The finest business leaders know that not all innovation is equal in value or impact, although today’s business leaders are always pursuing it.
You’ve listened to CEOs eagerly explain their innovation ideas over many meetings as a consultant. They are mentioned in every earnings report and at every event. Even if it’s a great concept, not many “innovation programs” are producing innovations that matter to their customers and shareholders.
Truly innovative businesses have discovered that value is not created by the size of the team, the budget, or the “change.” They are aware that when they focus their innovation on the services that only they can provide to their customers, real competitive value is produced.
Having recently spoke about the three fundamental principles of producing innovation that counts during my keynote address at Dreamforce. It encourages you to share, improve, and include your teams in a discussion by asking the following two related questions: “Are we building and creating something that someone else already does better?” and “Is that preventing us from spending every dime we have innovating the things that only we can do for our customers?”
If the answer is yes, read the case study on Salesforce that follows. Many businesses now depend on the Salesforce platform. It’s also one where a lot of people mistakenly think they need to considerably personalize to stand out in the industry. Warning: These adjustments usually make it more difficult for your team to work and for your customers to engage.
Salesforce’s CRM skills are what it is most recognized for today and in the past. But during the past seven years, it has made significant investments in a growing range of products and solutions to build a strong experience and innovation platform that can help organizations in upgrading and responding to the demands of a fast-changing environment.
But far too usually, when people talk to businesses about Salesforce, they assume that the platform can’t possibly manage the complexity of their business, which is not exactly a modern business mindset. Since adoption is difficult and measuring ROI is difficult, they usually start every discussion about Salesforce by expressing the same set of frustrations.
You usually respond to one of these concerns with the following simple question:
If your organization gave you a million dollars tomorrow and challenged you to create value with Salesforce, how would you spend it?
You can learn everything you need to know about their innovation strategy from the response.
Would they help their personnel provide better customer service? If they wanted to understand their customers and their needs better, would they integrate a new data source with Salesforce? Would they spend money on modifying Salesforce, a technological platform that is already regarded as being guided by best practices?
This question is, perhaps, intentionally misleading, but I use it to demonstrate the expense—not the expense—of tailoring a platform like Salesforce. The price you pay for not taking on the real difficulty of modernizing our business operations, which is to do what we ought to be doing. A lot of these leaders are usually unwilling to change “how” their employees operate. They claim, “That’s how we do it and always have done it.” But I tell them that not a single one of their customers has ever called to share how their unique, nine-step internal sales process helped them stand out from the competition and secure business.
Companies are probably making two serious mistakes when they focus on creating any cloud application.
The truth is that true business transformation is difficult, which is why so many businesses choose to change their technology instead. There is a saying in consulting that perfectly illustrates this concept.
An old process deployed on new technology is, simply put, a really expensive old process.
Nobody starts on a technology project to produce something more expensive, but attempting to fit a platform like Salesforce to your current outdated procedures will always result in higher costs. Many businesses are altering technology instead of improving behaviors and processes because it is thought to be simpler and less risky.
Spending innovation budgets on non-differentiated “innovation” and customization is a mistake. Instead, try the following:
The shared workflows, intelligence, and automation that Salesforce as a company invests a significant amount of time and money in developing serve as the basis for its cloud-based products and solutions. For you, Salesforce makes investments in developing best practices. Consider chances to use their given solutions instead of focusing on all the platform changes you can make, and consider how to transform your company to fit with this industry standard.
Around Salesforce, a sizable, dynamic ecosystem has developed. This ecosystem keeps surrounding the main Salesforce platform with additional capabilities, skills, and technologies that add value for both your business and your clients. If you discover any holes in the platform, look to this ecosystem as your first port of call. It’s likely that someone has already discovered this gap and developed a solution that will assist you in bridging it and ensuring seamless upgrades.
In fact, according to our analysis and report, The State of Salesforce 22-23 report, the most successful Salesforce users welcome the broader ecosystem and benefit from the economic investments made by partners like IBM, Copado, and others.
People must first identify differentiation to fully understand how to invest in it. They think differentiation is where your company provides special value to the customer, partners, and staff. To put it another way, as a CMO, do you spend money on a customized email campaign flow included in Marketing Cloud? Or is it more crucial to focus your team’s attention on developing customized offers that only you can offer for your most valuable customers? Your company has a different vision, culture, and set of activities. Focus your money on these areas, and value will come as a result.
They usually notice how the most successful Salesforce users approach the product with this new, modern perspective. As they adopt a more modern mindset, they implement the platform as a best practice, retool their employees and business procedures, and actively reallocate their time, resources, and budgets to develop and innovate the goods, services, and skills that stand out and are unique in your customers’ eyes.
Let’s step back and take another look at that list of concerns. Similar to the last example, if you adopt a modern business mentality and look at everything from the viewpoint of value—value to your shareholders, employees, partners, and, of course, your customers—you start to perceive those issues as signs that a new strategy is needed. Think about these changes:
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