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Salesforce is a powerful tool that can help sales teams streamline their tech stack and boost efficiency and productivity. As the leading customer relationship management (CRM) platform on the market, Salesforce offers a wide range of features that are popular with sales organizations, including reporting, CRM functionality, and account/contact management. One of the key benefits of Salesforce is its ability to centralize all customer data in one place. This allows reps to easily access and manage customer information, including contact details, account history, and purchase data. This can help reps to quickly identify potential sales opportunities and make more informed decisions about how to engage with customers. Another key feature of Salesforce is its robust reporting and analytics capabilities. Sales teams can use this data to identify trends and insights that can help them improve their sales strategies. Salesforce also offers a variety of mobile apps for employees, which can help reps stay connected and productive while on the go. Salesforce also includes sales forecasting tools, that can help sales teams to predict future sales and adjust their strategies accordingly. This can help teams to identify potential risks and opportunities, as well as make better decisions about how to allocate resources. Overall, Salesforce is a comprehensive solution that can help sales teams to streamline their tech stack, boost efficiency and productivity, and improve the human side of selling. Salesforce is widely used by the sales teams and it's a key tool to improve sales process and sales operations. Talk to Summit Technologies today and see how Salesforce can boost your sales efficiency.

Should nonprofits use CRM? Absolutely! Salesforce’s CRM for Nonprofits — Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud — is currently being utilized by many nonprofit organizations. Salesforce can help you strengthen and grow important relationships and opportunities that support your goal. From maintaining strong relationships with constituents, to segmenting supporters by issue and interest areas, tracking membership activities, and streamlining the donation process, Salesforce gives nonprofits the power to manage their data confidently and effectively. What exactly is a CRM for nonprofits? A CRM is a software application that centralizes data management to improve the customer experience, contentment, engagement, and service by bringing all communication with customers across all channels into one location. They were created with sales, marketing, and customer service in mind. CRMs, on the other hand, are increasingly able to interface with all parts of an organization’s operations and business in order to manage relationships and projects among team members, suppliers, partners, and contributors. CRM software will assist businesses in tracking, collecting, and managing critical information about donors, volunteers, employees, and projects. Perks of a CRM Automation of processes Nearly everything can be customized and automated. This is the rule that will help you save time when it comes to managing tasks and your daily routine. General emails, sending marketing and follow-up emails, calls, lead and fundraising tracking, and so on are all examples of key automation actions. With process automation, your prospect receives an email or other message at the right time, including information about their personal history with your company. Meanwhile, all you have to do is gather all of the information you’ll need to organize your next action or follow-up. All data is saved in a single location A great number of nonprofits rely on Excel spreadsheets to store and manage contact data. Salesforce will aid in the collection of all data in one location. It plans activities and fundraising operations based on the entire picture, which will be saturated with data and competing options. You will have limitless access to all data. From any device in any area of the world, you can get access to the necessary contacts and the most recent updates. Organize events Salesforce eases the stress of planning events that span many sessions, days, and places. Due to the functionality of your program, you simply create and manage your event or meet-up. Salesforce allows users to manage events, add participants, and extend your upkeep by creating a personal calendar or speaker’s profile, as well as check-ins and payments utilizing a built-in QR scanner. You will also receive reports in the form of graphs detailing the progress of your event. Your audience’s activities are tracked and recorded Salesforce provides a holistic perspective of your target audience’s habits by assessing their actions, such as the events they’ve attended or the most recent volunteer activity they signed up for. This information will give insight to tailor a relationship-building strategy that best suits your various audience groups. Separate the different types of contacts List segmentation is a difficult operation, especially when the data is old, erroneous, or in a different format. A CRM ensures that you have high-quality data and that you can simply categorize your lists according to the parameters you’ve established. The contacts can then be segmented and tagged by constituent type, interest area, and geographic location, and then exported to your outreach efforts. Conclusion Salesforce will assist your company in remaining organized and efficient. Nonprofit organizations are advantageously positioned to offer leadership and direction in solving some of the major difficulties communities and industries are facing. Thankfully, Salesforce can do just that--guide you down the proper path to achieve your objectives, professionalize your approach, and optimize your influence. Summit Technologies offers tailored Nonprofit Quickstarts to streamline the implementation of Salesforce. In addition to a no-cost estimate, we provide an excellent team dedicated to your organization's success. Inquire today if you believe your organization will benefit with Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud!

Revenue reporting and accounts receivable management are crucial components of any finance operation, and they are heavily reliant on accurate and timely data. One of the primary sources of this data is the sales process, where customer information, product details, pricing, and payment information are all collected and stored. Salesforce, a popular customer relationship management (CRM) platform, is known for generating high-quality data during the sales process. This data can be leveraged to streamline revenue recognition and accounts receivable management, without requiring manual intervention or data reconciliation. There are several options for integrating Salesforce with your enterprise resource planning (ERP) system to manage revenue and accounts receivable: Lead to invoice: Salesforce can manage the entire invoicing process, including quoting, pricing, order generation, and invoice calculation. Invoice data is then handed off to the ERP for managing accounts receivable. This approach is suitable for larger companies heavily invested in ERP systems for accounts receivable. Lead to payment: Salesforce can also manage electronic payment processing, with payment information pushed to the ERP for accounts receivable management. This approach is suitable for mid-sized enterprises that want to take electronic payments from a Salesforce property or charge cards. Lead to ledger: Salesforce can manage the entire revenue process, including quoting, pricing, order generation, and invoice calculation, with AR living in Salesforce. Journal entries are then sent to the ERP. This approach is suitable for smaller companies with recurring revenue products. Alternatively, companies can take a hybrid approach, combining different approaches for different product lines and ordering channels, leveraging the flexibility of the Salesforce platform. When considering integrating Salesforce with your ERP system for revenue recognition and accounts receivable management, it's essential to analyze your current architecture and determine the best fit for your business and data. Summit Technologies LLC can help with this analysis and provide guidance on the best approach for your business.

