5 Steps to Innovating

at the Speed of Your Customer

Contents

Introduction 2

Step 1 Assess: Understand the opportunity 5

Step 2 Ideate: Explore and validate solutions and build a roadmap for change 8

Step 3 Build and Learn: Quickly and iteratively build business and operational capabilities 11

Step 4 Scale: Measure, then grow and optimize what works 14

Step 5 Align: Continuously align resources with strategic intent 17

Conclusion 21

Biographies 22

Looking to reimagine your customer experience? Bring your vision

to life with guidance from Salesforce Professional Services.

Schedule An Appointment Now

5 Steps to Innovating at the Speed of Your Customer 1

Introduction
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 – and extraordinary world events have only
accelerated it. The way people interact has changed forever,
making the quick transition to digital even more urgent.

Building on the Third Industrial Revolution
(computing), the Fourth Industrial Revolution
is about connectedness, with advances
in cloud computing, big data, robotics,
and artificial intelligence. The connected
era has enabled consumers to be more
educated and more empowered in their
purchasing decisions. So the purchasing
experience has gained new importance.
In fact, according to our own research,
84% of customers say the experience a
company provides is as important as its
products and services.1 Moreover, peoples’
expectations in every context are informed
by their experience as consumers. In
other words, the business setting is not
insulated from escalating expectations.
According to research firm IDC, companies
spent an estimated $1.18 trillion in
2019 on digital transformation efforts,
an increase of 17.9% over 2018.2
And while the urgency and investment
are clear and present, that does not
automatically translate to success.
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.

As such, there is an increasing urgency to

evolve to meet customer expectations,
shareholder demands, and employee needs.
We can see this urgency translating into
significant global corporate investment. 84%
of customers say
experience is as important
as product
1
 onor Donegan, “State of the Connected Customer Report Outlines
C
Changing Standards for Customer Engagement,” Senior Marketing
Manager, Research & Content, Salesforce, June 12, 2019
salesforce.com/company/news-press/stories/2019/06/061219-g/
2
I DC Research, “Worldwide Digital Transformation Spending Guide,” April 2019:
idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=IDC_P32575

5 Steps to Innovating at the Speed of Your Customer 2

Adopting a Sense-and-Respond Operating Model:
How to Innovate at the Speed of Your Customer
At Salesforce, we work with customers who
are focusing on innovating and delivering
at the speed of their customers. We’ve
found that success in the Fourth Industrial
Revolution requires a different mindset and
operating model. The key is shifting decision-
making and operational focus from internal
efficiency to external customer engagement.
Furthermore, leaders must accept that
transformation in the Fourth Industrial
Revolution is never over. It is a mode of
thinking, working, and operating that
enables a company to continuously sense
and respond to the emerging and unmet
needs of customers, partners, employees,
shareholders, and so on. Transformation
is not an initiative to be completed, but an
ongoing mission to deliver new and relevant
experiences, products, and services.
Therefore, the first step on a successful
5
Align
1 Build &
Assess
SENSE
2 4
Ideate
5 Steps to Innovating at the Speed of Your Customer
customer transformation journey is
examining your existing operating model
to determine what will enable you to
quickly understand and respond to
the needs of stakeholders (customers,
employees, partners, and shareholders).
This white paper will describe five
steps that have helped our most
successful customers accelerate their
customer transformation journey:
1. Assess: Understand the opportunity
2. Ideate: Explore and validate solutions
and build a roadmap for change
3. Build & Learn: Quickly and
iteratively build business and
operational capabilities
4. Scale: Measure, then grow
and optimize what works
5. Align: Continuously align
resources with strategic intent
3
Learn
RESPOND
Scale
3
Before diving deeply into each step,
let’s take a moment to describe
the three major phases of a sense-
and-respond operating model:
Sense
The sense part of the operating model is
all about identifying customer interests,
or unmet needs, and capturing them for
further research and validation. By building
a sensing system, you establish continual
listening and engaging mechanisms with
your stakeholders in order to identify
opportunities and validate solutions before
investing large amounts of funding and
delivery resources. In other words, the sense
phase ensures you are building the right
thing (before you start thinking about the
best way to build it). This requires capturing
and distributing real-time customer
insights and making them accessible to
the right teams within your organization. It
also requires empowering those teams to
ideate, experiment, and validate solution
desirability, feasibility, and viability.
Respond
The respond part of the operating model
is where the focus shifts to building it right,
now that we know it’s the right thing to build.
It’s all about quickly and iteratively executing
against an identified need, learning, and
driving continual improvements in the
experience, product, or service. In building
a set of respond mechanisms, you focus
on a series of quick iterative wins and tests
over all-encompassing programs. Also key
to the process is monitoring and observing
5 Steps to Innovating at the Speed of Your Customer
how your product or service is actually being
used. This is critical for closing the value loop
and understanding whether or not your
solution hypothesis 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.
Align
The align part of the operating model is
where you put in place a repeatable and
predictable way to align and balance the
interests of multiple stakeholders. This is
critical for sustained success. This is not
just something you do when it is time to
set the annual budget. It is a continuous
process that keeps all stakeholders working
together toward the outcomes that drive
your corporate vision. Appropriate alignment
processes ensure timely decisions are
made to allocate corporate resources to the
initiatives most likely to achieve stakeholder
value. Granted, those initiatives may change
throughout the course of a fiscal year, but
that makes alignment all the more critical.
This part of the model ensures teams aimed
at strategic imperatives drive real stakeholder
value, and achievement is measured in terms
of value realized (not just tasks completed).
Did you know that Salesforce has a team of
certified consultants that can help your
organization build the right operating model?
Schedule An Appointment Now
4
Step 1
Assess: Understand the
opportunity
“Keep in mind that the landscape is always changing; you must
always examine what’s working, evolve your ideas, and change
the way you do things.”
Marc Benioff
Co-CEO and Founder, Salesforce

