Innovate with CRM Analytics
Established companies can find it challenging to innovate, especially with internally defined processes context. When a business is already doing well, the tendency is to stick to the status quo. This may serve the business well in the short-term, however, with market changes constantly threatening disruption, it is important to continuously explore different sales processes, attract new customers, and enhance customer engagement.
Salesforce is a wonderful platform for experimenting and innovating. In this case, we understand innovation as not something that reduces manual work or makes something quicker. We understand it as getting a competitive advantage of using this platform.
As Clayton Christensen says:
“The reason why it is so difficult for firms to capitalize on disruptive innovation is that the processes, and business made that make them great at their existing business actually make them bad at competing for disruption.”
At the beginning, let’s be clear about one thing: don’t overestimate the value of ideas. Ideas are free and they are everywhere. The crux of the innovation is the ability to test it. And this is about finding a balance between running your existing business model, probably your GTM strategies in Salesforce and focusing on innovation: finding new value propositions and new growth engines.
To be successfull with innovating in Salesforce, regardless if it’s an enterprise, SME, or other form of organization, you need a structure. Basically, any kind of anatomy or ecosystem that will enable you to play with innovation effectively. We won’t elaborate on that because there are much smarter brains that can talk about it. We’ll just list 3 relevant components, which we use in our work with the customers.
C&B toolbox
solution library - have a solution library that can be easily applied to your ideas, which means that in a matter of hours or days, the solution is ready to be tested and gather feedback. It can be a template or a framework that you can easily copy-paste.
testing space - have a safe playground where the customers can interact with the innovation and experience it in real life. It’s not a sandbox. It’s a set of different methods like permissions, apps, profiles, licenses, which can be selectively applied
progress mapping - have a tool which quantitalitevely measures the progress, adoption, or number of other criteria. It enables you to validate if the users really do what they claim to do. A good example is Analytics Adoption dashboard which is adjusted to capture data of your experiment.
With this toolbox, you can start working on several ideas right away, get immediate feedback, and find out what works best.
In 2-3 months, you'll be ready to give a presentation backed by evidence, showing what works and impressing your project sponsors with your results. You'll understand which ideas have the most impact and which ones to drop.
This approach will help you innovate faster!