Email communication plays a critical role in fostering a strong connection between your marketing and sales teams and your top accounts. With effective planning and customized templates, you can deliver highly personalized messages that resonate with your target accounts. To create successful account-based marketing campaigns, it's important to remember that you're marketing to multiple individuals across an account rather than a single lead. This requires building out multiple nurture campaigns based on criteria such as persona, title, industry, region, or company size. By anticipating the questions each role may have and answering them through your content, you can provide a tailored experience that speaks directly to their needs. For sales email templates, it's essential to ensure that members of target accounts feel understood and heard. Editable templates that allow sales reps to customize content as needed while maintaining consistent brand elements, such as letterhead, font sizes, and email signature banners, can help achieve this. When reaching out to a new account, make sure to invest time in researching the individual and understanding their interests. Leveraging social listening and follow-up messaging can help you craft a personalized and targeted email template that resonates with your target account. Provide valuable insights and resources that speak to their specific pain points and goals, and invite them to discuss how you might be able to help them achieve their objectives. Overall, by focusing on delivering highly personalized and targeted messages, you can foster strong connections with your top accounts and drive better results for your business. Below are some great email marketing examples. Hi Susan, Thanks for accepting my LinkedIn request. I read your recent article about consolidation in the healthcare industry. As I’m sure you know as a leading CMO at Makana Health, these consolidations are making it harder than ever to build long-term relationships with physicians. That’s why our team put together this new resource, “The Healthcare and Life Sciences Guide to Account-Based Marketing.” This guide offers innovative solutions for building customer relationships in the healthcare industry that can help you tackle the problems created by consolidation. What does your schedule look like this week? I’d love to set up 15 minutes to learn more about your goals and discuss how I might be able to help you create a marketing strategy to grow customer relationships. Best, Sally Sales Rep Hi [FIRST NAME], One customer of ours, [recognizable customer in similar region/industry/size], uses our [product/service] to grow their business. I thought you might be interested in learning more about their story and how they’ve partnered with [your company name] to achieve XX% ROI. I think our team could help [account name] achieve similar results. Let me know if you have 30 minutes next week to chat. Best, [NAME] [PHONE]

What should a solid Statement of Work include? How do you create SOWs that ensure both the buyer and the seller are satisfied? How do you create SOWs in Salesforce? Summit Technologies LLC spells it all out. Your Statement of Work should include: Introduction Objectives Scope of Work Deliverables and Timeline Payment Terms and Schedule Project Resources Project Risks Terms and Conditions Special Requirements Authorization With this templatized idea in mind, Summit Technologies will work with your company to build custom SOW document generation tools in Salesforce. So what do each of these sections require? Your introduction should consist of information about your company and your client. An overview of the work to be done might be included in the introduction section as well. Summit recommends building this section into tables and paragraphs for easy navigation. Many of the fields can merge fields from your project object in Salesforce. The objectives for your SOW should be set up just like SMART goals (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound). The objective section is going to be a high level look at what the project will accomplish for the client. This isn’t necessarily a “how the sausage is made” view, but a statement that the sausage will be delivered. The scope of work section defines what work will be done and what work is not included. We will deliver sausage, we will not cut it into bite sized pieces and feed it to the baby. Some companies will provide the scope of work as a separate document or file as well as including it in the SOW. This view of the project will highlight the steps and milestones in your project in a task list that gets into the details of each stage of the project. Tasks can be pulled in from your project object in Salesforce. The deliverables and timeline show the final outcome of the project and the milestones along the way. The deliverables are the products or services you will deliver to your client. The deliverables should be measurable products or services with clear due dates that keep the entire project on target. With the timeline you may also want to call out any deliverables required from the client to complete each task reminding them of their role in the project. The payment terms and schedule make it clear how you expect to get paid, what the payment terms are, and if required any variable costs that have a time and/or materials component. Laying out a clear payment schedule up front will prevent frustration at the end of the day for all stakeholders. Payment plans can be structured by deliverable, by phase or stage of the project, or by fixed dates. Either way your fully signed and executed SOW protects your time investment in the project. The resources section of your SOW lets the client know who will be available to them during the course of the project and what their responsibilities are. Stakeholders on the client side should be listed as client resources as well. This gives you a great reference document as you schedule meetings moving forward. Descriptions and responsibilities can be standard document components pulled into your SOW at creation rather than written over and over again. Just add them to the main template of your SOW. Then if you need to make global updates you only have to make the change in one place thanks to Salesforce. The risk section of your SOW is a good place to list out any known project risks so that everyone involved on both sides of the project has a clear understanding of factors that could jeopardize a project. Listing ways to mitigate the risks is good to give your client peace of mind as well as to have a starting point for all project resources to head off issues at the pass before they become major blockers. Your SOW terms and conditions are a necessity in any good SOW. Any special requirements should be listed here as well. Summit Technologies recommends creating a template for your standard terms and conditions and pulling it into your SOW just by inserting a tag. Once again, Salesforce document generation to the rescue. After covering any special terms and conditions your SOW needs to be fully executed so an authorization form is required. The authorization section is where the buyer and seller sign off on their acceptance of the SOW and everything included in it. An e-signing solution designed to work with Salesforce makes for easy, online signing immediately upon acceptance. Summit Technologies will advise you on the best e-signing solution for your Salesforce instance. With document generation in Salesforce you free up time and effort and reduce the potential for error by moving away from copying and pasting a Word document for every client and every statement of work. Salesforce document generation tools allow you to build and store a SOW template directly with Salesforce. Your template allows you to click a button on a Salesforce record, select the correct template, and watch as the system creates a statement of work for you. Document generation and e-signature solutions give you fast SOW creation with reduced errors and faster delivery to your customers. Better prospect experiences set you apart from your competitors. And Salesforce generated documents are easily saved with the records they are generated from and or uploaded to an external document storage tool if required.

Email has become one of the most popular forms of business communication, but with so many emails flooding inboxes daily, it can be difficult to capture readers' attention. This is why it's essential to design your email with efficiency and readability in mind. By doing so, you can help your audience learn what they need to know faster, with a look that's both visually appealing and proven to be more effective. To achieve this, it's crucial to follow a process that applies to all aspects of business and technology. This means collaborating with your team to develop frameworks, workflows, and strategies that allow creativity to flow. By doing this, you can create a design system for your communications that includes a modular framework to turn your vision into reality. Keep in mind that each email is a step in the overall customer experience, so it's essential to design every message to fit in with all the other communications your subscribers could receive from your brand. Make the look and feel consistent, so it's easy to identify any newsletter, onboarding welcome, or password reset as your content. In today's mobile-first world, it's crucial to ensure your email looks great on any device and every email client. Provide an elegant mobile experience from your initial welcome email to ensure you capture your subscribers' attention. Use a tool like Litmus to preview your email on multiple devices. Adding context and interest through photography or illustration is an excellent way to appeal to your subscribers' emotions and communicate functionality. However, beware of stock photography that doesn't align directly with the message and the subscriber. Additionally, distinguish your call to action through color, placement, and text treatment to ensure readers understand the purpose of your email and can act on it quickly. Consumers tend to scan emails for important points that pertain specifically to them. Therefore, it's essential to divide your email into bulleted text and short paragraphs for better readability. And while doing so, ensure that your messages are built for everyone in your audience, considering individuals' needs, including alt tags, readability, black text on white backgrounds, and other features that make your emails accessible to all. Finally, it's crucial to preview and review your email before hitting send, considering every variable in the content. Test with images turned off to see what your email looks like with a weak connection, and build a checklist to catch everything as you review. Designing your email with efficiency and readability in mind is crucial to capturing your audience's attention and delivering your message effectively. By following the tips discussed here, you can create visually appealing emails that are proven to be more effective, ensuring you get the desired engagement from your audience. For a guide to improving deliverability for email, click here. Summit Technologies LLC can help you implement a marketing automation platform such as Marketing Cloud or Account Engagement (formerly Pardot) and provide consulting services to ensure your emails are designed for maximum impact. Contact us today.

