organizational commitment to the system. This in turn reduces project risk, reduces project cost, and increases the value the organization sees in its system. (For more details on Salesforce project costs, see my post on cost factors.)

What is Team?

Correctly staffing for a Salesforce system is key to achieving, maintaining, and growing organizational value. Investing in the right staff in the right roles allows an organization to take ownership of its system. When an organization has ownership, it decides what features matters most for its business and determines how to set up the system for best effect. The organization has the confidence and knowledge to effectively meet its goals with the system.

There are several important aspects to Team that build on each other as the customer progresses through their journey with Salesforce:

1. Staff alignment is the level of agreement between stakeholders (and the consulting partner) on the goals, outcomes, and challenges. Alignment also involves efficiency in making decisions (and sticking to them unless understanding of the problem changes). The bigger the organization and the more teams involved in a project, the more challenging achieving alignment is.
2. The core team for a Salesforce system consists of the internal Salesforce administrator, the project lead, the executive decision maker, and the consulting partner (if applicable).
3. Forward-thinking organizations who excel at taking Salesforce and data transformation to the next level have several Team aspects in common:

• They recognize the strategic value of a Salesforce system and take a product approach to their work. They have a product owner who has a mandate to think about where the short- and long-term organizational value is for the system. The product owner leads ongoing investment in the system to ensure it grows with the organization’s changing needs. The product owner has a “seat at the table” with senior leaders and is viewed as a peer.
• They use their system and data to focus on measurement and learning. Continuous learning practices are embedded in each group, but they often have an organization-wide role to drive this work and share best practices across the organization.
• They staff additional Salesforce admins, developers, and business analysts (as needed). The more ongoing organizational needs, the more important it is to bring some or all of this work in-house for both ownership and the agility to react quickly to business needs.

Current Challenge with Team

Organizations generally understand the core staff needs (Salesforce administrator, project lead, etc.), but those are just the basics of how you staff for success with Salesforce.

Potential Solution

Provide more tools for assessing organizational readiness to increase customer success potential up front. If customers fail with Salesforce because of customer challenges, it still looks bad for Salesforce. Provide tools for stronger upfront assessments of organizational readiness. Not everyone is ready to be successful. What is their data maturity as an organization? Are stakeholders aligned with what needs to be built? Do they have the right staff in place to take a build-measure-learn approach? Help organizations evaluate these factors and provide specific guidance in each area on how to improve.

What is Approach?

“Do things that work, because they work.”

- Corey Ladas

The core principles of Agile and Lean focus on maximizing business value and customer success is tied to creating systems with the most business value. Alternate approaches such as Waterfall focus first on coming in on time and on budget. While there can be business value in both of these, that value is usually secondary when choosing what to build. That said, it’s possible to “do Agile” or “do Scrum” and still fail. It requires a true embrace of an Agile approach to see the value.

Using Lean and Agile approaches, it’s possible to create a “value delivery factory” that efficiently produces high-value outcomes for the organization.

Changing how an organization approaches technology projects is often the hardest step. It can take organizations years to successfully adopt Agile, learning as they go. This iterative approach ultimately creates a culture of continuous improvement, a core tenet of agility.

How can an organization use an Agile Approach to create the most business value?

• They build a shared understanding of the most important organizational needs. Focus on those first. Understand the “why” of what is needed.
• They learn as they go and adjust the course with what they learn from users and management. Developing a build-measure-learn loop is critical to success.
• They create a culture of continuous improvement within the team who is building and supporting the system. Use tools such as retrospectives to focus on processes that are working and fix ones that aren’t.
• They reduce risk by testing and building iteratively in small increments.
• They deliver early and often to get value out of the system early and to learn from user feedback.
• They visualize the team’s work with Kanban to keep everyone on the same page.
• They think Lean and start with the minimum viable product (MVP) so that the system is not overbuilt.
• They stay on budget by adjusting the scope as necessary to fit the available resources.
• They use user-centered design and design thinking to solve problems that staff experience.

Current Challenge with Approach

Too many customers and partners are still using legacy project management methodologies. This fundamentally limits the ability of customers to be successful. While Salesforce has embraced Agile approaches internally and provides introductory Agile, Kanban, and Scrum Trailheads, that’s only enough to learn basic concepts.

Potential Solution

Create a Salesforce Success Academy and associated Trailhead content that educate customers and partners on Agile/Lean practices. Expose customers and partners to Agile and Lean approaches, team best practices, product ownership concepts, and user experience design. Teach them how to apply this to their work. Build a curriculum for customers and partners. Start with a multi-day workshop with thought leaders in this space. In the future, move these concepts to custom Trails to teach team and approach more broadly.

What’s an example of this? Teaching customers and partners User Story Mapping. User Story Mapping can quickly create alignment, clarity, and prioritization. Teach this early in the customer’s evaluation and planning for a new system. Starting with User Story Mapping is a huge step forward, even if a Waterfall approach is used after that. See Background Reading: Team and Approach, for more topics, workshop speaker suggestions, and articles/books by thought leaders.

What is Platform?

We are discussing customer success on Salesforce, so clearly the platform is Salesforce.

Salesforce and Salesforce.org have done an excellent job providing platform benefits that enable customer success:

• Strong and deep core platform features from various Clouds (Sales, Service, Analytics, Community, etc.)
• Advanced capabilities focused on nonprofit and education market (Nonprofit Success Pack, Higher Education Data Architecture, and Student Advisor Link)
• An easy-to-manage system for the staff admin, customizable with clicks, not code
• Large and diverse ecosystem of consultants (SIs) and 3rd party apps (ISVs)
• Open platform for external integrations
• Amazing community: user groups, Power of Us Hub, Trailblazer Community, community sprints, etc.
• Wide range of documentation, training, and support options via Trailhead, Power of Us Hub, Certifications, Premier Support, and Trailhead
• Mission-critical platform, including Salesforce Trust

Current Challenge with Platform (Salesforce.org specific)

Many of Salesforce.org’s nonprofit customers track programs, services, and clients. Unfortunately there are no documented standards, guidelines, or good practices for tracking this on Salesforce. As a result, there are some strong implementations out there, but there are also many poorly built program management solutions. These are lost opportunities for customer success.

Potential Solution

Provide community-sourced guidance and examples for implementing program management. HEDA and NPSP provide a great base for donor and student/school management. They help ensure customers don’t back themselves into an architecture corner. We can also do something similar for program management by building a knowledge base of examples and/or reference architectures. Pro-bono volunteers, nonprofit staff, and consultants could then leverage this.

Summary

Let’s help transform the organizations we work with and help them maximize the business value of their systems, today and in the future. It’s important to challenge customers to push their organizations in new ways beyond better platform technology.

We can expose them to methodologies that streamline their implementation and help them achieve their business outcomes. Let’s teach customers to invest in their team and take ownership of their systems. Finally, let’s help them understand how to adapt, to experiment, and to learn what’s truly working and not working.

Is there anything I missed? What are your thoughts on how we can improve customer success? Leave a comment below or join the conversation on the Power of Us Hub (requires login).