Lessons Learned the Hard Way

November 5, 2009

In a project I recently completed with one of our expansion stage portfolio companies, we implemented a new way of organizing and tracking farmer retention calls in salesforce.com. We all know how much money can be made from farming, and this company was concerned that their North American farmers were not making the right touches at the right times in order to really leverage their existing customer base.

The implementation had a number of specific goals that I will list here broadly and in no particular order:

1. Increase farmer compliance with documented customer retention process
2. Increase visibility, and scalability of tracking farmer customer retention activity
3. Increase the number of accounts a farmer can manage
4. Increase renewal and add on sales

When we rolled out the new implementation to the global sales leadership team, the manager from one of the other regions seemed displeased. Not with the implementation itself, but with the fact that we had spent significant time implementing something he was already doing very well in his region. It seemed that he already had high process compliance with his farmers, and had visibility into the renewal activities they were completing.

While all of us knew that the new implementation would most probably not have any adverse affects on his farmer program, I think we all realized that a number of things had been over looked leading up to the whole initiative. Here are a couple of key learnings I took away from the project:

1. Knowledge and idea sharing is critical across regions especially within similar business units

The region in which the retention process was working was obviously doing something that the region in which it wasn’t working was not. Had there been some transfer of ideas between regions and better alignment globally with regards to managing the key retention activities, they may not have even needed to re-implement the process in salesforce.com.

2. Fully diagnose the issue before coming up with the solution

Had we put more time into fully understanding why the North American farmers were having such a hard time managing their accounts and retention activities we may have come up with a different solution.

I think that these learnings can be applied broadly when providing sales and marketing support to expansion stage software companies, not just for salesforce.com implementations. Furthermore, I think that applying these two basic ideas can significantly affect the success and amount of impact a project can have on a company.

While these learnings are things that I already knew, and actually seem like common sense, I think that putting them into practice is not always as easy as it sounds.

VP, Sales

Ori Yankelev is Vice President, Sales at <a href="https://www.ownbackup.com/">Own Backup</a>. He was previously a Sales and Marketing Associate for OpenView.