💃 Bring This Management Consulting Technique to Salesforce🕺

Good morning, Salesforce Nerds! Management Consulting is the older sibling of Salesforce Consulting.

Being siblings, there are a lot of similarities - coverage of industries (ex. Healthcare, Finserv, Manufacturing, etc) and horizontals (ex. Marketing, CRM, Ticket/Service, etc) and serving clients through strategy, influence, and leadership.

One thing that is Standard Operating Procedure in Management Consulting, but is underutilized by Salesforce Professionals, is framing the business and having comparables.

Why is this helpful? How do we do it? Read on!

Agenda for today includes

• Bring This Management Consulting Technique to Salesforce

• Daily Principle

• All the Memes

Bring This Management Consulting Technique to Salesforce

Salesforce Professionals! Raise your hand 🙋 🙋‍♀️ 🙋‍♂️ if you know how many users in the SF org you are supporting? Excellent!

OK, how many people in the company, total? Hmmm, saw a few hands go down.

What was your company's revenue last fiscal year? Anybody?

How about the competition? Who are your company's direct competitors? What was their revenue? What CRM do they use? How many salespeople do they have? How many total employees? How does that ratio compare to your company?

Was that a fun round of questions?

Takeaway: We are responsible for the CRM. Salespeople use the CRM. Salespeople sell things. Sales generates revenue. Revenue pays for your salary, your boss's salary, the salespeople's salary, etc.

Knowing how your company is performing with the headcount you have, and how that compares to the competition - these are valuable insights that will help you craft cases and make decisions.

For example -

• Company A sold $10 million last year, with 10 salespeople.

• Company B, who sells the same product, sold $5 million, with 10 salespeople.

• Company C, who also sells the same product, sold $30 million with 10 salespeople.

What does this tell us? How is this actionable (hint: company websites are great places to research)? Here are 3 key takeaways-

1) Company C has an overwhelming competitive advantage. This could be talent, process, marketing/sales strategy, etc. They are further along in their maturity. Check their company website.

How do their lead forms look? Oh, they have a chatbot, ho hum so do we. What?! Their chatbot provides product options to select? It's not just a lead form?

2) Company B has issues to resolve, that their competition has already solved for. On one hand, this should be a comforting feeling to know their problems are solvable.

On their website, under their careers page, they are hiring a VP of Sales? Hmmm that says a lot....

3) Company A has not reached their potential, but there is also room to get worse.

Their website isn't bad, but their lead forms are inconsistent - the form on Contact Us page only asks for last name and email. The homepage lead form asks for first name, last name, email, phone, and city/state. Their Careers page shows 2 openings for salespeople. Also an opening for a corp salesperson to manage inbound leads. That's good that they have enough inbound leads that they are hiring a dedicated resource!

Now that we have some specific examples of how to apply this technique, let's circle back to the initial round of questions (and add a few, too) -

• Industry - It matters. Written about here.

• Company Revenue - Quick story: There are 2 car parts dealers. 1 dealer has $100 million annual revenue. The other has $3 million annual revenue. Huge differences, minimal similarities, other than they sell car parts. Understand the differences and how they trickle down into the business. For example, a $3MM company may have just one executive. $100MM will have at least 5.

• Company Headcount - This can tell a lot of stories. The most obvious are efficiency and leverage.

• Salesforce License Count - Again, lots of stories here. One of the big ones is expense - if a company is willing to pay for hundreds of Salesforce Enterprise licenses, their revenue expectations are driving this decision.

• What and How the Company Makes Money - Products? Service? Hardware? Software? Rent? Own?

• Competitors - compile a list of competitors. Do the same analysis. See where your company fits in this list. Strategize what you want to do with these insights.

Daily Principle

and now....Your Daily Memes