Learnings from Salesforce.com

After giving it some thought and consideration I managed to narrow down all of the things I learned at the Salesforce.com visit to a few important leanings that apply to expansion stage companies. Here is the first one:

Get organizational alignment on your company’s vision

One of the things Salesforce.com did extremely well from the very beginning was that they successfully created a simple vision that was easy to understand. Then they educated the entire company on that vision, and made sure that there was alignment throughout the organization.

While this may seem obvious I think most CEOs of small companies would be surprised at the different answers they would get if they surveyed their employees on the company’s vision. Getting alignment on your company’s vision especially in the customer facing divisions of the business (sales, marketing, and customer support) will ensure that your customers, prospects, and other constituents are always being delivered a consistent message.

Doing this successfully requires that your vision be distilled into a simple message that is easy to understand. For Salesforce.com it is “The end of software”, and it is so simple that it can be communicated through a simple image that they use as their logo.

You know you have done this successfully when you survey your employees on the company vision, and they all give you the same answer and can tell you what it really means. I truly believe that when this happens the benefits of having this alignment can and will be recognized throughout the entire organization.

At OpenView, we try to drive this point home through one of the workshops that we run with each portfolio company. It is a full day interactive workshop in which we help our company’s senior leadership teams develop the mission, vision, and values of the company. Once they have clarity and alignment on these, it becomes much easier (though still very difficult) to identify and focus in on the most important goals and strategic initiatives they need to accomplish in order to achieve their mission and vision. The values they identify give them guide lines for how they are going to run their business and achieve those goals and initiatives.

After the workshop most of them put the mission vision and values that they have come up with into a presentation and present it to their entire company. We hope that helping them with this will help them get the kind of alignment and consistent messaging that Salesforce.com was able to achieve, and that helped them be so successful.

Check back next week for another best practice from the Salesforce.com visit.