We’ll be talking anonymously about a
different one of our customers at each of our
five steps. The first one is an entertainment
provider that recognized market dynamics
were changing (fewer net new subscribers,
higher acquisition costs, higher content
costs, and so on.). To remain competitive
and maintain its growth trajectory, it needed
to adjust the fundamentals of the business.
Led by the CEO, the company launched
an initiative to transform its customer
experience by expanding its brand to
offer not just a “premium product,” but
a “premium customer experience.” The
company resisted the urge to do what it
had always done (launch an innovative
new product) and instead focused on
understanding who its customers were
and mapping the customer journey and
lifecycle. Leadership dove deeper into the
journey by persona to understand when Net
Promoter Scores (NPS) rose and dropped,
and what events coincided with those
changes. Through this exercise, the CEO and
his leadership team were able to educate
and engage the entire organization on its
customers: what they needed, what they
liked, what they disliked, when they were
disappointed, and when they were delighted.
This journey became the backbone of all
decision-making. Activities were prioritized
based on whether they were likely to drive
customer loyalty by alleviating a customer
pain point or maximizing a moment of “wow.”
The initiative united and gave purpose to all
25,000 employees and aligned everyone’s
understanding of what constituted success.
As a result of mapping the customer
experience journey, it became clear that
company policies and practices were driving
a lack of transparency. This was reducing
customer trust and loyalty as early as the
first month of billing. As such, driving greater
transparency became job number one —
with transformative effects. But none of that
could have happened if leadership hadn’t
looked beyond operational efficiencies to the
customer experience they were providing.

5 Steps to Innovating at the Speed of Your Customer 5

 This journey became the backbone of all decision-
making. Activities were prioritized based on
whether they were likely to drive customer loyalty
by alleviating a customer pain point.

with you? When and how do customers

And while this process may often require drop out? Under what circumstances
moving away from policies and practices do customers become advocates?
that feel safe, perseverance pays.
Once these insights are synthesized,
So what’s the best way to see your you should see patterns forming that
products, services, and experiences can point you to where to start. You’ll
through your customers’ eyes? Really begin to see where you can easily raise
define who they are, beyond a churn or the bar for NPS. You’ll start to see where
segmentation model – describe them as “wow moments” can be standardized.
people with needs, wants, and desires. Opportunities will come into focus, and
you’ll be able to align resources and teams
Start by observing and studying them,
to take advantage of those opportunities.
then use the insights gathered to define
common personas that comprehensively
articulate what customers want and
need from you. In the process, you may
discover an unmet need in a different
part of their life that you can serve.

After understanding who your customers

are, explore the journey you’re currently
providing them. Ask questions like: What
are the steps of the lifecycle? What policies
or practices impact them at each stage and
how does that impact their Net Promoter
Score (NPS) or perception of their experience

5 Steps to Innovating at the Speed of Your Customer 6

Build a Culture of Curiosity

According to our research, companies overwhelmingly agree that their

business has been impacted in the past five years by a greater need for
customer-centricity. Eighty-one percent describe this impact as at least
“moderate,” and 49% describe it as “significant.”3

