Transformation is not an initiative to be started, completed and celebrated, but an ongoing mission to deliver new and relevant experiences, products, and services. Over and over again.
In the sense and respond model, a key to the process is monitoring and observing how your innovative product or service is actually being used. Is it solving the opportunity originally identified? Is it creating a whole new set of problems? Is it meeting and exceeding the expectations of the customer and the company?
This is critical for closing the value loop and understanding whether or not your solution delivered on its promise, and what enhancements are needed in the next release. The data gathered reinitiates the sense phase, producing an ongoing cycle of engaging with stakeholders in order to deliver value to them.
McKinsey and company describes bringing an engaged stakeholder to the process as requiring two equally critical components: voice and value. The voice is the employee’s influence in the larger organization and to what extent are trusted, respected, and sought after for advice. A stakeholder with a strong voice is able to move transformative change to the goalpost. The value is the individual stakeholder’s role in capturing the value including revenue, operating margin, capital efficiency, customer engagement, etc. An engaged stakeholder’s value to the change and the organization is critical to see and quantify the rewards.
This is a great time to employ both adoption dashboards in terms of the Salesforce tool and a field user community in terms of feedback. Your dashboards identify employees and departments who have and have not bought into your new Salesforce implementation. Your user community helps you understand why it is and why the result hasn’t been what you expected.
Continuous growth and improvement depend on people bringing their best thinking to the table. But in order for employees to share their most candid ideas and feedback, the culture must encourage them to do so.
- Establish clear feedback channels
- Invite participation through inclusive problem-solving
- Talk openly about what did and did not work
- When communicating important information or changes, provide context
Scale, measure, and grow is a little bit like wash, rinse and repeat. As the saying goes you can bathe once. But for maximum effectiveness we recommend doing so regularly.
Implementing your innovative change and hoping for the best result likely won’t give you the results you are after. Plan how you will measure your digital transformation progress as you move from iteration to iteration. Ten important digital transformation key performance indicators (KPIs) you can use to measure the business value of your innovation are:
- Return on Digital Investments
- Employee Productivity
- Adoption and Performance Metrics
- Customer Experience Metrics
- Percentage of AI Enabled Businesses
- Reliability and Availability
- Cost-Benefit Analysis
- Revenue from Digital Technology
- Percentage of Cloud Deployments
- Active Usage Metrics
In the final installment in this series we will look at how you and Summit will assess the results and align your Salesforce resources for the next round of enhancements.