By Shannan Hearne, Summit Technologies LLC Marketing Specialist and Salesforce Certified Consultant Proper account planning ensures that sales teams maximize revenue opportunities, create team alignment, clarify sales rep goals internally, and understand customer needs. Account plans are key to building strong customer relationships so sales teams can crush their goals deal after deal. And with a successful and thorough account plan in place for your most strategic accounts, you can align your focus to become your customer’s trusted partner, solving problems instead of selling products. Salesforce is a tool that has evolved since its inception to empower companies to market, sell, and service better. Account planning is one of the tools in your Salesforce arsenal to do just that. Account planning is a process of building strategic plans to improve value-driven relationships with key customers that can help in long-term development and retention, thereby maximizing the revenue potential. Account planning maps out all the important details about a new prospect or an existing client, including information like their decision-making processes, the companies they compete with, and an organization wide strategy to win, retain, and grow their business. Account planning in Salesforce is a measurable, repeatable process to ensure that every touch with a client grows the relationship thereby growing the revenue potential. Account planning in Salesforce with the intuitive and strategic customized approach of Summit Technologies grows client relationships while enabling every member of the team to grow, too, so that deals are closed faster and with a higher level of customer satisfaction making everyone’s job a little bit easier. When you build a solid account planning management template that suits your business’s targets, goals, and needs you can define your accounts’ journeys with milestones and goals to close business faster. Summit Technologies will work with you to whiteboard your existing processes, customize your Salesforce tools to enhance your existing ways of working, and craft an account planning management template that evolves as your business evolves. An account plan brings together information about your customer, your competitors and your sales strategy to nurture existing business in a simple document to ensure each customer is set up for success. Account plans help businesses accurately see the full picture of their customer, often missed in the structured fields of a CRM alone, by including a variety of information like annual revenue, key decision makers, sales timelines, and goals for both the buyer and seller. An account plan gets the entire account team on the same page, literally. It makes it easier to execute on account strategy, it smooths transitions when the account changes hands pre- and post-sale, and it can help onboard subject matter experts, like engineers, who might join mid-deal and need to get up to speed fast. Your account plan maps out the way you will grow your relationship with your client but it also clearly marks milestones so anyone at any time can jump in or out of the customer relationship and provide a smooth transition that is seamless to your client. Sadly, the general reality of account plans involves working hard to create them in Q1 and then largely ignoring them for the rest of the year. The problem is that most account plans are static documents, rather than dynamic, evolving account plans that remain relevant all year long. Living account plans work because account information stays up to date, making it easier for sales teams to create actionable strategies to earn the sale. With living account plans, sales teams are better able to deliver tangible benefits, eliminate surprises, and predict the ability to hit quarterly goals. Account planning encourages salespeople to develop a deeper understanding of each customer’s individual needs, motivations, and business situations. A well designed account plan takes your 2D visualization of an account viewed in a customer relationship management platform like Salesforce to a 3D living, breathing, evolving story of who the customer is and what he or she needs from your company. In turn, this empowers sales managers to find new ways to increase revenue from existing accounts. McDonald’s founder Ray Kroc may have revolutionized the upsell by training counter staff to ask, “Would you like fries with that?”, but more importantly he revolutionized growing a business by focusing on a simple menu with quality and quick service. Your account plan is the blueprint that lets you repeat one successful client relationship over and over again by focusing on quality and speed. Ray’s franchise model worked for McDonald’s because people liked getting the same burger and fries whether they were in Anchorage or Yuma. Your clients like doing business with you repeatedly because they like getting the same quality of service and delivery with every interaction whether it is the chat bot on your web site, an agent on the phone, or interacting with your app. An account plan puts into place a tool to ensure a quality experience - no matter who delivers it - every single time. In this sense, the blueprint or road map of your account plan is a very high stakes investment in your business’s success. Instead of looking at sales only on a deal to deal or quarter to quarter basis, successful sales teams are focusing on high-value accounts and account planning can help you do this efficiently. And as with all high-stakes endeavors, research and preparation increase your chance for success. For instance, sales reps should be in tune with recent organizational changes among their clients. A customer’s new round of funding may make them more receptive to the products and services you offer that can help them reach their next growth milestone faster. Likewise an influx of funding through a government program or other vertical impacting event can highlight an important point in time to focus on one segment of your client base. Or, with more businesses turning to remote work, clients may have new strategies and use cases that allow you to sell into new teams and business units. Discovering details like these allows you to present proposals that have a higher likelihood of acceptance because they show that you are invested in the success of their business. You know their business. You are prepared to help them with their business. Armed with a detailed account plan, a sales rep can ask more focused questions, like, “What results have you seen from expanding into X market?” or “We’ve noticed that your competitors have focused more on selling into Y industry. Have you considered moving into that space as well?” At that point, your reps can move the conversation into what product or service you’re currently offering and how it can help achieve their goals. What was once a sales pitch is now a conversation focused on problem solving, leading to increased trust and a deeper client relationship. Summit Technologies has been building just such relationships with our clients since we opened our doors in 2016. One aspect of account planning that is especially useful in your Salesforce ecosystem is communication. With the power of Einstein and marketing automation with Salesforce Marketing Cloud and/or Pardot you can capture all past communication interactions and plan for your forward communication strategy. This is very important to improve your overall communication strategic initiatives and maximize ROI. Salesforce’s artificial intelligence tools (Einstein) overlay a well developed account plan and automate with predictive analytics many customer interactions allowing your sales team to focus on those key moments of contact that matter the most. Another useful reward to account planning with Salesforce is a more insightful method of account segmentation. Armed with the information from your account plan you can identify and use analytics and Salesforce artificial intelligence to find and target key accounts. Analyze both potential and current value of accounts to key customers and target them accordingly. Should you create an account plan for every account you engage with? The short answer is yes — if you have the resources for it. However, if this is the first time your organization is conducting formal account planning, start by identifying your key customers for the new year. It makes the most sense to use account planning for your largest, most complex, and most valuable customers. As you identify the powerhouse MVPs who can be a large percentage of your annual revenue, keep an eye on the opportunity to grow in the future with Account Based Marketing (ABM) enhanced with the data you compile and analyze on your existing accounts. An account plan - and the historical data it generates - prepares you to do more business in the future with a simple and repeatable process. Quip - a real-time collaborative suite of documents and spreadsheets - can be an MVP product in your account planning arsenal. Quip makes it simple to add account plans to every Salesforce account and opportunity record. Quip is embedded in your Salesforce org and helps transform many business processes and documentation challenges into productivity wins. Once you have identified which customers need account plans, start by gathering client information. Before you work with a client, you need to understand who they are, what their goals and needs are, and what opportunities would be a good match for their needs. While every company is different, start with the following questions to map your account strategy. • What are the company’s goals? • How are they currently executing their goals? • Who are the key decision makers? • How will your customer measure success with the product or service that you’re selling? While some of these questions can be answered by doing a quick Google search, don’t be afraid to reach out to the prospect directly for answers. Asking questions doesn’t just give you more data, it shows your prospects and clients that you have a real and genuine interest in what success looks like for them and how you can help them attain it. The more information you have in an account plan, the more your extended team can use it to understand priorities, collect feedback, and make informed decisions. Plus, if the account ever gets transitioned to a new sales rep or gets passed off to a success manager, your teammates will have a full understanding of the customer’s history. With a solid account management plan in place you can define account management KPIs and have Salesforce help measure them with custom reports and dashboards. Don’t forget this critical step in measuring the progress of your accounts over time and to make changes along the way as you analyze historical data and update account plans over time. Whether you are implementing or re-implementing Salesforce, Summit Technologies can assist you in adding account planning as another tool to get the most out of your Salesforce strategy.

