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How Business Leaders Guide Adoption Of New Products, Tools, Ideas

The challenge of getting your organization to adopt something – a new piece of software; a new business strategy; a new anything – can sometimes be daunting.

The journey towards adoption becomes all that more meaningful when you’re moving an organization in new directions.

Rob Jeppsen, SVP Commercial Sales for Zions Bank, presented at DF13 his approaches to earning organizational adoption of Salesforce.com.

The lessons, though, can be used by any leader looking to guide change.

Jeppsen used successfully a three step process wherein the leader of the organization or the adoption effort is crucial. If adoption isn’t happening, he said, it’s often due to weak leadership skills.

Adoption, he stressed, continues throughout – it’s a continual process, even when you think you might be done.

Jeppson’s three phases of adoption, as applied to getting his sales team to use Salesforce.com

1. Mandatory – You have to set the tone from the start. If you don’t have adoption, look in the mirror (leadership brings adoption)

  • Goal – Start the engine
  • Strategy – Try to model awesomeness
  • Key Tactics –
    • Managers must use Salesforce as single source of truth
    • Dig Deeper Into Data – Move past pipelines and outcomes and into activities
    • Use Data To Make Predictions – this will help “unstick” stuck deals, patterns in success/failure will appear, etc.
  • So What? –
    • Discovery of true sales process experiences
    • Officers learn value of each hour of each day
    • This is the turning point – they focus on what needs attention

2. Complimentary – show how adoption is actually helping the folks that have to do most of the “adopting.”

  • Goal – Create more sales time
  • Strategy – “Remove the Hate, Automate”
  • Key Tactics –
    • Use the new tool to transparently show success – e.g. create automated incentive worksheets;
    • Use the new tool to build standards of practice that are easily template and repeatable.
    • Review existing deals in the pipeline and optimize towards those behaviors that lead to sales
  • So What? – In Jeppsen’s case, his team sees SalesForce as something that helps them do their jobs better. There’s a little pain in implementation, but in this phase it starts to pay off.
    • For Jeppsen, the effect of this was that sales records are more complete and predictive and his sales team is more efficient.

3. Necessity – Get your team to the point where they say “I’ve got to have this, man.”

  • Goal – create a leadership team of world-class sales coaches to benefit rest of sales organization
  • Strategy – Insight is the doorway into improvement
  • Key Tactics –
    • Always learn and adapt – Jeppson implemented monthly strategy sessions;
    • Use the data to predict success (and failure) – employee development functionality using predictive metrics;
    • Create and foster clear organizational benchmarks;
  • So what?
    • Now, Jeppsen’s sales team is running TO coaching, not from
    • Record number of sales people hitting goals

All three stages are equally critical, but Jeppsen indicated that the Mandatory Phase – the first step – can often be the most painful and is always the most important.

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Culture Coding for Fully Formed Adults

How to create and maintain good culture while fighting complexity creep.

The issue of creating and fostering culture in a company or organization is tricky. Partially because the concept of culture is somewhat nebulous, but also because in order to do it right, you have to make one giant assumption.

Darmesh Shah, CTO and co-founder of Hubspot, gave a talk at DF13 about creating, establishing and maintaining culture in a company. We’ve talked about the why, and a bit about the how.

Dharmesh pulled back the curtain on Hubspot’s struggles and successes with exploring, creating and documenting company culture. And that included one significant assumption that might seem a little obvious, but it’s implications for Hubspot might surprise you.

Assume you’ve hired fully formed adults

That’s it. Assume that when you hire someone, they are an adult with all the neat features adults come equipped with – good judgment, responsibility, the ability to use logic to make rational decisions, etc.

With that in mind – here’s how company culture played out for Hubspot.

  • Employees choose their own hours and where they work from. Results matter more than where or what time of day we produce them.
  • Vacation time is not tracked and there are no limits on vacation time. And, Dharmesh cautioned, his employees do abuse this policy, but not in the way you might expect. He found people weren’t taking enough vacation.
  • Almost complete transparency is tucked into every crease of Hubspot’s culture. The average age at Hubspot, Dharmesh said, is 27 years old – a fairly young crowd. They love transparency. More precisely, they “love it; love it; love it” he said.
  • No social media policy. You should know whether or not you should post something to your network.

That’s just a sample of some of the outcomes when you assume you’ve hired fully formed adults…for Hubspot, anyway. According to Dharmesh, the approach was – “don’t write rules, right wrongs.”

And using good judgment is crucial when you allow this amount of freedom. Dharmesh described a hierarchy of good judgment that sounded a little like a military creed, but it’s really built like a mathematical formula. You solve for a series of things:

Solve for team over self, company over team, customer over company.

