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A Guide to Your

PATH TOSUCCESS

VISION

SUCCESS METRICS

SOLUTION

ROAD MAP

STEERINGCOMMITTEE

ACTION

MEASURE& MONITOR

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First Notes:

This guide has two parts: an overview of a Road Map, and a step-by-step process of building your own Road Map. Building a Road Map is a process we call the “Path to Success.” With it, you will understand the rationale for building a Road Map and then walk through a real exercise of building your own CRM strategy. We hope this guide will inspire you to use the tools provided and execute a Road Map for your organization.

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OUR CORE FOCUS

MANUFACTURING FINANCIALSERVICES

TECHNOLOGY PROFESSIONALSERVICES

NONPROFIT HEALTH CARE

We wouldn’t be doing our jobs as consultants if we were simply order takers. Challenging the status quo, providing constructive feedback and seeking win-win results is our focus, which is reflected in both our Salesforce partner score and reviews on the AppExchange. Wherever we see risks or obstacles, we point them out and suggest ways to mitigate them. We make sure you receive the most from your partnership with us.

Simplify, Accelerate, Transform. Not only our tag line, but a phrase that tells the story of our clients’ success. Simplifying complex processes, Accelerating powerful cloud based solutions, and Transforming the power behind your organization’s mission. Since our inception in 2008, we have delivered on this vision to be the WOW! provider in our industry.

This thinking has naturally made us nimble so you have access to a robust team of highly skilled consultants. As a result, Redpath can build long-term partnerships that provide the most value and deliver the best solutions without sacrificing scope to meet budget. At the end of the day, we want you to be successful and value your partnership with Redpath.

A little about RedpathIn an increasingly diverse business world, we have learned to adapt and grow in a way that WOWs our clients. For us, this has meant developing a diverse team of talented individuals with varying backgrounds in large organizations, nonprofits, startups and development roles. We can relate to our customers because all of us came from these markets.

With a combined 100+ years of Salesforce experience and 100+ certifications amongst our consultants, our abilities become quickly evident to our clients. This experience comes from working in many specialties such as marketing, sales, service, project management, programming and business process. An incredible feat one of our consultants achieved was gaining recognition by Salesforce as a Most Valuable Person (MVP), a title that only 188 other experts worldwide earned.

As a Salesforce Silver Consulting partner, we are knowledgeable about more than just the horizontal needs such as sales, marketing and service. We have specialized and honed our best practices for a core of verticals including nonprofits, manufacturing, technology, financial services and professional services.

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What is the Path to Success?The Path to Success is a process of building a Road Map that identifies an organization’s CRM needs. It provides direction for deciding what to implement, setting timelines, prioritizing tasks and how to execute. Each step of your Path to Success will need to answer a specific question:

The Road Map organizes all of the functionality needs in your CRM. Think of it as all of your wants and needs organized into chronological due dates such as monthly, quarterly or semi annually. It then becomes your guide for communicating changes to the rest of your organization and helps you rally your teams to implement needed functionality.

Great use cases: New CRM implementation, revitalizing existing CRM, adding new functionality, managing existing CRM.

VISION: What do we want and what does done look like?

SUCCESS METRICS: How can I confirm that we got what we intended?

SOLUTION: What does the “to be” solution look like?

ROAD MAP: What needs to be built and when?

STEERING COMMITTEE: Who will make decisions?

ACTION: Who will execute the Road Map?

MEASURE AND MONITOR: Is it working and are we done?

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What the Path to Success is NOTNot a technical specification. As a general best practice, details of the execution should be planned outside of the Road Map such as specific tasks, milestones and Gantt chart. Of course, it needs to be detailed, but flexible to allow for evolution. If your Road Map is thick with complexity, it will create difficulty for your organization to address every issue. Think of Path to Success as the Constitution; it sets the precedent for creating new policies.

Not a “how to use CRM” guide. This may be a “how to” guide for building a Road Map, but your Road Map is not a “how to use your CRM” document. That being said, it should still include desired functionality. A separate document should be used for CRM training.

Not a small effort to build. A well-thought-out Road Map should not be built overnight. CRMs require significant effort to maintain because they are relied on so heavily by organizations to automate, scale and manage resources. The effort invested in a Road Map should be based on how much the organization values it.

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Top 10 reasons to build a Path to Success

It’s just good planning. The Path to Success road mapping process enables cross-functional planning teams to fully examine their organization vision & strategy. Enterprise decisions are then made as an integral part of the plan.

Set time-specific deadlines. Road Mapping helps the team ensure they will have the technologies and capabilities at the time they are needed for their strategy.

Link organizational vision and strategy with technology decisions. Road Mapping prompts a team to be specific with planned features or capabilities in terms of value.