A successful sales strategy is a critical component of any successful business. It lays out a roadmap for reaching revenue targets by identifying target customers and selling channels, and creates a repeatable sales process to match. By providing clear steps for advancing customers through the sales pipeline, sales teams can be more productive and efficient. The structure of the sales process also provides real-time visibility into sales performance, allowing leaders to make adjustments and stay on course. There are two main factors to consider when creating a sales strategy: customer type and selling channel. Customer type is typically based on size, industry, region, or the product they're buying, while channel refers to the method used to reach customers (direct sales, partners, or self-service). The most effective sales strategies take both into account. Sales strategies based on customer type group customers based on company size, region, product, or industry. This allows sellers to develop expertise in the specific needs and challenges of those customers, leading to increased win rates. Selling channels include direct sales, channel sales, and self-service sales. Direct sales is ideal for complex products or large deals that require a longer sales cycle and human involvement, while channel sales is a great approach for reaching customers through a network of partners. Self-service sales is a great option for customers who prefer to make purchases without a lot of human interaction. A sales strategy is a roadmap for success, providing clarity and consistency for sales teams while also allowing for real-time adjustments based on performance data. By taking into account both customer type and selling channel, businesses can create a sales process that is tailored to their unique needs and goals.

By Shannan Hearne, Summit Technologies Marketing Specialist My granddaddy always worried people were putting the cart before the horse. I kind of thought it shouldn’t matter so long as the cart was moving in the right direction. As it relates to technology and automation, though, Grandaddy was right. Companies who rely on business or at times the lack thereof to dictate when automation can be incorporated into their processes are likely focusing more on low hanging fruit rather than the ripest deals on the tree. Process automation, automated workflows, automated document generation, and automated API integration help businesses operate at the speed of light. Automation is not a new idea and it has been the goal of tackling mundane and repetitive tasks since Henry Ford rolled the first car off the assembly line. In case you were wondering, Henry Ford took the time to build a single automobile from 12 hours to one hour and 33 minutes with automation. The Model T was the first car produced on the assembly line but Mr. Ford began with a Model A and created nineteen more models before getting to the mass produced Model T. Here are just a few ways that automation and Salesforce can drive your business forward: Automatic payment and document generation API integration Data services Data collection Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology Robotic process automation Rules engines Case management Case assignment Workforce automation Process automation AI-driven workflows Integration of existing data and systems Data security and integrity Salesforce CRM integration helps companies build high-performing sales leaders, empower sales teams, win more deals, and move into the future with confidence. Here are a few examples of how Summit Technologies has brought Salesforce’s automation tools out of the cart and in front of the horse to drive businesses forward. The University of Cincinnati Online needed to move their recruiting efforts to a more robust CRM and marketing automation solution. Read more. Vanguard Motor Sales needed a CRM platform with increased visibility of historical and current inventory, document and image management, and automated the buying and selling of vehicles. Read more. The Ohio State University College of Arts and Sciences needed to automate recruiting and retention for students and the post-acceptance to enrollment process. Read more. Florence County, South Carolina needed to transition from spreadsheets and word documents to Summit Technologies’ Economic Development Accelerator for Salesforce and automate workflows to enhance productivity. Read more.