If you choose the wrong side, the equation falls apart – and that’s the definition of using bad judgment. Every decision should be run through this test. Failure will be painfully obvious.

There are dangers, Dharmesh said. Complexity has a way of creeping in. What’s good for one group might not be great for another. Even raising the issue of culture might rub some people the wrong way.

Address the complexities immediately, as their true toll lies below the surface and can slowly and silently pull your culture apart at the seams.

One way to approach culture coding that can help address complexities before they arise is to start with a “federal” set of values – an executive-level take on things.

But, Dharmesh said, you’ll run into “state” laws that conflict.

The key is to balance federal against state – it won’t be the same for every organization, but it’s a good framework to apply to the task of codifying culture.

Dharmesh described building, defining and maintaining Hubspotter culture as the hardest thing he’s taken on during his career to date. It’s easy to see why and even after you’ve “created” your culture, the challenge isn’t over…in fact, it never ends.

The final task for creating a company culture is not being married to any version of it you’ve created. Workforces change. Companies change. Organizations grow and shrink and mutate time and time again. Your culture should, too.

“As you grow, there is a very very strong temptation to preserve culture – understandable, but wrong,” Dharmesh said. “You have to adapt.”

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The Challenges of Creating Organizational Culture

Darmesh Shah exposed the why of Cracking the Culture Code at Dreamforce 2013 today, but his approach is even more interesting.

As co-founder of the then-young Hubspot in the late 2000s, Shah was posed the challenge of defining the culture of Hubspot.

“For the first three years at Hubspot, the word ‘culture’ wasn’t spoken,” he said, confirming the uniqueness of the challenge.

The idea came from co-founder and CEO Brian Halligan, who had joined a CEO support-group of sorts and other, more seasoned CEOs warned that company culture could end up biting you a lot harder than you think if left untended.

Dharmesh started with a simple survey of 60-or-so Hubspotters – “On a scale from 1 to 10, how likely are you to recommend Hubspot as a place to work?”

The responses indicated a maniacally happy workforce.

But the real question is why? And that’s where the work really started with Dharmesh – documenting the culture of Hubspot…on paper.

The Hubspot culture deck is, apparently, the second most widely read culture document in the history of the planet. The first? Netflix.

Hubspot found that the key to documenting your company culture is remembering that it “can’t be about who you are. It should also be who you want to be.”

And the measurement should happen with frequency and consistency.

Have a company meeting? Ask your employees afterwards on a scale of 0 to 10 if they would have that meeting again.

Meet with company alumni and ask how happy they are to have your company on your resume.

Always measuring. Always adapting.

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Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff Announces Salesforce1 at DF13

Leading with a strong focus on philanthropy, larger-than-life Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff kicked off his DF13 keynote with an enthusiastic message to business leaders – give.

“The best drug I ever took was philanthropy,” Benioff said, striding through the audience as leader of the #1 CRM company in the world and fresh off word that his company did $1 billion in business in a single quarter.

This year’s Dreamforce conference boasts more than 135,000 registrants; 1,200 sessions; and 350 exhibitors. But the most important number turned out to be “1”

Salesforce1, that is. Benioff and co-founder Parker Harris used a “Back to the Future” skit to introduce the CRM giant’s newest initiative – taking Salesforce to the mobile web.

Benioff explained the thinking behind the move – the concept of the “Internet of things” has transitioned to the “Internet of customers” and behind every interconnected device is a person.

“We need to reassess how we connect with our customers,” Benioff said. “At Salesforce.com we pivot to our customers.”

And, he added, he wants his customers to pivot to their own customers.

Thus the impetus for a new, mobile Salesforce – in order for Salesforce to pivot towards its own users, it needs to ensure CRM users can reach and respond to customers in a fully mobile manner.

After all, Benioff noted, the mobile experience is an inextricable aspect of the full customer journey. And to keep your customers and gain new ones, a business must know thy customer.

Check out the nuts and bolts of Salesforce1 here.

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Best Sessions at Dreamforce 2013

With well over 100,000 people in attendance at DreamForce, it’s easy to get lost in the hustle and/or bustle. Even more difficult is to keep your focus on why you came here in the first place – to learn new ways to drive business growth and efficiency.

The eCornell team has one goal during our time at DreamForce – to tune out all of the DF13 noise and focus in on the best information for business leaders and decision makers.

