“Yes, we can, but we won’t.”
Very rarely do people expect that sentence to come from a consultant.
It’s our job to dream about possibilities and make those happen. That’s how we best serve people and teams and pursue the best for them to make them the best that they can be.
If you want to implement Salesforce (or use a new cloud, integrate with an external system, or build something custom), it doesn’t matter how powerful it is or what features it has. It can’t do everything.
Salesforce is a mirror, not a magic wand.
The great thing about it is that it shows you what already exists - what your team is doing, what information they need and is important to them, and their day-to-day cadence to get their jobs done.
It reveals a lot. With the arrival of artificial intelligence, Salesforce can even predict, prioritize, and interact. But it can’t fix things.
What it will do is show us things that already exist, for better or worse. If we’re willing to look in that mirror and address what it shows us about our processes, culture, and practice, our organizations will be better for it.
It isn’t going to fix problems, but it will empower us to–and that’s worth far more.
Salesforce Can’t Fix Processes
If you don’t have processes in place, implementing Salesforce isn’t going to automatically create them. Going through the implementation process may help you define or refine them, but it’s not going to build them for you.
Someone asked me a few months ago if I’d recommend Salesforce for their company. The problem? Everyone did everything differently and had different information about their accounts. One person on the team tracked in a spreadsheet, while others kept their information in their email inbox.
Their sales team had no clear direction or goals. The company had no organizational expectations as to how to pursue sales. Adding another thing to do wasn’t going to fix that.
If you don’t have processes, don’t immediately try to create one from scratch. First, document and analyze what is already being done.
Creating processes should aim to make your team better at their jobs. Their involvement is critical and helps create ownership and responsibility for the outcome of what they do every day.
Salesforce Can’t Fix Culture
Humans love stability. Even people who love change, I think, love the consistency of knowing things will change.
If a company is resistant to change or the team lacks buy-in, implementations won’t unlock those barriers but will show you how to address them.
What’s your company culture truly like around change and learning new things? Are you intentional with what you adopt or what you don’t? Why?
On the flip side, do changes only affect the bottom layers of your organization or does your leadership adjust their priorities to accommodate?
If your team is hesitant, it’s worth the effort to find out why. They know their jobs best, and a change may make their job harder. Get them involved. “If you could make anything better, what would it be?” is a powerful question.
Salesforce Can’t Run on Autopilot
Salesforce has a low barrier to entry, and it’s easy to jump in and get started. We’re all about hitting the ground running.
But it also requires more maintenance, and doing that well is going to require investing time, money, and people. Is it worth it? Complexity isn’t always a vice, it just needs to be leveraged well and support growth instead of inhibiting it.
If you’re a small org with a small amount of data, Salesforce could be too complex. Your instance may have a lot of required fields or objects that may not even be important to you.
If you’re already using Salesforce and eyeing the next new feature or cloud, it might need way more maintenance or could be massively underused.
Look for Value
It’s okay to say no to things that don’t bring value. Knowing what’s valuable requires knowing your specific goals and clearly defining what you want. If your goals don’t match whatever results a tool promises, it may not be valuable to you.
One company we interacted with needed to track products for their customers. Two customers could order the same product, but in their system and workflow, the products were different because the different customers ordered them.
That was valuable to them, and rightly so–their entire business model and process revolved around customer-specific products.
Salesforce didn’t do this well and at best needed a lot of extra configuration just to make it work for them. It was one of many reasons why we ended up not moving forward with their implementation.
What are You After?
We’ve had companies ask us to build something for them when an existing solution would be more appropriate.
We’ll tell you if that's the case. Our primary goal is actual value, whatever form that may take for you.
Sometimes, what needs to happen is beyond the reach of what any tool can do. Just because a platform is so flexible and accessible (and I love it for that!) doesn’t mean that it would add value to your company or processes.
However, it can show us what our processes, culture, and practice look like. The sooner that we realize that our tools are mirrors and not magic wands, the better our companies and teams are for it.