Last week, I had the opportunity to do a sit down with James Canosa from Stott and May, a company that provides intelligent executive recruitment for organizations across the UK, Europe and North America. We had conversation around data operations and CRM (Customer Relationship Management) in general. To be honest, I had the experience in providing classes in business schools (in Europe 10 years ago), but the exercise of a podcast is fun: the format is completely different and more casual in nature. This one was part of a new episode of The “Salesforce Sitdown” podcast led by Stott and May. The company is proposing some great podcasts and you can easily subscribe to it.
Click on the image below to access to the podcast hosted on Stott an&d May website
We started the discussion on how important it is to focus on data while you are working on delivering a product for a customer. We talked about process, data, metrics, KPIs, how to interpret data and measure success by combining analysis of quantitative (user analytics, performance analytics) and qualitative data (paint point, behavioral or sentiment analytics) with the customer centricity in mind.
Then, we discussed (with a lot of modesty) how the CRM offer from Salesforce evolved over the years. Fifteen years ago, projects were taken weeks for small business that wanted to implement a CRM and it is still the case now… The situation is quite different for large companies: CRM Implementations always start by putting “the core” in place and fill the platform gaps through customization or with external vendors. This is true until a new acquisition from Salesforce happens and it is then changing the game… when the company is entering in an era of decommissions and new implementation of new components coming from the new vendor acquisitions.
Then, we then had some time to chat about AI (Artificial Intelligence) that has the aim to provide the right insights to your users/customers. The AI approach itself is taking some time to implement to get models that work. The most important is to start from the question we would like to answer and start “small” and test out before moving further.
We continued the discussion with the different roles that are working on processes and data that are crucial to definition of Product Operations and how it is always important to anticipate how to identify the metrics to be measured for success.
We finally ended with a discussion about the change of mindset that CRM users (Sales) had to during the pandemic and finally with the important to have clean data on the platform that everyone can trust.
From Stott and May : “Data is a hot topic and whether Salesforce is your master data manager or part of a broader system of enterprise platforms/applications we discussed data analysis and visualization, the challenges and what good looks like! This series is part of a wider community initiative, peer led, for SFDC Tech/COE Leaders to connect with each other on the machinations of successful user adoption, shared best practices and learnings about roles, processes, and tech used in such teams. We don’t always get to be connected to peers in the Salesforce Community, COE leaders can find themselves operating like islands, in their own businesses and separated from others. This is a window in on how Salesforce is run, elsewhere.”
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