The key to creating an organization that 2. Reward and acknowledge

continually looks for new opportunities curious employees.
to improve customer experiences, is to Use the tools you already have at your
cultivate a culture of curiosity. As leaders, disposal (spot bonuses, recognition in
how often do you discuss industry trends all-hands meetings, quarterly awards, and
with your teams? How do you encourage so on.) to highlight those employees who
them to explore other parts of the business routinely exhibit curiosity and actively
to more fully understand the impact of their leverage it to create better experiences.
work upstream and downstream? Do you
reward those who question the status quo
3. Authentically exhibit curiosity.
and bring new ideas to the team? Do you
When you interact with your employees
model curious behavior? In other words,
and teams every day, use it as a way to
do you drive exploration and discovery?
exercise your own curiosity. Ask authentic
probing questions. Set a goal for yourself
Here are three things you can start
to learn something new every day from
doing tomorrow to cultivate a culture
at least one employee interaction. Your
of curiosity in your organization
team will see the difference and begin
with little to no investment:
acting the same way, especially when
#1 and #2 above are already in play.
1. Get your team close to the customer.
Enable your team to go on ride-alongs,
visit contact centers, or shadow an
associate at a retail store. Whatever
makes sense for your customer and
industry, provide the opportunity
for your employees to get firsthand
exposure to the customer experience
they’re creating. It is guaranteed
to expand your team’s perspective
on the work they do every day.

3
T
 he Economist Intelligence Unit, “Integrated Transformation: How
Rising Customer Expectations Are Turning Companies Outside-in”:
salesforce.com/campaign/sales-service-content-hub/integrated-
transformation/?d=cta-body-promo-1

5
C Steps
H A P TtoE R
Innovating
2.0 at the Speed of Your Customer 7
Step 2
Ideate: Explore and validate
solutions and build a roadmap
for change
“Whatever the problem, be part of the solution. Don’t just sit
around raising questions and pointing out obstacles.”
Tina Fey
American actress, comedian, writer, producer, and playwright

Our second customer example is a financial
services company that sought to transform
its wealth management business to better
meet evolving customer needs, and keep
pace with disruptive new competitors in
the fintech space. It hadn’t invested in
its technology landscape in years, and
as a result it was not suited to support
its vision for transformation and growth.
The platform made it hard to launch new
products or services, deliver real-time
data, and provide advisors with the
360-degree view of clients that drives highly
personalized, engaging client experiences.
The CIO wanted to use design thinking
to change the focus from tools and
technology (the “how”) to understanding
what clients need (the ”why”), in order to
better understand and anticipate future
client needs and align those needs to the
wealth management business. This would
allow the company to better understand
and anticipate future needs and align the
business with those needs. Dedicated cross-
functional teams were set up to explore
different areas of the business to find out
what was and wasn’t working and where
opportunities lay.

The CIO leading this transformation

was aware a change of this magnitude
would require a cultural mindshift, from
Shift focus from the “how” to
a “we know” (we know our industry, our the ”why” in order to better
competitors, and what our customers want) understand and anticipate
to a “learning” mindset to ensure teams
would step out of their comfort zone and
future client needs.
challenge the organizational status quo.

5 Steps to Innovating at the Speed of Your Customer 8

Early on in the process, teams spent time
with end users and customers (advisors and
their clients) to understand their needs, and
these insights drove ideas and solutions. User
stories were sketched to visualize potential
solutions, which were tested early and often
with advisors and clients. Multiple iterations
followed to narrow down the possibilities,
which were then presented to stakeholders
for validation from a business and technology
perspective. The design thinking framework
enabled the organization to shift from
being technology-focused to being client-
centric in their development approach;
early and regular stakeholder and user
engagement led to insights for meaningful
change, helping teams quickly understand
and validate the most desirable solutions,
while being open to new opportunities.
This practice focuses on translating needs
and opportunities into initiatives. But beware;
some stakeholders may push to rush those
initiatives to a finish line, while others may
paralyze them in committee. A balance must
be achieved. Recognize that the finish line
is an illusion, and imperfect iteration is the
key to success. At this stage in the process,
4
D
 Zone, “Applying the 80:20 Rule in Software Development”:
dzone.com/articles/applying-8020-rule-software
5 Steps to Innovating at the Speed of Your Customer
you’re probably still unsure if it’s the right
thing, and you’re definitely unsure of the
right way to build it. Research shows that
only 20% of features are used “frequently
to always.”4 That means 80% of features are
used “never to sometimes.” Design failure
in the development stage is a huge loss
in people-hours and investment dollars.
Prototyping is a low-cost approach to testing
ideas directly with users, which enables you
to learn about the most viable solution.
Following this approach is key to ensuring
that what ultimately gets delivered is of value.
Similar to the customer story above,
innovating is not just about sticky notes,
games, bean bag chairs, and creativity.
Innovation that drives actual business
results requires an incredible amount of
discipline, and new decision-making norms
and approaches. It requires paying as
much attention to how the idea is created,
shared, and brought to life as the idea itself.
80%
of features are used
never to sometimes
9
To ensure that innovative ideas are customer-focused, technically feasible,
and equipped to generate business value, follow the same steps our most
successful customers have:
1. Conduct experience-focused research.
Start with identifying opportunity areas
and assign cross-functional teams to dive
deeper, through hands-on, face-to-face
conversation and observation. The goal is
to empathize with customers in order to
fully understand pain points as inputs for
effective ideation. Empathy is crucial to a
human-centered design process because
it allows you to set aside your own
assumptions about the world and gain
real insight into users and their needs.
2. Map the experience.
Working with the outputs of the research,
create a customer experience journey
map. A journey map is a visualization
of the process and interactions a
customer goes through in order to
accomplish a goal tied to a specific
business or product. It also defines key
experience touchpoints, messages, and
interactions. It’s used to understand and
address customer needs and identify
opportunities for improvement.
3. Co-create with business and
IT stakeholders.
Working with the output of the
previous two steps, bring together
your design, business, and technology
stakeholders to ideate on possible
solutions. Common design thinking
techniques used to spur ideation
include brainstorming, prototyping,
bodystorming, mindmapping,
and sketching. Coming out of this
session you’ll narrow the solution
hypotheses you want to test further.
5 Steps to Innovating at the Speed of Your Customer
4. Design, prototype, and iterate.
Build working, testable prototypes
and get them in front of stakeholders
as quickly as possible; then apply
learnings to iterative refinement.
These prototypes can range in fidelity
from simple click-throughs to more
interactive experiences. By creating an
environment in which users can touch,
explore, and interact with the prototypes,
teams are better able to understand
how those prototypes will be used
when they’re fully designed and built.
5. Plan and build a roadmap.
Now that you have a customer-
validated solution design, create a
plan and roadmap that communicate
how technology will support and
enable the experience. The goal of
this step is to define a delivery plan to
be executed in the respond phase.
Looking to reimagine your customer experience?
Bring your vision to life with guidance from
Salesforce Professional Services.
Schedule An Appointment Now
10
Step 3
Build and Learn: Quickly
and iteratively build business
and operational capabilities
“The only way to win is to learn faster than anyone else.”
Eric Ries
Author of The Lean Startup

