💃 Salesforce Escalation Management🕺

Good morning, Salesforce Nerd! You’re a bedmate with Murphy’s Law.

And so you must have the toolkit to manage the worst 🙂.

Here is the escalation toolbox 🧰 with 3 key tools and how to use them 👇

SCENARIO

A Salesforce Escalation

“Hey” the Teams message says.

Then 3 more “Hey’s” from 3 more people. And before you can say “what the f…” your Teams, inbox, and phone are blowing up.

The Sales Ops manager is the first to give you the rundown - the Opportunity pipeline is gone. Kaput. Disappeared. 👻

You realize what happened - one of the nerds was building an automation that would auto-closed/lost stale Opportunities. They must have forgetten key conditions, because every open Opportunity had been closed 😳🤬.

There is gonna be hell to pay for this 💯. But first, the issue must be resolved. The escalation managed 😮‍💨.

You might be thinking, “escalations are a rare occurrence for me. Why get good at something I’ll rarely use?”

Here’s 3 reasons-

✅ Escalations are exceptional and so need an exceptional solution.

✅ Escalations are high-visibility. Your manager is aware of them. Your manager’s manager is aware. All this visibility and awareness brings you attention. Make the most of that attention…

✅ As you progress in your career, your escalation management workload will increase, and most of the escalations won’t be caused by you, but you’ll be responsible for resolving them 🙂.

ESCALATION SURVIVAL GUIDE

Salesforce Escalation Toolkit

Your escalation toolbox needs these 3 tools. Here’s a breakdown for each-

👨‍🔬 Root Cause Analysis

Escalations are usually loud. But buried inside the noise is a signal. Put on your detective hat and get to work flushing out that signal.

What just happened?

Who is impacted? One user? Every user and beyond?

Are sales users still able to make sales?

When was the first notice that something was wrong?

Finally, why did this happen? 👈 Be prepared to communicate this effectively.

So those are the questions just for yourself. You need to gather intel before you go all Paul Revere.

Next, you need to be prepared to provide this detail to the people who can decide your livelihood-

🤲 This is the severity. This is the impact to the users.

🤲 This is how revenue, profit, commissions, expenses, anything that has to do with money is affected. If no direct financial impact, say so.

🤲 This is the approximate time it will take to resolve the issue. Be sure to consider this.

As you root cause, you will uncover a series of events that led to the escalation. This timeline of events will be a critical document your leadership will demand. Go ahead and get it organized asap.

🧑‍🚒 Preventative Action Plan

Developing a preventative action plan is secondary to root cause analysis, but is a prerequisite to going into a post-mortem.

A preventative action plan is basically an SOP document that should’ve already existed (it may already exists and just needs to be followed 😃).

In the case of our disappearing Opportunity pipeline example, proper SDLC would’ve snuffed that out in a development sandbox before it ever made it’s way to production. A basic example-

1. Develop in dev box.

2. Test

3. Promote to QA environment

4. Test

5. Promote to UAT environment

6. UAT

7. Deploy to Prod.

8. Post deployment steps.

Automation with missing conditions would struggle to make it past 3 rounds of testing. Preventative action!

🎤 Communication Plan

Arguably the hardest tool to master, and definitely the most anxiety-ridden activity in escalation management - the communication plan.

In a well managed org, your manager (or higher) would own the communications. The stakes are so high in enterprise CRM, that a polished leader understands they’re getting paid the big bucks to handle these complex scenarios.

If you’re the one responsible, or strive to be that respected leader who is, then here’s some core components to the plan-

🧠 Be strategic. Who you communicate, what you communicate, where, when, etc all need to be considered. The “why” for each of those is the strategy.

💎 Be clear. State the problem, the impact, and the ETA to resolution. Use bullets. Words matter - use ChatGPT to polish your copy.

😶 Be humble. Don’t blame. Don’t deflect. Have a sense of urgency. Be accountable.

🏃 Be fast. The more competent troops you can rally fast, the quicker you can get to a resolution. But remember, be strategic who you communicate to. Does that tech-adverse VP of Sales need to be the first to know?

A good leader is worth their weight in gold for these situations because escalations can be made worse with poor communication. There is no substitute for repetitions when it comes to this. And every person who is good at this once started from zero experience and got beat up before they got communication right 😅.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Takeaway

Preppers have detailed plans and checklists for when a .00001% alien invasion event occurs.

You have no excuse for not having a Salesforce escalation plan…

And consider this - handled well, an escalation doesn’t erode trust, it builds it 💪.

Stakeholders remember how you show up when things go sideways 👇

SOUL FOOD

Today’s Principle

and now....Your Salesforce Memes