Discovering Quality
Wanted: A Sales System to Keep Pace with Growth
A small business needs a sales automation solution to replace the system they built in-house. They have outgrown the system and want a solution their sales reps can use on mobile devices. They also want to create custom reports and automate their sales workflow with minimal effort. At the same time, they want the solution to look and feel like their in-house system as much as possible.
The business gets a proposal from a large solution provider. It promises to meet their needs, but at a high price. The customization costs alone exceed their budget. They were unwilling to pay the high annual costs for administration, training and licensing. They need a firm with a leaner approach.
The business engages your firm to customize and deploy Salesforce Sales Cloud. You start by observing a sales rep and admin use their existing system, looking forward to improving usability while retaining what they like about it. The sales rep shows you how she moves leads and prospects through the sales process, updating opportunities and taking notes along the way. The sales admin shows how he runs and checks forecasting reports.
A sales manager wishes aloud for a way to make sales reps enter notes from all of their calls. You reply that Sales Cloud will make capturing notes a lot easier for the reps. They can speak their notes into the mobile app right after they leave the customer, with the conversations fresh on their mind. The sales operations director wishes the reps would notify her team when a deal reaches the closing stage. You mention that Sales Cloud will do that automatically.
Quality Assurance in Discovery
In a discovery session, you capture and refine the client’s sales automation needs, keeping usability in mind. The client’s IT Director wants to make sure your solution will meet their quality standards:
Available 99.9% of the time
Fast response time, taking at most 3-5 seconds to respond to a simple user request
Secure, allowing only authorized users access to apps and data.
The IT Director declares there’s nothing worse than an unreliable solution. You reply that there is something worse: an unused solution.
The IT Director agrees. What will encourage the sales team to use Sales Cloud? It started when you observed the client’s sales rep and admin using their current system. Since you understand what matters most in their sales processes, you will have Sales Cloud customized to exceed their expectations. For example, sales reps often forget to enter notes when they are at the office. Sales Cloud will enable them to dictate the notes into their phone. It will provide help for new users, while enabling experienced users to efficiently work anywhere.
Sales Reps Love to Talk
A developer customizes Sales Cloud for the client, so you can confirm the customization meets their expectations. Meanwhile, the client has chosen users and managers to test the customizations. You demonstrate Sales Cloud to them and get feedback for changes. When the developer completes those changes, you deploy them to a sandbox for the client’s team to test. The sales operations team appreciates how the automatic “deal closing” notification will streamline their process.
The sales reps love dictating the notes in their phone. They pressure their managers for Sales Cloud, as only sales reps can. One sales manager laughs and replies he’ll raise their quotas since the solution will save them so much time.
The testing team provides feedback to make the solution even better. The managers work with you to establish what changes will make the solution acceptable to them. You deploy those changes and have the test team perform a final user acceptance test. The managers sign off a solution that exceeds their expectations.
The IT Director appreciates how thoroughly you tested Sales Cloud with the sales team. She noticed its fast response time and liked it. She approves the Salesforce service level agreements (SLAs) for availability. The sales team has already convinced her that the users will appreciate the new solution. She looks forward to replacing their outgrown sales system so she can do more with less.
A high quality solution delivers value to a business by enabling users to do more, save time or both.
This is the eighth in a series of posts about unknowns in the discovery process.