I recently had the opportunity to present at Dreamforce 2013 two sessions on proven strategies for effective data management. The experience illustrated for me an important concept that’s crucial for anyone tasked with choosing, or even selling, a solution.
Salesforce wanted me to present the story of how LoopUp changed from looking at Salesforce as a tool – a glorified Rolodex – into treating Salesforce as a solution that worked for us. What strikes me about our story with Salesforce is that it is not unlike other SaaS-based solutions: the tool is only one piece, but selecting, implementing and managing the solution is the ultimate puzzle.
The initial issues we had with Salesforce were partially around the specific functionality, but frequently the deeper problems were ones agnostic to Salesforce. Questions surfaced, such as: what are the specific metrics we should measure? Who has responsibility for each piece of the puzzle? How do we measure and iterate on the process?
When I set out to help create better processes utilizing Salesforce, what I found was that almost always the problems mapped back to the how the process supported (or didn’t support) the primary business requirements and objectives, and how to define, measure, and iterate processes against our definitions of those.
After my time working on our Salesforce implementation, I realized that the framework for selecting many technology solutions is largely the same. Namely, without understanding the business requirements and how the solution can (or should) map to those business requirements, it will not be possible to make a tool become a solution – no matter how rich its feature set.
Presenting at Dreamforce was a privilege and I was fortunate enough to receive some great feedback on the session. One person came up to me after one of the presentations and remarked about how helpful it was to hear how implementing the right solution was, in large part, based on effectively mapping business objectives to a data structure and processes that supported those objectives. I was surprised to learn that this person works at a Fortune 500 company, as I would expect they would better acknowledge and act upon this idea. Upon expressing this, the response I received was,
“Solution-based buying and selling should be the norm everywhere – but how frequently do you hear about a list of features versus how a solution will solve your problems?”
I realize now that in the same way that we sell our own product (LoopUp) as a solution to conferencing problems (rather than feature selling), Salesforce has become a solution for us because we have identified how to make it work for us within our business. This should be the ultimate test of any purchasing or implementation decision, but too often people get mired in the details and forget about the big picture view: a solution is only a solution if it solves problems you face. If not, it is just a tool with a feature list – and in my experience, this will not drive real results.
Read more about LoopUp’s solution to conferencing problems
View the Dreamforce presentation: proven strategies for effective data management
