Last week, our team came home excited and motivated from the whirlwind that is the legendary Salesforce World Tour. We were able to catch up with so many businesses and hear how they’re using Salesforce to drive business growth and transform customer experiences.
At our Partner Theatre Session, our Senior Sales Director, Jarrod Myers, and CEO of Lightfold John Cosgrove (JC), were joined on stage by Áine O’Riordan, Director PMO, Business Services from Allegis, to talk about one of their most challenging Salesforce rollout projects to date.
It was a frank, open and refreshing conversation where we were able to discuss some of the learnings and successes gained from a project of this nature. In case you missed it, here are the highlights from their chat.
Allegis Group is the global leader in talent solutions, spanning 500 locations worldwide, with its APAC Business Services function providing recruitment services across seven countries. Áine heads up their PMO team, which delivers transformations and projects throughout the APAC region.
Four years ago, their front office team — responsible for recruitment — was operating using legacy systems with significant gaps in the way they supported sales and services teams. Their middle office team — responsible for assignments, time, payroll and billings — was operating using multiple systems across the region, with error-prone and inefficient manual workarounds holding everything together.
Then in 2020, in the throes of a global pandemic, Áine’s team decided to undertake a very ambitious project: a complex overseas Salesforce rollout that included four production orgs across seven countries. No one in Áine’s team, including Project Managers and Business Analysts, had used Salesforce before — they were all complete novices. Oh, and they decided to kick off the entire project remotely, with the first rollout happening in China.
While the team could get started on the rollout for the middle office without worrying about country-specific data, their front office, which focused on recruitment, needed to view client data not only in their own country but across the entire region. Their goal was to give all users the ability to:
Enter: Cloudwerx and Lightfold. Our teams joined forces with Allegis to workshop the challenges and then propose an account hierarchy model that could give their users access to the regional data they needed. Starting with China. Yes, this meant that we’d be teaming up to work remotely, supporting a team with a different language and culture. And, to make matters worse, COVID prevented them from travelling to visit stakeholders — a significant hurdle for a project of this nature.
Together, Allegis, Cloudwerx and Lightfold worked closely with stakeholders to understand how they worked and the challenges they faced. The goal? To demonstrate the benefits of a platform technology like Salesforce that would help their team to grow and scale with the business.
Through a series of workshops, the Lightfold team were able to obtain insights directly from users about how they performed day-to-day tasks. This resulted in a suite of CRMA dashboards that the team used to drive the daily operations of their front office. The best part? It no longer made sense for the team to work outside their system, which helped quash creative workarounds, right from the onset of the project.
It’s been quite the journey so far, so Áine wrapped up our conversation with her biggest learnings from the experience.
As mentioned, Áine’s team had minimal Salesforce experience before they started the project, but they were all excited to get stuck in and learn the new technology. They leveraged the wealth of learning provided by Salesforce, including Trailheads, Webinars and Training Courses, as well as learning from their implementation partners. As Áine explains:
“Our team’s knowledge has exploded in this time with some having gained Salesforce certifications with more planned for the year ahead. ”
Organisations undergoing digital transformation often bring in consultants who apply one-size-fits-all solutions in the name of “best practices”. In contrast, Áine’s approach was to rely on a combination of engaged and informed staff, along with a select group of trusted partners, including Cloudwerx and Lightfold:
“Knowing the skills that we lack was very important as it helped us evaluate the partner organisations to fill the gaps and provide guidance along the way. We would not have achieved the same degree of success without these partnerships.”
Áine used an analogy to explain her approach to digital transformation: the restaurant vs. the gym:
“Stakeholders who have not been through digital transformation think that it is like going to a restaurant. They think they get to sit down, look at the menu, order some digital systems, have them served up, and then consume them, and as a result, become transformed. This never works, so they blame the delivery team.
But digital transformation is not a restaurant, it is a gym. Yes, you need to work with specialised equipment, and yes you need an experienced trainer, and together you do the real work of transformation. The delivery team can facilitate the changes, but the business has to own them, because the real metric of success is not what happens in the gym, but how you are able to perform better as a result of putting in your time there.”
If we didn’t get a chance to catch up, our team would love to have a chat about your Salesforce setup and how you can take a customer-centric approach to data and AI. One of our friendly team members will be available to answer your questions and talk about how we can support your business needs.
If you are interested in working with Cloudwerx, please reach out to hello@cloudwerx.com. We offer free consultations, and would love to hear about your business.
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