DF13 Sessions To Watch For

We’ll be posting throughout the conference from a selection of sessions we’ve identified as key for

  • business growth;
  • sharpening leadership skills;
  • inspiring your workforce, and;
  • leveraging that entrepreneurial edge, no matter how established your organization.

Marc, Marissa and Deepak will have some great insight to impart, for sure. But the hundreds of sessions spread across San Francisco that comprise each day of DreamForce 2013 are where the real gems are found.

Armies of experts and innovators are presenting invaluable knowledge for the duration of the 4-day conference. The trick is sorting through the glut of sessions for the messages that really hit home for the decision-making crowd.

That’s where eCornell will help. Consider us your guide for the executive crowd for DreamForce 2013

From keynotes to key themes, we will write and report with your business growth in mind.

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Open Innovation – Gets Products to Market Faster And Cheaper

Engagement is the early buzzword at DF13. More than 100k people are packed into San Francisco and we’re all looking to cozy up to one person – the customer.

How about engaging with your customers so they can help you get the right products to market faster and cheaper? Oh, and when you do it right, they tend to spend more and buy more frequently.

Salesforce’s Reena Bhatia and James Taranto announced this morning the crucial role of open innovation in keeping your organization lean and profitable.

What is Open Innovation?

“Open innovation is the use of purposive inflows and outflows of knowledge to accelerate internal innovation, and expand the markets for external use of innovation, respectively.”

That’s Henry Chesbrough’s take.

In layman’s terms – use the power of your community to get ideas, solutions and services to the market quicker. Listen to your market. If you ask the right questions or look in the right places, they can tell you how to do things better, faster and leaner.

As a business leader, why should you care about open innovation?

Because not only is the inability to change a death knell for any company, but the inability to do it smart and quick will destroy your chances of serving your customers and beating competitors to market.

There were 250k new products introduced in 2010 – 66% failed in two years and 96% failed to return cost of capital.

According to Salesforce’s Bhatia, Director of Value Consulting and Taranto, Director of Solution Engagement, companies that employed open innovation when launching new products or services enjoyed twice the net present value than those that did not.

Examples of Successful Open Innovation Campaign

Dell IdeaStorm – pushing products to market with input from customers through hyper-connected networks.

  • 15k submissions;
  • 490 ideas implemented;
  • revenue from IdeaStorm members is 50% higher;
  • purchase frequency is 33% higher.

Proctor & Gamble – Swiffer came from an open innovation experience, as did the coating on Tide Pods (each from external developers, rather than customers)

Government Services Administration – “Great Ideas Hunt” – 600 ideas from employees. Five were implemented and saved $5.5 million and another 40 are in consideration.

Corning – B2B – They actually did B2B2C – using Radian6 they listened to people complaining about dropping phones and breaking glass. They approached manufacturers with stronger glass (Gorilla Glass) and successfully sold a product they had shelved years earlier (and helped cell phone manufacturers decrease R&D cycle time).

Bottom Line – You Have Product Experts Out There…Your Customers

Don’t just engage with your customers – engage with them in a meaningful way; throw the doors of innovation wide open; and gain better products and more profitable customers.

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Cracking the Culture Code – Why You Should Care About Creating Culture

“There is no magical unicorn that craps out great culture”

Those are words of caution from Dharmesh Shah, CTO and co-founder of Hubspot and self-anointed introvert that captivated the audience during his Dreamforce 2013 talk on developing and implementing culture in an organization.

Tasked with documenting the Hubspot company culture a few years back, Dharmesh claims it was the “hardest thing I’ve taken on in my career.”

Shared beliefs, values and practices – that’s culture

Company culture used to be standard – rules and regulations handed down from executive-level folks were accepted by employees as long as the benefits and compensation were good.

No more, Dharmesh found. That model is broken and Hubspot set out to figure out how to tackle company culture.

But why? As a business leader you probably think of 100 things more pressing than something as seemingly trivial as company culture.

Here are Dharmesh’s top reasons why to spend calories in culture:

  1. Creating a culture is hard, killing it is easy – left alone most things degrade to crap without outside intervention
  2. Culture debt is insidious and often interminable – hiring the wrong people can be a really tough and lengthy thing to overcome
  3. Good culture makes the easy decisions unnecessary and makes difficult decisions easier!
  4. The team determines the destiny and the culture determines the team
  5. Don’t just hire to delegate – hire to elevate
  6. Culture is to recruiting as product is to marketing – customers flock to great products, workers flock to great companies with good culture
  7. Helps the stars “shine”
  8. Whether you like it or not, you will have a culture – why not take the time to design?

We’ll have more from Dharmesh. Specifically – how do you actually go about documenting and creating the blueprint for culture code.