Reorganizing Operations and Sales: Creating an Action Plan
(This is Part 6 of a multi-part series by Passage Technology: Reinventing Your Business, Reimagining Your Salesforce — see Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5. In other entries for this series, we’ll be going in-depth on topics such as how Salesforce Admins can employ new approaches and empower their business partners. In addition, how businesses can streamline operations and objectively evolve strategic decision-making, ensuring group buy-in and productive innovation. And finally how to execute efficient project planning in the Salesforce environment, to be agile while achieving your goals for reinvention.)
During the reinvention process, as business leaders reassess the quality of their information and refine their strategic decision-making, a series of important activities and tasks begin to emerge. Certainly, every aspect of business operations and sales performance can benefit from the efficiency and productivity improvements. But where to begin?
Because businesses can’t do it all at the same time, prioritization is important — based on objective factors. What’s the best way to put together a practical and effective action plan that makes sense for the business and its reinvention, to manage current issues and emerging issues?
Ultimately, the business can better serve internal stakeholders and external customers by reimagining Salesforce to successfully develop and execute its action plan. Here’s how.
Plan the Work, Then Work the Plan
Project management is an important part of executing an action plan (we’ll cover how to do this within the Salesforce org later in this blog series). But prioritization and planning are the first steps to consider. Competing interests, internal biases, and siloed mindsets are barriers for people trying to objectively plan the work.
Technology on the AppExchange can help overcome those barriers and the human elements that affect decisions on priorities. Instead of groups just taking a straight vote, or having one person make the call, a scoring or rating system can be used to properly weigh and evaluate the options that go into the plan. After all, not all competing priorities are equally important.
In addition, different insights come from different parts of the business. All viewpoints need to be considered, but within an organizing framework that scores alternatives to match the goals of the action plan. Further, giving the opportunity for all voices to be heard helps with future buy-in when moving forward, which is crucial to success.
Value Scoring and Matrix Scoring
With end-user apps available on the AppExchange, like Prioritization Helper, individuals and groups can use Value or Matrix Scoring to rate records inside of Salesforce Objects. These scoring models provide a more straightforward visual input than coding, which makes it easier for any team member to create an unbiased decision-making model with clicks not code — and without Admin or IT assistance.
Therefore, sales teams will know which opportunities to pursue first, and IT will know which bugs to fix urgently. Later, if priorities change, the priority scores can be updated in real-time using the newly updated rating system. It’s also easier to change in the future because it doesn’t require changing any code.
Common Use Cases for Prioritization Scoring
Below are a handful of examples representing how Value Scoring and Matrix Scoring can aid in building an action plan:
- Rank the conditions/criteria and alternatives, then input values for each cell. More weight should be given to the most positive attributes; low or no weight to the other attributes.
- Compute scores.
- Different groupings may be created based on scoring tiers under the max score — for example: High, Medium, and Low.
- Act accordingly and re-evaluate conditions/criteria and alternatives as well as their input values as priorities change.
Action Planning for Today and Tomorrow
By understanding the influences on prioritizing action planning, and taking the right steps to properly weigh the criteria and alternatives, business leaders and employees can efficiently undertake successful reorganization of operations and sales functions. In addition, because of the use of scoring systems to establish today’s priorities, adjustments can be easily made to match ever-changing situations in the future.
To learn more about Passage Technology’s apps and services, Contact Us, or visit the Prioritization Helper and Data Analysis Helper overview pages.
(Attn: Sales Leaders — Another Salesforce end-user app from Passage Technology, Data Analysis Helper, available in the AppExchange, can help with reordering sales functions to prioritize and improve outcomes for sales teams, territories/segments, and individual customer accounts. See the recent AppExchange blog post: 5 Ways to Boost Sales Performance.)
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