Our third customer example is a Fortune
1000 company that provides residential
and commercial real estate services. It
realized it needed to differentiate itself
through customer experience-driven growth.
The company’s goal was to strengthen its
business’ fundamentals while growing it,
both organically and by acquisition. The
CEO established a transformation office,
led by a chief transformation officer (CTO)
who would report directly to the CEO.
In addition to C-level accountability for
the transformation, the CTO defined a
transformation strategy with three pillars:
• Focusing on end-to-end
customer journeys
• Leveraging front-line associates
• Leveraging a lean digital
innovation process
In defining the transformation strategy
in this way, the CTO inverted the
leadership pyramid, focusing creativity
and empowerment on the front line
and placing the executive team in the
role of support. (This removed barriers
and accelerated the process.)
As the CTO built out the transformation
office, several pilot cities were tapped to work
directly with field management and front-
line team members toward understanding
customer and employee pain points and
reimagining an improved customer journey/
experience. These cities and teams became
the hub of the transformation office, in
essence acting as the experimentation
laboratory for hypotheses focused on
improving the customer experience.
Using agile and iterative development
approaches, they partnered with Salesforce
to build the first set of Minimal Viable
Experiences (MVE). Then, leveraging the pilot
cities and teams, they tested and validated
the MVEs. Teams piloted functionality in
production prior to full-scale rollout across
the country. Feedback from the pilot teams
informed future solutions and the delivery
roadmap. Only after pilot criteria were
passed were the new experiences deployed
across teams, nationwide.

5 Steps to Innovating at the Speed of Your Customer 11

Simultaneously they continued to pull in new
innovations and enhancements so that with
each deployment, the solution was more Our most successful
comprehensive and complete. customers embrace the
practice of thinking big
One of the keys to their success was striking and acting small.
the right balance between momentum and
discipline. After a series of prototypes and
experiments, it can be tempting to go all in —
build the business case, request millions of
dollars, stand up a program team, and charge
into a 12-18 month production build at scale.
After all, that is how most of us work today.
But there is still much more to learn, and
many of our most successful customers use
an alternative approach ­— one that is more
iterative and agile. They focus on building the
least amount possible in order to learn from
end users in production.

Minimal Viable Product (MVP) is frequently

used to describe what is developed at this
stage. Consider a cupcake. It has all of the
core features of a multitiered, elaborately
decorated cake, but it is a lot less expensive
and takes a lot less time to make. A cupcake
is an MVP of an elaborate, multitiered cake.
With a cupcake you have the experience of
tasting the cake, the frosting, etc. It gives you
enough of an understanding of the multi-
tiered cake experience to provide feedback
on what works and what doesn’t. It is critical
to have the design of the ultimate cake in
mind, but begin by making a cupcake.

