How do you get the most value out of Salesforce? David Cotten revealed four main things to focus on when successfully developing Salesforce to provide the highest return on investment for your organization in his session: Managing Salesforce Like a Pro. He was joined by Lynn Phillips, the director of product management at Young Presidents’ Organization (YPO) to share her experience of innovating with Salesforce from a customer perspective. 

The four tips on how to manage Salesforce were: 

Manage your Feature Bloat 
The “what’s your problem statement” has to come first. Coming out of a conference like Dreamforce, there are so many cool and exciting things you see, and people think they need everything right now. But actually, your organization may not be ready to implement some things immediately. If you’re seeing something you want to turn on quickly you have to do the due diligence for that. 

Phillips’s advice: Define your scope up front. We (YPO) try to define what success looks like so we have that lense into where we’re headed so as changes are requested you can look through that original lense and decide if that’s something you need to do in a first release or at a later time. “We need to measure adoption not only on are [users] using the system but if they are finding value from the system.”

Just because you have Salesforce doesn’t mean someone won’t go and use a different system. So how do you drive adoption? 

Empathize with Your Users 
“We surveyed our members and found out they wanted to network and they wanted to find out about events that are going on,” Phillips said. YPO and Bluewolf used prototypes and scrums to build something that looked like what users wanted before diving in and coding the new tool. This helped them realize that at first there were too many steps in the process. Thhe implementation team came up with a “quick create” button to reduce the steps and drive adoption. 

You can build prototypes without code with tools like Keynotopia. It gives people an experience of what the app is going to look like and work like before you actually build it. 

Manage Innovation Through Tools 
Often it feels like the person who yells the loudest is the one to get their additions or changes prioritized. This is not a viable way to develop. There are a lot of tools out there that can help you determine what to add to your Salesforce org through the creation of transparency so that you can better prioritize. 

“We use Bluewolf Sightline (an application lifecycle management tool) to manage our sprint boards. By using the virtual sprint board our global team can know what we are doing at any given time. We use these during our daily sprint calls so we can see exactly where everyone is on every sprint board. It helps us visually to see how we are moving through what’s happening. It also tracks all the different components so we can know where all of those are rather than keeping them in a separate excel spreadsheet and then the developers can see where those components are and what to move to production,” said Phillips. 

Focus Your Staff in Right Places 
A big challenge to finding business value is that everyone on the team needs to understand the original intent of what they are asked to do so that they understand their task’s importance. How do you keep your team nimble? Try creating “micro changes” for digestible value that you can reach right now. Phillips says her team implements this by “picking a few areas to focus on in every sprint and at the end we have new functionality we can demo to the business and then use their feedback in the next sprint. This way the business can see we are actually making progress.” Phillips said that her team also records the demos from each sprint to send out so that execs and business users can stay up to date on what the team is doing. 

If you’d like to learn more about Bluewolf Sightline or how our teams help you manage Salesforce, talk to us at booth 1205 at Dreamforce or contact us here.