Salesforce’s Communications Cloud helps you deliver digital-first journeys and perfect orders that save tie, money, and improve operational efficiencies. This Salesforce tool and Summit Technologies helps you create simple yet powerful digital experiences, streamline product and service launches, adhere to industry standards and architectures, and reduce churn with predictive analytics. Sounds good? Built on the world’s #1 CRM platform, Communications Cloud (formerly Vlocity for communications) enables B2C, B2B, and wholesale communications service providers (CSPs) to move to a catalog-driven digital BSS. With purpose built industry functionality and all the capabilities of Sales Cloud and Service Cloud, service providers of all sizes can quickly adapt to changing customer expectations, drive faster time to value, and unify every part of the organization — from marketing to retail channels to customer care and operations. Salesforce Communications Cloud helps businesses meet and exceed customer expectations across B2B, B2C and multiple channels. Communications Cloud integrates with Salesforce Marketing, Sales, and Service Clouds to provide functionality specific to the communications industry. It uses analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) to give personalized service to your customers. Marketing, Sales, Service, and Communications Clouds work together to optimize the customer experience across multiple channels making omnichannel marketing a reality for your business. You’ll want to work with Summit Technologies LLC to integrate the fantastic functionality of Communications Cloud with your other Salesforce systems to ensure the data and processes in your organization all work together smoothly. Salesforce Customer 360 supports most business operations, but what if you want to use your number reservation system with Communications Cloud? Or a credit check application? In this case, use OmniStudio and APIs to integrate your third-party applications. The solution gives you industry-standard APIs, including TMF620 and TMF645 APIs, which come out of the box to help automate your processes for faster, more accurate service. Communications Cloud supports tailoring your customer interactions to the preference of each customer. This includes notifications about: Relevant new promotions, products, and services that the customer or potential customer may want to buy Service activations and deactivations Service outage notifications Billing and account information Changes to products and services that the customer already has, for example, price updates Opportunities for customers to provide feedback Each communication is tracked on the customer account, so Einstein Analytics can monitor interactions and give efficient, personalized service. Commercial and technical teams can collaborate using the shared catalog to design and develop offers that meet customer requirements. Product creation and delivery involves a large team of engineers, marketeers, administrators, lawyers, integration specialists, and pricing specialists. With the shared catalog, these teams can build and test parts of the offer separately and then connect and test the offer as a whole once it’s ready. The shared catalog components are reusable in other offers too. This building-blocks approach to creating offers, along with built in product-lifecycle-management tools, collaboration tools, and auditing tools, reduces offer time to market. Your customers order products and services using different channels such as the online store, call center, retail outlets, and dedicated business portals. Communications Cloud is omnichannel—so customers can use any sales channel, and the solution accesses, processes, and stores information using a master data source. CPQ, CLM, and Digital Commerce use the shared catalog, Salesforce CRM, and other external sources, like a reservation system, as master data sources. This ensures that before the order is placed, the products and services offered to the customer are: Relevant, for instance, a product they’re likely to buy Correctly configured and priced Available and deliverable to the customer location The solution prompts the customer with product recommendations based on their selections and context and makes sure that the offers are consistent across any channel the customer uses. Once the order is placed with CPQ, the order-management and fulfillment teams use order management tools to pull and fulfill the order. Integration with Marketing and Service Clouds facilitates the scheduling of any required services, for example, installation, and keeping the customer informed. Your customers may reach out to the call center or their account manager to ask questions about their bill, order, or service delivery, but this doesn’t have to be the end of the conversation. With the right tools, including Einstein AI and analytics, service agents can use the time to build the customer relationship and make informed suggestions. For example, agents can suggest ways for the customer to save money by switching products or services. All things change: People and businesses move locations and change their service use. Customers upgrade and downgrade products and services, disconnect services, and renew or cancel subscriptions. In the communications industry, changes to existing plans and services are called move, add, change, delete (MACD), which is pronounced “mac D”. Sales reps create MACD orders with industries CPQ and submit the orders to Industries Order Management for processing. Relevant penalties and incidental charges, like disconnection fees, are automatically calculated as part of the MACD order. Communication Cloud integration with Salesforce Service and Marketing clouds keeps the customer up to date with progress. They can schedule relevant service appointments, such as installation or disconnection by a field service engineer. Who will utilize Communications Cloud at your company? How will they use it? While there isn’t a one size fits all solution when it comes to your employees, Summit Technologies LLC will help you map out through our discovery process what key employee roles and responsibilities can best be met with Salesforce Communications Cloud. Summit Technologies is a Columbus, Ohio based Salesforce Consulting Partner consisting of a talented and creative team of Salesforce certified Consultants, Developers, Analysts and Project Managers. We specialize in building innovative solutions for our clients within the Salesforce family of products including Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, CPQ, Experience Cloud, Nonprofit Cloud, Education Cloud, Pardot, Field Services and Salesforce Communities. Summit Technologies strategic services solutions bring custom Salesforce technology to work for your business.

Opportunity teams in Salesforce are groups of users that work together on deals and can include both internal and partner users. These teams can include different roles, such as an executive sponsor, dedicated support agent, or project manager. If your Salesforce administrator has enabled opportunity splits, you can split credit for an opportunity among members of the opportunity team. To edit an opportunity team, go to the Opportunity Team related list on an account and click to add a team member or a default opportunity team. You can specify the member's role on the opportunity and give them either read and write or read-only access to the opportunity. Keep in mind that changes made to an opportunity team do not affect your default opportunity team or the teams on your other opportunities. You can set up a default opportunity team of coworkers you typically work with on opportunities by specifying a role for each member and their access to your opportunities. To do this, go to your personal settings and navigate to Advanced User Details. Under Default Opportunity Team, click Add and select the coworkers you want to include on the team, as well as their access to the opportunity and their role on the team. You can also choose to automatically add your default team to opportunities you create or that are transferred to you. To track the progress of your opportunity teams, you can create reports and use filters. To update information for a team member across all opportunity teams, use a filter to view all teams for that user and export the report data using Data Loader. This will allow you to update team member information in bulk.