5 Steps to Innovating at the Speed of Your Customer 12

Our most successful customers embrace this practice of thinking big and acting
small, and these four practices can help you follow their example:

1. Empower small teams to identify degree of done. We recommend that you

challenges and prototype. ruthlessly prioritize your capabilities.
Before you start building, figure out
3. Pilot, test, and learn.
what your biggest challenges will be.
Pilot your MVP with a small group of
Conduct a cross-functional study of your
stakeholders. This fosters the transparency
roadmap to identify the most tenuous
and collaboration that drive a learning
areas, so you can prevent them from
organization. And of course, it enables
causing trouble during execution. To do
you to do a live test and gather feedback
this, create pods of 3-5 individuals with
from your stakeholders, saving you cycles
diverse skill sets. These pods should be
in the long run. For example, having your
given the authority to think outside the
contact center agents test out a basic call
constraints of operational processes and
flow may shine a light on features they’ll
norms. Wall them off from the rest of the
need right out of the gate, or illustrate
organization, removing them from their
a need to remove clicks and steps that
day-to-day roles, and empower them to
will have a big impact over time. Your
make decisions. A hands-on mentality
delivery team should be present to see
is needed here, to execute against a use
and hear all feedback. Building learning
case and illustrate technical feasibility.
and responsiveness into your team is the
So this team must work in prototypes,
best way for them to deliver something
not just high-level designs. This approach
that truly supports their stakeholders.
will expedite your delivery and prevent
We encourage two to three rounds of
you from stumbling at crucial times.
testing and learning prior to going live
2. Bring it to life. at scale. And as always, prioritization
Define and build your Minimal Viable is key, so be sure to sort out what
Product or Experience (MVP/MVE), giving feedback matters most in each round.
end users a taste of what’s to come. You
4. Let’s go live.
want to develop only as much of your
Spend some time hardening your
end product as is needed for users to
MVP before launch. Make sure
provide credible feedback. In your MVP/
your enhancements are in and your
MVE, focus on core capabilities, not bells
stakeholders are ready for the changes
and whistles.
coming their way. Then go through the
standard software development lifecycle,
Your MVP should have a solid base,
testing stages, and preparation before
illustrate the product intent, extend
deployment. But remember your team isn’t
across multiple capabilities, and be
done after deployment. Certainly celebrate
robust enough for stakeholders to
your success, but then continue the cycle.
provide feedback. You don’t need to
Keep your end user feedback loop active
build all the capabilities out to the same
and keep testing, learning, and adjusting.

5 Steps to Innovating at the Speed of Your Customer 13

Step 4
Scale: Measure, then grow and
optimize what works
Our fourth customer example is an managers received training on how to
equipment manufacturer that set out to interpret the dashboard data and coach
implement its first company-wide CRM their teams to reinforce the adoption of
as part of a transformation initiative new behaviors and features. The training
focused on driving customer value. Before also included materials for managers to
the implementation, the customer and use in introducing the dashboards to their
inventory data was manually maintained teams, and tips for using gamification to
across disparate systems, teams struggled to recognize and reward team members
collaborate cross-functionally, and customer who were championing the effort.
interactions often took place out of context
• Field user community
because there was no single, unified view
While the adoption dashboards provided
of the customer lifecycle. The company had
a useful indication of whether adoption
reached an inflection point and recognized
was taking place, they didn’t always
that to maintain customer loyalty and remain
provide insight into why or why not.
competitive in the new landscape, it needed
To better understand the why, a joint
to modernize its management of customer
business and IT “Field User Community,”
relationships.
comprised of a cross-section of end
users (cross-role, cross-geo, cross-level),
Following the initial Salesforce rollout, the
was established to provide ongoing
team saw incremental improvements,
feedback and input on the Salesforce
but knew that additional value could
implementation. This group was used
be generated with greater adoption of
as a sounding board for understanding
new behaviors and key system features.
what was working and what wasn’t,
There were two mechanisms the team
demoing features that would be included
put in place to identify and address
in an upcoming release for feedback,
opportunities to improve adoption:
and capturing requests for future
• Adoption dashboards enhancements. This community ensured
The team started by identifying key a constant two-way feedback loop for
adoption metrics and implementing a driving ongoing solution optimization.
set of custom dashboards to understand
— at the individual behavior level —
how employees were (or weren’t)
using Salesforce in the field. Front-line

