Jade Global has been privileged to work with many leading organizations across industries and markets. A common characteristic? They all want to grow and scale quickly … and they depend on the Salesforce platform to help make that happen.
Certainly, the Salesforce platform is a staple of many businesses. But with growth comes challenges. And for Salesforce, a savvy approach to integration is essential to success.
When Salesforce launched 20 years ago as a cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) application, the product focused on doing one thing extremely well — helping sales teams organize their pipeline and their leads.
Over the years, the Salesforce CRM expanded to include account management, contact management, opportunity management, forecasting and quoting, among many new capabilities. Now it’s called Sales Cloud.
And Salesforce has expanded to provide other cloud offerings to its platform, including Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud and Community Cloud, as well as Einstein and a host of other SaaS offerings.
The Salesforce Sales Cloud and its other iterations have become true enterprise software platforms that can help many parts of an organization.
As Dreamforce ’19 approaches and interest in all things Salesforce peaks, I wanted to share some of the best insights we’ve gained from helping our customers make the most of the Salesforce platform.
I’ll look at three types of projects that we help customers implement. In all these cases, scaling is paramount:
- Territory Management
- Mergers & Acquisitions
- Salesforce-to-Salesforce Integration
Territory Management
We advise our Salesforce clients to consider marketing, sales and sales operations as the family that’s going to drive customer acquisition and revenue, support the brand and create an engaging customer experience.
And when we focus on the nuts and bolts of sales, especially for high-growth companies, we emphasize territory management. Salesforce Sales Cloud allows you to do this quite well, but it also requires integration with enterprise systems that house customer or prospect data, as well as data sources for marketing, product and brand information.
Territory management is the practice of assigning the right people with the right industry knowledge to the appropriate geographical regions. If you have 100 sales reps and you assign five to California, you don’t want them calling on the same accounts and missing other potentially lucrative opportunities.
It used to be that only large, established companies could afford the sophisticated software applications that made territory management possible. Not anymore.
With cloud-based applications like Salesforce Sales Cloud and a flexible integration platform, companies of any size can adopt territory management and other advanced sales and marketing tactics.
The Salesforce platform is a powerful growth engine. By configuring Salesforce Sales Cloud to meet the needs of the business and integrating it with other essential data sources, companies can maximize their sales resources.
In addition to eliminating redundancy, territory management also lets companies focus on target markets where they’re selling and closing business while pursuing addressable markets that provide opportunities to expand product reach.
For example, if you’re selling into hospitals, your addressable markets may include pharmacies, pharma companies and dialysis centers. That’s how growth companies move from niche players to industry leaders.
This is all a part of digital disruption, which we define as offering more organizations access to capabilities that previously required a lot of time, money, expertise and resources. Integration is one such capability.
There are a lot of integration platforms out there. Some will cost you millions of dollars to set up and manage, eating up capital and time. Then there are integration platforms where you can get started quickly, and, in a matter of weeks, solve business challenges. The latter option is clearly a better approach. And that’s why we recommend Boomi to our clients.
M&A Consolidation
Jade Global also has extensive experience in M&A consolidation. A customer may start with an innovative SaaS offering that’s disruptive. And as the company grows from $50 million to $200 million, it gets the attention of big tech. Pretty soon, it’s acquired, which introduces an entirely new challenge in terms of integration.
Having a strong integration platform like Boomi’s allows us to quickly ramp up and bring visibility to the most complex data challenges.
During the integration work to support these mergers, we might need to connect a very large enterprise resource planning (ERP) system with one or more Salesforce Sales Cloud instances. Or we may need to help a company move from another CRM platform to the Salesforce Sales Cloud.
In those scenarios, we work with our integration developers to mash up the data and give us the visibility and analytics we need. Then we can go to the business teams and agree on a go-forward data model that accelerates the consolidations and process unification.
In turn, this helps the newly combined sales team effectively sell a larger basket of services that includes all the products from both companies.
Migrating Multiple Salesforce Platforms
Of course, Salesforce-to-Salesforce platform integrations are common when companies merge. Just think of the massive Salesforce Sales Cloud integration that was needed when Dell acquired EMC.
Mergers aside, many large organizations maintain more than one Salesforce platform as part of their standard business model. If you’re a $50 billion organization, you may have a Salesforce Sales Cloud for each of several product lines, and even more for larger business units.
All these situations require a nimble integration platform that gives sales reps — and their leaders — a unified view of the sales and opportunity pipeline.
Regardless of the scenario, one thing we’ve discovered in our extensive Salesforce-to-Salesforce integration work is the importance of “instance optimization.” It’s part of keeping your technology stack running smoothly.
For example, it’s very easy to create fields and processes in Salesforce Sales Cloud. But the way companies sell and handle orders when they’re generating $30 million a year in sales is likely different from how they do it when they’re generating $100 million a year. They’re always looking forward — what do we need to do today, this quarter? — not backward.
Processes change to reflect that, but there’s often a lot of historical baggage in businesses’ Salesforce platforms. And many companies don’t take the time to “turn off” or eliminate what they don’t use anymore.
When we talk about scaling a business, part of that scaling process means an organization will implement new activities and stop doing others. A Salesforce Sales Cloud health check coupled with an optimization process gets rid of all the clutter that’s no longer used.
If you don’t optimize your Salesforce platform, complexity continues to increases when you add enhancements. And then if you need to merge Salesforce platforms, you will face even greater challenges and costs.
Also, without diligent “instance optimization,” the performance of the Salesforce platform will degrade as it is forced to grind through data that’s no longer relevant. Instead of looking for insights across 1,000 lead records, it’s now a million.
Instance optimization right-sizes the Salesforce platform for where a company is in its growth cycle and prepares the business to adapt its Salesforce clouds to new scaling challenges.
Removing the Barriers to Growth and Innovation
The Salesforce platform can be a powerful growth engine and stimulus for innovation. And to unleash that power requires a low-code, cloud-native integration platform.
That’s what Boomi provides and why Jade Global’s partnership with Boomi has empowered us to help companies grow.