The average Salesforce customer has multiple orgs. These Salesforce instances usually arise as a result of mergers and acquisitions. They can also stem from large organizations deploying separate orgs over time for various geographies, business divisions, or departments. Sales, service, different regions, or company subsidiaries need to share data and benefit from cross-org initiatives. Company leaders need a single view of their customer and business data. This single pane of glass view enables companies to drive internal efficiencies for cross-sell/upsell, automate business actions, integrate omni-channel experiences that bridge sales and service, consolidate data, and extend multi-org data into data lakes. For example, a company with five acquisitions can consolidate all the business and sales data across those five acquired companies. They can then use this information to create company wide sales targets, consolidate multiple service departments, or share leads and contacts for cross-sell/upsell opportunities. Using Heroku Connect, you can create aggregated datasets from multiple Salesforce orgs using records pulled from many Salesforce objects. You can use Heroku to simplify data visibility across these orgs and enable users to take actions on Salesforce data in any org of your choice, and you can use it to build new customer engagement experiences united around a single ID. Using the new Multi-Org Visibility & Actionability Salesforce Labs Package for Work.com, Salesforce admins and developers can now accelerate the time to value for these solutions in just a few clicks on the platform while having the flexibility to customize it for their business needs. Multi-org visibility is great for when you need a single view of all your Salesforce data across multiple orgs. In our car manufacturer example, one car maker may own 25 dealerships across the country. Each dealership has its own Salesforce org to keep its sales and service information separate from other dealerships. Whether you're building a simple prototype or a business-critical product, Heroku's fully-managed platform gives you the simplest path to delivering apps quickly. When someone orders a vehicle from the brand’s website, the manufacturer needs to see inventory across all its dealerships and assign a vehicle to the new owner. It could accomplish this by keeping its dealer orgs separate, but consolidating its data into a single org using multi-org visibility. All this is done using Heroku Connect, Heroku Postgres, and Salesforce Connect. Beyond retail applications, the corporate leadership team can see sales, service, and marketing metrics across all their dealerships in a single dashboard. They can use this information to plan for their business as a whole. Multi-org visibility enables businesses to have a clear view of their Salesforce data across all business units and take action on this data. Seamlessly sync your Heroku data into your Salesforce systems of record, for a single point of view of your customers. Take the simplicity of the Heroku development experience and add tools that you know. Your devs can build how they want with the tools they want. Heroku means they’ve got full flexibility and processing power at their disposal within the trusted Salesforce environment. Heroku patterns decrease your launch time and introduce new technology to your customers. With the integration of Heroku, the Salesforce Platform has a new set of capabilities that lets you use the platform to do things that were not possible before. Summit Technologies LLC is a Salesforce consulting partner with the proven ability to get you up and running on your multi-org environment with Heroku. The Heroku patterns shared are just templates. Heroku use cases are endless, and the patterns can be combined to accomplish just about anything. Once you've got these Heroku patterns up and running in your workflow, you’re going to be able to lead your industry because it means that your development teams are untethered. They're going to go faster. They're going to test more quickly. They're going to increase their speed to market, and they're going to build the best, most modern, real-time customer-engaging connected experiences.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Salesforce Pardot are both marketing automation platforms designed to improve your omnichannel communication with leads and contacts, but they have some key differences. Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a comprehensive platform that includes a range of features for email marketing, social media marketing, mobile marketing, and other types of marketing automation. It is geared towards enterprise-level organizations and offers a wide range of integrations with other Salesforce products in the Salesforce ecosystem. Salesforce Pardot, on the other hand, is a more streamlined platform focused traditionally on B2B marketing automation. It includes features for lead generation, lead nurturing, and lead scoring, as well as integrations with Salesforce. Pardot is designed for small to medium-sized businesses and is typically more affordable than Marketing Cloud. Overall, Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a more comprehensive platform with a wider range of features, while Salesforce Pardot is a more specialized platform focused on B2B marketing automation. But is that the whole story? Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Pardot are both automation and digital analytics platforms, but they are geared towards different audiences and have some key differences. Pardot is a B2B marketing automation platform with a focus on marketing and sales alignment, lead management, and marketing campaigns. Marketing Cloud, on the other hand, is more geared towards B2C companies and offers greater capabilities in social media marketing and advertising, as well as SMS campaigns. While Pardot is primarily an email marketing platform, Marketing Cloud includes a range of modules for different areas of digital marketing, such as Email Studio, MobileConnect, Social Studio, Advertising Studio, and Journey Builder. Ultimately, the right platform for your business will depend on your needs and goals, as well as the size of your database, the type of marketing channels you use, and the length of your sales cycle. Both Pardot and Marketing Cloud can be use ful for different types of businesses, but it is important to consider the specific features and capabilities of each platform before making a decision. In some cases, both Marketing Cloud and Pardot - now known as Marketing Cloud Account Engagement - can be useful marketing and engagement tools for your company. Summit Technologies can help you select the one that is best for your business, or we can implement both.

By Shannan Hearne, Summit Technologies Marketing Specialist From the earliest times, people have been drawn to stories. Cave drawings, fairy tales to explain the unexplainable, and fish tales. Even today, stories remain a powerful tool for conveying information and capturing people's imagination and attention. That's why content marketing that incorporates narrative elements can be so effective. One of the key elements of narrative is characters. Whether they are people or products, characters give your audience something to identify with and become invested in. By focusing on a main character, you can create a subject that carries the audience from the start to finish. A character engrosses the reader and makes him a champion for success in the end. To make your characters more compelling, give them distinct traits, histories, and trajectories. As the story unfolds, show how the character-subject evolves in meaningful ways over the arc of the content. This can be done by using commonly used character arcs like "rags to riches" or an illustrious "aha" moment. In the scenario of marketing, the character arc might very well be a problem solved or a pain point eliminated. Another essential element of narrative is conflict and resolution. People read content online to solve their problems, so creating a plot that references a conflict and provides a solution to that problem is essential. For example, you can trace your product character's journey from its lonely state to its new, active and happy home. Pacing is also important when it comes to developing the plot. Too little tension makes for boring content, while too much detail can be distracting. By using a plot diagram with key narrative elements, you can create a structure that addresses the tension between the audience and their issues while leading them to a resolution. Personification helps audiences relate to your content. By personifying non-human characters and using anecdotes and examples, you can make your content more concrete and understandable. This can help enhance the readability of your content, illustrate complex ideas, and make the content personal for the reader. I might not be able to relate to every widget on the market but the widgets that have interesting stories are the ones I remember. I bet you’re like that too. And so are your readers. Overall, incorporating narrative elements into your content marketing strategy can make your content more engaging, impactful, and valuable. By including characters, plot, and personification, you can create content that resonates with your target audience and encourages them to take action. By combining key elements of narrative with intentional content marketing you can deliver content that is meaningful to your prospects and customers. At Summit Technologies, we thrive on helping our clients create compelling content that helps them thrive. Contact us today for help with your content marketing strategy.

Creating a great customer experience (CX) is a top priority for companies in today's competitive marketplace. To achieve this goal, many businesses turn to technology to help manage and improve their CX efforts. According to recent research, the most commonly used tech tools for CX include CRM software (such as Salesforce) used by 47% of top companies, CX management solutions (41%), service or help desk software (35%), and messaging and chat tools (37%). However, as the industry continues to evolve, CX leaders are looking for more advanced features in their tech tools. They want a single tool that is both robust and provides quick access to insights. For smaller organizations, this is especially critical. In recent years, customer feedback has become even more important for CX professionals. A survey found that 72% of CX professionals believe customer feedback is more important now than before the pandemic. The most popular channels for gathering customer feedback include email, website, customer calls, in-person, and chat. In the U.S., digital platforms such as websites, in-app, and social media are also commonly used for feedback collection. The four key components of CX are brand, product, price, and service. CX refers to everything an organization does to deliver superior experiences, value, and growth for customers. To measure the effectiveness of CX efforts, companies can track key metrics such as Customer Satisfaction Survey (CSAT), Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Effort Score (CES), and Customer Churn Rate. Summit Technologies is your Salesforce implementation partner and our discovery process ensures we build a Salesforce solution for your business that incorporates everything you need, customized for your business model, and nothing that you don’t need. Summit Technologies is a Columbus, Ohio based Salesforce Consulting Partner consisting of a talented and creative team of Salesforce certified Consultants, Developers, Analysts and Project Managers. We specialize in building innovative solutions for our clients within the Salesforce family of products including Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, CPQ, Experience Cloud, Nonprofit Cloud, Education Cloud, Pardot, Field Services and Salesforce Communities. Summit Technologies strategic services solutions bring custom Salesforce technology to work for your business.