5 Steps to Innovating at the Speed of Your Customer 14

Having a well-designed, architected, and
implemented solution that addresses unmet
customer needs as outlined in the first three
steps is important, but value generation
ultimately depends on people adopting the
solution and making it part of the way they
work, day in and day out. Gone are the days of
the “if you build it, they will come” mentality.
Having mechanisms in place to measure
adoption and engage stakeholders in driving
ongoing improvements is essential if you want
to achieve sustained end-user engagement,
and ensure that what’s been built will meet
and exceed the evolving needs of your
customers. Consider taking the following steps
to measure progress, gather insights,
and apply learnings to optimize solution value:
1. Measure what matters.
Identify a holistic set of adoption
metrics that provide visibility into
progress at multiple levels:
• Level 1: Basic usage metrics to provide the
most fundamental measure of application
adoption (for example: login rates, number
of records created/updated, and so on).
2. Empower leaders.
Provide leaders with the knowledge, skills,
and tools to promote new behaviors
and new features among their teams. If
adoption metrics and dashboards are
being implemented, consider conducting
manager enablement sessions to provide
tips for leveraging those metrics and
dashboards, like in the example above.
3. Engage end users.
Seek feedback by engaging end users in
a two-way dialogue. Create the space for
them to voice their likes, and dislikes.
4. Close the feedback loop.
Once users have provided their feedback
and ideas, they expect to see something
happen. Avoid the black hole effect
by closing the feedback loop. Be sure
to acknowledge the feedback you’ve
received and address how you have
taken that feedback into account.

• Level 2: Operational metrics to provide

visibility into user behaviors, data quality,
and completeness. (How consistently are
key fields populated? Are records being
kept up to date in real time, or left stale
for long periods, impacting data quality?)

• Level 3: Strategic and business

performance metrics, which provide
visibility into progress toward top-level
business outcomes (for example: sales
revenue, pipeline growth, and so on).

5 Steps to Innovating at the Speed of Your Customer 15

Build an Open & Transparent Culture

“If leaders want to unleash individual and collective talent, they must foster
a psychologically safe climate where employees feel free to contribute ideas,
share information, and report mistakes.” — Amy C. Edmonson

Continuous growth and improvement 2. Invite participation through inclusive

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. An environment in which
people can speak openly without fear of
negative consequences sounds ideal, but
where do you start?
problem-solving.
Show that you value your team’s input by
soliciting their help to solve an important
challenge you’ve been working on.
Doing so will not only generate some
great ideas you can act on, but also give
implicit permission for others to speak
up and seek input when they need help.

3. Talk openly about failure.

Think about how leadership can model
the desired characteristics in your day-
to-day work. Small, symbolic actions
from leaders can go a long way toward
affecting a shift. Here are some things
you can start doing tomorrow:
1. Establish clear feedback channels.
Hold regular forums (such as town halls
and roundtable discussions) to share
information and solicit input from
employees at all levels. Make these
interactions authentic by resisting the
urge to build slides or scripts ­— focus on
generating a dialogue. Establish an open-
door policy and set up virtual feedback
channels for employees who may be
less inclined to speak up in these larger
forums. Finally, be sure to thank people
for their feedback and let them know how
it was used.
Share mistakes you’ve made and
what you’ve learned from them —
and encourage employees to do the
same. Organizations like UNICEF have
gone so far as to implement “Failure
Fridays,” a weekly ritual that invites
team members to talk openly about
failure and share learnings with one
another.5 Making it safe to fail builds
the culture essential to sustaining a
sense-and-respond operating model.
4. Pull back the curtain on decision-making.
When communicating important
information or introducing changes,
provide the context employees
need to understand how and why
decisions were made. Doing so not
only builds alignment by giving them
a view into the big-picture decision
matrix, but also opens the door to their
reactions, questions, and concerns.

5
“ Institutionalizing Risk Taking (UNICEF + Failure)”:
blogs.unicef.org/innovation/institutionalizing-
risk-taking-unicef-failure/

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2.0 at the Speed of Your Customer 16
Step 5
Align: Continuously align
resources with strategic intent
“Done right, a strategic intent is really a decision that makes
1,000 decisions.”
Greg McKeown
Author of Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less

Our final customer example is a global
entertainment and hospitality company
that set a bold goal of transforming its entire
customer experience. Its vision offered
a seamless customer experience across
channels, properties, and interactions as
well as personalized offers and suggested
experiences based on customer preference
and history. To make this a reality, the
company knew it needed to coordinate
across multiple business units and align
leadership around a single enterprise-level
roadmap that would drive the company’s
strategic vision.
The company turned to Salesforce to
move beyond a “one-and-done” project
model to a continuous sense-and-respond
delivery cycle. The first step in that process
was to build joint business and IT teams,
led by a product manager who prioritized
features and capabilities to deliver on a
business outcome. This fundamentally
shifted the conversation between the
senior management team and the delivery
teams from traditional project metrics (such
as time, scope, and budget) to business
outcomes (such as increase in revenue
from upsell and cross-sell, or decrease in
spending from reduction in direct mail
costs). This allowed them to establish a
direct connection between their annual
strategic plan and delivery roadmap
outcomes. An annual proposal submitted
to the senior management team would
ensure sufficient funding to execute this
vision. To be clear, this did not mean that
a set of projects was funded; instead,
funding went to teams building business
capabilities and experiences that aligned
with the company’s strategic intent. These
teams had full authority to reprioritize the
delivery roadmap throughout the year.
They were held accountable for delivering
a business outcome, not a project.

