The 12 Days of Salesforce for 2024 (Day Ten: Approval Processes)
TL;DR: Here is my list of things you should be considering as you reboot your business for 2024, focusing on Salesforce generally and your Approval Processes specifically.
Here’s the first post in this series, along with the idea that you can save $150K annually. https://medium.com/@kmcafeesf/the-12-days-of-salesforce-for-2024-day-one-dd8051e0adee
Day Ten (of Twelve): Advanced Approval Processes
What you should consider: Implement advanced approval processes to automate and expedite decision-making, reducing delays in critical business operations.
What you should evaluate: Assess the time saved through faster decision-making. Consider potential cost savings associated with reduced delays.
Annualized cost savings (est. based on 30 users): $10,000.
How I would approach Day Ten and Approvals:
Everyone hates processes that take too long. For American customers, “too long” is likely “any time at all that isn’t instantaneous”, sadly.
That said, waiting for something good is worth it, but there’s certainly a middle ground of getting something to someone as quickly as possible and more quickly than before.
Process Review
We all have review processes. Budget approvals, discount approvals, document approvals, and the list goes on. Do you have an inventory of those processes that you use and rely on? If not, start there.
A baseline of how long the various approvals take will be the place to start. Evaluating those for improvement possibilities is next. Are there opportunities to have multiple approvers in a step? For parallel approval processes? For alerts to the critical step’s approvers? For alerts to requestors that approvers are out of office?
You see where this is leading. Because there probably are.
Impact
Now consider what those cycles being shorter could do for your business. Could they win you deals by getting in front of customers more quickly? Could they improve customer satisfaction with your teams? Could they improve morale?
Sure, some of those elements will be challenging to evaluate and quantify, but it would be worth tallying those benefits up, especially where more than one is in play, and using that to build the business case for change.
Using tools to help these cycles, like really any CRM or ERP, means you can effect some change quickly and cleanly, leaving an accountability trail that even satisfies your accountants. And who doesn’t want that?
There’s even an opportunity to determine if you have some useless, possibly legacy for no particular reason, bureaucracy. That ruthless B-word and all the negativity that comes with it.
Make everyone’s lives easier — even in ways they don’t notice — and people will love you.
This is a part of the 12 Days of Salesforce for 2024 series. Here are links to the other initiatives you should consider, and as always, please reach out to me if you’d like some counsel or my approach via my team at Rule Six Consulting LLC.
Day One: Automation of Repetitive Tasks
Day Two: Data Cleanup & Deduplication
Day Three: Analytics & Reporting
Day Six: User Training & Adoption
Day Seven: Mobile Optimization
Day Eight: Artifical Intelligence
Day Nine: Communities and Portals
Day Eleven: Security & Compliance
Day Twelve (Hooray!): Improvement Cycles & Feedback
I appreciate you spending some time thinking about these topics with me, and I welcome feedback and additions.