There are quite a few cases for document generation in Salesforce. Quotes and contracts are just two of them. Salesforce has several document generation tools that connect well with its platform. PandaDoc, Conga, Nintex (formerly known as Drawloop), S-Docs, Formstack, Windward Core, Docomotion, and Opero Documents are just a few. Salesforce’s AppExchange shows 402 document generation solutions currently. Some generate branded documents, PDFs, Word documents, or even collaborative documents. Some solutions work via click, workflow, or batch. Salesforce document generation is widely needed by platform users across industries but there are many myths and misconceptions for companies looking for a document generation solution that fully integrates with the Salesforce platform. Summit Technologies LLC offers document generation solutions on fully vetted applications to meet all their clients’ document generation needs. What are the use cases that are relevant for your business? If you are a Salesforce Sales Cloud user, business proposals might be the tool that takes your pipeline opportunities from open to closed won. Sales proposals can be time consuming for sales teams to generate and deliver to leads. One solution for this is to build custom proposal templates and upload them to Salesforce easily accessible to sales teams with the click of a button. A well built proposal template pulls in the bulk of the pertinent information, automatically appends the document creator or record owner’s personalization, and still allows for tweaks by the sender. Imaging saving 4-15 minutes per sales rep per proposal. How much time to focus on selling could this create in your company? Anyone who works in the compliance space is accustomed to generating and completing quite a bit of paperwork. A document generation tool for Salesforce can turn overwhelming stacks of paperwork into a manageable digital stack accessible from any device. Templates are built in Salesforce for the tasks the compliance officer requires. Then the document can be selected, evaluated, and generated to create an audit report with only the policies necessary. Imagine a clean desk and all your documents associated with any Salesforce project right at your fingertips. Sales and marketing teams alike have events that wow existing customers, woo potential customers, and create brand awareness and good will. Whether these are live and in person events such as a golf outing, a lunch learn, or a conference alerting people of your event with an invitation can be time consuming. If the event is virtual like a webinar or a virtual conference most companies prefer to send a series of invitations rather than a single one. Salesforce marketing platforms Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Salesforce Pardot are great tools for emailing event invitations. But for sales reps to send invitations on the fly or to a batch of Salesforce campaign members is easy when event invitations are loaded as PDF files. Invitations in Salesforce with a document generator can also be printed along with mailing labels for each contact to send personalized direct mail invitations. Automate the access data for IT administrators with document generation. While pulling login history and other org access data is relatively simple in Salesforce, customizing the presentation of that data can be a time consuming and frustrating task for IT staff. A custom document let’s administrators do a query, filter, and format data with ease. Product engineers must document all product changes. Then customers have to be notified. With clean, accurate data in Salesforce, the process can be completely automated using document generation. The engineer documents the product change in Salesforce. A document with information about the product change is built and an email send is triggered to all customers using the product. Simple compliance with minimal manual effort! HR teams have challenges with tracking employee time and attendance, especially with a larger than ever remote workforce. Timesheets that require data entry from employees, sign off by managers, and routing to human resources or payroll departments can be easily managed in Salesforce using a document generation and e-signature solution. Forget Google Sheets and emails which can be easily overlooked in inboxes. Even in multiple layer management scenarios such as contractors working through one agency at another location can automatically route their weekly hours for approval and signature. Field service reps have a hefty amount of information to input after visiting a home, for example, a home inspector. Nobody wants to sit on a customer’s front porch hand writing notes that later have to be entered manually into a computer to generate a field service report to send back to the customer and other departments. With a handheld device and a document generation tool the inspector can enter all notes, generate the document, and have it digitally delivered to the customer faster and with fewer errors. Routing of the generated document can all be handled with conditional logic saving even more time. Document generation has a role to play with channel management as well. Channel sales can provide a powerful boost to a business’s reach and brand awareness. Partners with the right tools at their fingertips sell and promote your products and services more effectively. With document generation and Experience Cloud, channel partners can complete MDF applications, route applications, and have ready access to co-branded marketing materials. These are really just a drop in the bucket of the solutions available with Salesforce and document generation. Summit Technologies LLC has created document solutions with Conga for the transportation industry, quote configuration templates for customer-facing documents for a water purification systems designer, implemented Conga Composer to generate client-ready sales documents for a rapidly growing technology company, and integrated tools like Nintex for Salesforce document generation. Just imagine what Summit Technologies can automate for your business.

Salesforce is the leading CRM for sales, marketing, customer success, and business operations tools. In order to provide the best platform for its users, Salesforce is continuously improving with three seasonal releases per year. To keep pace with the updates, many organizations look to managed services because of its quick error resolution, reliable support, and prevention of company disruption. what are managed services? Managed services provides a way for organizations to proactively manage their Salesforce maintenance and updates by keeping a Salesforce certified administrator on retainer for a specific bank of hours per month. This administrator will serve as a partner in maintaining updates, training, and system security, mitigating issues before they become problems, and providing continuous support for your organization's development and growth. what are the benefits? Salesforce takes a lot of time, attention, and knowledge to stay in peak condition. Managed services provides a reliable resource with extensive Salesforce knowledge and experience. Your employees will be able to focus on what they do best without having to waste time on system support. A managed services package is perfect for companies that: Own a backlog of Salesforce projects that exceed their team’s workload capacity Prefer long-term partners and reliable relationships at reduced rates for platform assistance Want to outsource ongoing support and training as they grow their business what are my options? Summit Technologies offers three managed services packages to support a variety of needs and budgets: Silver, Gold, and Platinum. Each package provides different levels of support, yet all guarantee a high pace of work and fast delivery of results. Click here to learn more about how Summit Technologies' managed services can help your organization.

