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Innovating At The Speed of Your Customer - Explore and Validate


Fourth industrial revolution

We’re living through a period of profound transformation framed by rapid technological innovation and new ways of thinking. The World Economic Forum calls this the Fourth

Industrial Revolution. Digital transformation with Salesforce and Summit Technologies LLC can take you through the next step in our Fourth Industrial Revolution - Innovate at the Speed of Your Customer series.


Michael Gale, co-author of The Digital Helix, found in his research that 84% of digital transformations fail, either because enterprises hit a major roadblock in their efforts or they fail to make their digital operating models sustainable. The result? They’re right back where they started, minus a whole lot of time, money, and energy.


Salesforce implementations, whether focused on delivering a better user experience or a better customer experience can succeed or fail in the same way. A truly innovative solution cannot meet only the needs of the customer or the company.


In our sense and respond model, the second step is to respond to the needs we’ve sensed in our customers. And the needs we have uncovered in our company. Now that we know what the right services or solutions to build are, how do we build them the right way?


The key to creating an organization that continually looks for new opportunities to improve customer experiences, is to cultivate a culture of curiosity. As leaders, how often do you discuss industry trends with your teams? How do you encourage them to explore other parts of the business to more fully understand the impact of their work upstream and downstream? Do you reward those who question the status quo and bring new ideas to the team? Do you model curious behavior? In other words, do you drive exploration and discovery?


Three ways to cultivate exploration in the eyes of the customer are:

  • Get your team close to the customer

  • Reward and acknowledge curious employees

  • Exhibit your own curiosity


Dedicated cross functional teams could be set up to explore different areas of the business to find out what is and isn’t working and where additional opportunities lay. Talk with Summit Technologies. As your Salesforce partner we are here to help you maximize the investment you are making in your Salesforce ecosystem and innovate at the speed your customers are expecting.


In the next article in the series we will look at agile and iterative methods of rolling out the opportunities you have uncovered and the abilities of your Salesforce tools.


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