5 Steps to Innovating at the Speed of Your Customer 17

Business Needs Inform Delivery Priority and Funding

The product aligned funding model makes technology funding decisions based
on business priorities, with greater flexibility to shift money and resources
based on evolving priorities and customer demand.

Define Strategic Architecture

Senior Management Team Identify critical business outcomes
and enterprise priorities

Identify Relevant Product Groups

Shortlist ideas based on their relative Chief Product Owner & Salesforce
value (value/cost x confidence), and Platform Team
prepare for review with product owner
council and product sponsors

Allocate Product Group Funding

Senior Management Team Allocate funding to product groups
based on their relative contribution
to business value generated

Define Product Team Priorities

Chief Product Owner
Define product team priorities and
& Product Owner
identify dedicated staff to plan, build,
and run products

Chief Product Owner & Manage Product Team Budget

Salesforce Platform Team Reallocate funding within product
groups based on evolving priorities
and customer demand

5 Steps to Innovating at the Speed of Your Customer 18

In effect, our fifth step enables the other
steps to flow in a continuous motion. Funding
teams that are accountable to an outcome,
and not funding a set of predefined projects,
allows the organization to develop the ability
to pivot and adjust. An annual planning
process creates false starts and stops and
doesn’t reflect the reality of an evolving
customer landscape. Remember what we
said at the beginning: Customer needs and
wants are ever changing. In order to be
responsive yet responsible, we have seen
our most successful customers shift to this
funding and alignment approach. It holds
teams to the ultimate level of accountability
— a business outcome — while enabling
them to make pivotal decisions as a result
of stakeholder feedback or changes in
the marketplace. It requires a new set of
3. Shift from measuring activities and
operating norms and collaboration across all
levels of an organization. While moving to this
type of funding model is not a simple change,
you can start where you are today, with
these initial steps, and evolve as you learn:
1. Adopt a new mindset of success.
The most important thing is to adjust
your mindset. This recognizes that not
only has your “cheese been moved,” but
it isn’t even cheese anymore. Project
completion is what made leaders
successful in the past, but in the Fourth
Industrial Revolution, success is defined
by the proven ability to learn and
continuously evolve the organization to
meet customer needs. The measures
of success therefore must change from
typical project metrics to outcomes.
If you try to embrace new metrics for
success without changing your mindset,
you’re sure to fall far short of your goal.
5 Steps to Innovating at the Speed of Your Customer
2. Establish an empowered team.
Even if you are operating within a
traditionally funded project, name
a product manager and technology
lead. Give them the authority to build
a team that drives business outcomes
by sequencing feature development.
As an experiment, try it with one
team and one capability for a specific
period. You need to insulate the team
from existing processes and delivery
expectations, while establishing a trial
set of operating norms. See what you
learn broadly as an organization and
how you might apply the model to
other teams. What worked and what
barriers did you experience? How can
they be addressed for the next team?
outputs to outcomes.
Transformation is a result of performance,
and performance is a result of action. But
all too often we measure the activity and
not the outcome, and we end up getting
fixed on the means (i.e., “the project”)
and not the end (i.e., “the business
result”). So try this: Define success
metrics for the team, then determine
how frequently those metrics will be
reviewed with the senior management
team. What are the leading and lagging
indicators for whether or not a capability
is producing the desired result? Use the
first few cycles to determine incremental
shifts in value and progress reporting.
Most importantly, remember the
first step: Adopting a new mindset is
critical to success in this new world.
19
Drive Business Results Through Empowered Employee Experiences
According to Gallup research, highly engaged
teams show 21% greater profitability, and
our own research suggests that companies
that empower their employees are more
likely to perform at higher levels.6 This kind of
environment is based on trust, transparency,
and high levels of capability across the
organization.7 Jørgen Vig Knudstorp,
Chairman and former CEO of LEGO Group,
once said, “I don’t want to control. I want
to create context. I want to create clarity of
culture and strategic choice, but then I want
people to surprise me.” In order to grow
a sense-and-respond operating model at
scale, you need three things: an empowering
context that encourages actionable
insight and creative ideas, the latitude to
iterate and test, and the ability to achieve
recognition by championing your customers.
So how do you create an empowering
context? Start with these steps:
1. Make your strategic intent known.
Clearly articulate your strategic intent.
What goals do you need to achieve? How
will you know you’ve been successful?
What values will be the guardrails for
decision-making? What are the key
actions required to achieve your target
outcome? Make it clear and clearly
prioritized. Lack of understanding
priorities will erode your team’s overall
effectiveness.
6
Gallup, “The Right Culture: Not Just About Employee Satisfaction”:
gallup.com/workplace/236366/right-culture-not-employee-
satisfaction.aspx
7
“ Why Equality and Diversity Need to Be SMB Priorities”:
salesforce.com/blog/2018/02/why-equality-and-diversity-need-
to-be-priorities
5
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Innovating
2.0 at the Speed of Your Customer
2. Educate and enable.
You must provide the right education
for your team’s success. Research
by Bersin showed companies that
effectively nurture their workforce’s
desire to learn are at least 30% more
likely to be market leaders. In the Fourth
Industrial Revolution, this is more
important than ever as new technology
and customer expectations require new
skills. According to a study from Sloan
Management Review, more than 90%
of respondents needed to update their
skills at least yearly to work effectively
in a digital world, with 44% needing
to update their skills “continually.” It’s
crucial that you make time and resources
available to your team to help them
keep up with the demands of the digital
world, and with browser-based, gamified
learning platforms, this can be easy,
engaging, and fun for your employees.
3. Reward those brave enough to be the
first to lead.
Front-line teams need the support
and guidance of their managers. As an
executive leader, it is critical that you
identify those front-line managers who
are brave enough to work differently,
and publicly recognize and reward
them. Acknowledge what they have
done, how they have changed, and how
they managed in a specific situation.
Then encourage them to keep at it and
provide them the additional support
they’ll need for next time. Over time,
team behaviors and attitudes will
shift to emulate the changemakers.
20
20
Conclusion
While adapting to the speed of your It doesn’t matter where you are today. The
customer is an ongoing evolution, constantly secret is just to start the process, and move
fueled by new thinking, the five steps we’ve toward your goal, one iteration at a time.
talked about here offer a strong foundation.