Salesforce is the global CRM leader because of its powerful and highly-integrated platform, Net Zero impact, advanced innovation, and so much more. Although there are many reasons to be excited about Salesforce, we are looking forward to the Spring '22 Release. Salesforce periodically releases updates that improve the performance, security, logic, and usability of the platform. Since the platform is constantly evolving, Salesforce releases three times a year (Winter, Spring, Summer) with many new features and improvements. These are our top 5 highlights from the Spring '22 Release. Sales and Service New out-of-the-box functionality, like asset integration, work plan integration, Service-Level Agreement (SLA) Management, and default page layouts, allow incident response teams to detect, diagnose, and resolve incidents faster. The Winter '22 Release already introduced three new standard objects to help resolve customer cases and major disruptions. These new functionalities are designed to make it even easier for response teams to complete cases. Platform and Apps Salesforce is introducing Backup and Restore, a feature to help businesses stay resilient by preventing permanent data loss. In just a few clicks, administrators are able to restore data from any previous backup. This feature also includes a "Logs" tab which keeps track of each back up, policy execution, and any potential errors that may occur. Nonprofit and Education Enhancements to the Elevate now allow PayPal Checkout to giving pages and custom donation forms. Donors using PayPal Checkout do not have to reenter their information, making giving much easier. Elevate will clearly mark all donations received as PayPal or credit card, and transfer the information to the Nonprofit Success Pack. Integration and Analytics Spring '22 is introducing Intelligent Insights and dynamic pre-built dashboards to the Tableau CRM for Public Sector to improve operational efficiency. This will fuel data-driven decisions among executives by centralizing license, permit, and inspections data. Users can track a department's performance, identify applications and inspections that need attention, and improve workflow efficiency. Additionally, they can get immediate insights into an account’s applications, licenses, complaints, inspections, and violations from an account record page. Net Zero, Financial Services, Health, & Manufacturing Tableau CRM for Financial Services: Insurance Dashboards presents key claims analytics such as closure rates and average settling times across lines of business and departments, to pinpoint bottlenecks, improve workflows, enhance staffing models, and more. Users can assess financial performance to support optimal pricing and risk exposure. Click here to read more about the Spring '22 Release.

Summit Technologies has received distinction as a Salesforce Ridge Consulting Partner (previously known as Silver Consulting Partner). Being recognized as a Ridge Partner signifies Salesforce has honored the outstanding accomplishments by Summit Technologies in the categories of Customer Success, Innovation, Growth, and Lead Generation. Salesforce has four levels (Base, Ridge, Crest, Summit) to classify consulting partners. All consulting partner tiers are based on their Consulting Partner Trailblazer Score. The Consulting Partner Trailblazer Score measures a partner’s contribution against Salesforce-set targets across four main categories and allots points based on successful completion. Summit Technologies has officially surpassed the 250 points required to reach Ridge status. Since becoming a Salesforce partner, Summit Technologies has demonstrated a high level of expertise by successfully completing implementations, customizations, and integrations across a variety of industries. Summit Technologies has 10 Salesforce certified experts, over 60 Salesforce certifications, and a customer satisfaction rating of 5 out of 5 stars on the Salesforce AppExchange network. Learn more about us here.

Ecommerce Isn’t One-Size-Fits-All Every brand and organization is unique. Some are geographically specific and managed by one central team, and others are sprawling, multibrand enterprises that operate all over the world. These variations in size and region are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the many factors that determine how a brand operates with ecommerce. In this module, you learn key considerations that help commerce leaders and decision makers structure their businesses and teams for success. It all begins with an honest assessment of your organization and your goals. A good understanding of how your business is currently structured (and how you envision it in the future) should guide your implementation. How Scaling and Expanding Affect Your Organizational Structure When assessing your ecommerce goals, consider how they will affect your business structure in the long-term. As you plan your digital transformation and envision the future, ask yourself these key questions. How many brands do you have? If you have goals to add new brands to your portfolio, consider whether each separate business unit will operate independently—and how much autonomy each will have. If you want clear cohesion between multiple brands, you need to establish guidelines and best practices—then implement a system to ensure all business units follow suit. How mature is your organization when it comes to digital initiatives? Scaling your business undoubtedly involves building new ecommerce capabilities and features over time. Determine whether your in-house team will take charge of these new digital experiences or if you need to bring in a partner to assist. Do you have goals to expand to more geographies? International aspirations can have an enormous impact on your teams. If you operate in diverse geographies, you need to translate your site into new languages, follow the data and privacy regulations of each region, collaborate on operational changes, and more. Once you’ve thought through your goals and determined what growth looks like for your business, the next step is to establish ownership and authority. Establish Digital-First Leadership Roles Before setting out on your ecommerce journey, you need to establish all the rules, relationships, systems, and processes that define responsibility within your company. Consider this scenario: Cloud Kicks, a company that specializes in high-end custom sneakers, wants to launch a new brand for kids. Who will be in charge of the roadmap for this new ecommerce experience? Will the business bring in a new team to launch the brand and manage it once it’s up and running? With well-defined roles, the company can plan the new implementation with maximum clarity about responsibilities and accountability. Establishing clear ownership helps you lay a solid foundation for management and oversight of your businesses and teams. It creates structure and clarity to help guide each individual team to work within the framework provided. Ultimately, governance defines ownership, enables faster growth, and allows your teams to operate more productively. The Four Operating Models While ownership and responsibilities define the oversight within a company, operating models help provide even more structure. These models establish the roles and reporting structure within a business and ensure that the structure supports business goals. If you think of ownership as the basic outline of a business, operating models are the final draft. Typically, businesses operating ecommerce fall into one of four categories: a centralized model, a distributed model, a center of excellence, or a hybrid model. Let’s review each one, along with their pros and cons. Centralized Model The centralized model works best with one dedicated team coordinating all digital activities—like merchandising, marketing, SEO, analytics, and development—across business units. Most smaller ecommerce businesses deploy this model. For example, single-brand direct-to-consumer (D2C) start-ups can deploy a centralized model to easily launch ecommerce early in their digital maturity. Pros and cons of a centralized model: ✔️ A singular, focused team with a clear vision ✖️ Difficult to scale if and when you expand to new geographies or add new brands Distributed Model With a distributed model, each business unit typically leads their own digital change and is only accountable for their own initiatives. Consider a large holding company with several distinctly different brands under one portfolio. With a distributed model, each brand can operate independently and each site can be managed separately—with no need for consistency in terms of UX design, features and functionality, and integrations. Pros and cons of a distributed model: ✔️ Offers freedom for businesses with a diverse range of brands and geographies ✖️ May be difficult for brands that want a cohesive strategy across business units Center of Excellence The center of excellence is typically a core team of digital specialists who test, deploy, and manage technologies—with marketing frequently at the forefront. This team's main focus is to create guidelines and best practices for all lines of business within the organization. The goal is to improve the customer experience and use digital strategies to gain a competitive advantage. Pros and cons of a center of excellence model: ✔️ Offers continuity for a diverse range of brands and geographies ✖️ Mandates cohesion across business units, which can hinder brand autonomy Hybrid Model A hybrid approach takes the brand autonomy of the distributed model and combines it with the oversight and general guidance of a center of excellence. This creates an organizational structure that allows separate brands to have distinctive, exclusive experiences while adhering to best practices set by a centralized team of experts. Pros and cons of a hybrid model: ✔️ Brands have strategic guidance but are still able to maintain autonomy ✖️ Potential for friction and costly overhead if brands don’t adopt recommendations