Successful businesses have intentionally
invested in the people, processes, and Are you ready to change the way you work
technologies that enable a sense and and deliver customer-first experiences?
respond operating model. It’s not easy or Our team of consultants can help you
painless. You will be required to make hard embrace digital transformation.
decisions, get out of your office, create new
contexts for employee engagement, look Schedule An Appointment Now
beyond the things that have made you
successful in the past, adopt new mindsets,
and build new leadership skills. You will
need to champion investment in new
functions, skills, measures of success, and
practices that power your ability to build and
deliver transformative products, services,
and experiences to your stakeholders.
But in the end, this effort will open the
door to tremendous new opportunities.

5 Steps to Innovating at the Speed of Your Customer 21

Salesforce Innovator Biographies

leading collaborative, cross-functional teams into

new and uncharted territory to achieve previously
unimagined success.

Alexis Paulis

Alexis previously was a Sr. Director, Program

Executive at Salesforce, where she lead large
scale digital transformation initiatives for some of
Salesforce’s most strategic customers reporting
to CXO executive sponsors. In her current role,
she partners with customers to co-create strategic
operating models to sustainably transform the
way in which organizations work with a focus on
building customer centric organizations. Alexis
has a background in Management Consulting and
prior to working at Salesforce focused on bringing
in innovative methods and new ways of working as
part of IT strategic design and development.
Kaitlyn Kranz
Kaitlyn is a transformation consultant with
experience supporting clients across industries
in navigating large-scale organizational change
initiatives. She is passionate about helping
customers achieve their most ambitious
transformation objectives by embracing change
and harnessing the full potential of their people.
Kaitlyn specializes in the development and
execution of tailored strategies to drive new
behaviors and ways of working to promote
achievement of her customers’ strategic goals.

Kristin Raza

Kristin Raza is the Global Professional Services

Offering Lead at Salesforce. In this role, she
is responsible for the overall growth and Holly North
performance of the Transformation Services
Holly is a Senior Director for Salesforce’s Global
portfolio. She leads a dedicated team of expert
Transformation Service Offerings, with more than
consultants who collaborate with Salesforce
20 years of expertise in digital strategy and design,
customers to develop and demonstrate new ways
working at the forefront of human-centered design,
of working in order to sustainably achieve their
designing and building ground breaking products
digital transformation goals and accelerate time to
and services. She helps senior business leaders
value. Prior to joining Salesforce in 2016, she led
understand the challenges and implications of
Innovation, Transformation, and Solution Delivery
applying design thinking, data and analytics to
IT portfolios at DIRECTV and began her career as
improve business performance and create new
a management consultant, specializing in change
possibilities for customer and business value.
management and leadership and value realization
Her areas of expertise range from design-centered
of technology investments through effective user
digital transformations to green field product to
adoption strategies. Kristin is passionate about
service and experience design.

5 Steps to Innovating at the Speed of Your Customer 22