Reveal gaps in technology. Areas where plans are needed to achieve objectives become immediately apparent, and can be filled before they become problems.

Prioritize investments based on value-drivers. At every stage of the Road Map, focus on the few most important things: key result areas, value drivers and technology investments.

Set SMART goals (specific, measurable, actionable, realistic, and time-bound). This will keep you and your team accountable and create ownership.

Provide a clear guide for your team, allowing the team to recognize and act on events that require a change in direction.

Strategically use technology across department lines. Cross-reviews look across plans of several departments to find common needs & capabilities that can be leveraged.

Communicate organizational and technology plans to end users and management. With a Road Map, a team can clearly explain to end users where they are going and what to expect. A Road Map gives end users information they can use in their own planning, and can be used to solicit their reaction and guidance.

Build out your leadership and project team. The Road Mapping process builds a common understanding and shared ownership of the plan, incorporating ideas and insights from your team that represents the many departments involved in a successful solution.

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Developing your vision is the most important step as it drives your strategy and speaks to what goals to set for your organization to execute your vision. At the most basic level, it is a statement that calls out your current CRM state, future CRM state and specific goals. In some cases, you may have multiple vision statements.

The best visions are created by those who have a deep knowledge of the constituents who will use the systems. Your vision needs to have three components: people, process and technology. Technology is listed last because it enables the people and processes.

Building a great vision requires you to truly understand the pain points of your organization, needs/wants of each stakeholder or team, what gaps needs to be closed and what is working well. We use the following techniques to help us craft a vision:

• Conduct Voice of the Customer (VOC) interviews with key stakeholders• Document the “As Is” state• Document the “To Be” state• Identify the gaps between where you are today and where you want to be• Formulate strategy to close these gaps• Identify any obstacles or risks that might be in the way and how to mitigate• Identify availability of resources (People, Budget)• Identify resistance to change• Communicate the what’s in it for me (WIIFM) value for each stakeholder group• Uncover any technical risks involved

Example: This is a vision Redpath uses to drive our internal CRM development:

Our CRM will be our business process hub to manage the performance of our marketing, sales, service delivery, finance and customer service department. Executives, marketing, sales, account managers and consultants will operate within our CRM to manage day-to-day work. This includes requirements gathering, project assignments, time recording, project management, marketing communication, task management, leads, appointments and support cases.

CRM will reduce our sales cycle time with automation, contract management and electronic signatures. We will improve customer satisfaction by managing all customer service cases in our CRM with defined SLAs. We will improve the accuracy and speed of our customer invoicing by syncing our CRM with our accounting system. Our services delivery will be impeccable.

Vision

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Your metrics will show what done looks like and informs you of your Road Map’s success. The metrics themselves are specific to your vision and limited to the most important results for your business. Measuring everything is great, but if you were limited to 3-5 key performance indicators (KPIs), what would they be?

To build a metric, start with the area you are trying to evaluate. We call this the Key Result Area (KRA). Then, identify the most important influences that affect the KRA. We call these value drivers. From there, determine a Key Performance Indicator (KPI) from your value drivers. This will be your metric. If a value driver is more important than another, it is appropriate to have more than one metric. Based on your vision, now select the most important 3-5 metrics as your success metrics.

EXAMPLE SUCCESS METRICS

KRAWhich Results Are Important?

RevenueGeneration

Improve sales e�ectiveness

Acquire betterquali�ed leads

Increase accountpenetration

Identifynew accounts

Average time toclose deals/quarter

# of sales acceptedleads/quarter

YoY revenueincrease

Customer Satisfaction

Improve customersatisfaction

Evaluation customer

satisfaction score

# of activitiesper customer

per period

Average customersatisfaction score

by period

# of new accounts/quarter

Value DriversWhat levers can you pull?

KPIWhat will you measure?

Success Metrics

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The solution documents what the “to be” solution will look like. Think about all of the areas of your organization and your vision. What functionality do we need to deliver and what data moves where? We recommend first building a solution architecture, which is a high level summary of how functionality relates to your CRM. Your solution architecture should also include the following:

• Capability Map that identifies CRM standard features, AppExchange Apps, Integrations and any tailored configurations needed in the solution

• Data Source of Record (SOR) and data security that determines what data is stored where and how it flows to and from other systems

• Process swim-lanes or process flows that describe key business processes and integration points

• Integrations between the different systems

EXAMPLE SOLUTION

ARCHITECTURE

CRM*Salesforce is SOR

Leads, Contacts, Accounts, Opportunities, Campaigns

Orders, Quotes, Transactions

Website

Other External System

MarketingAutomation

ERP

INTEGRATION• Native app connector• Opportunities, Contacts, Leads, Accounts

CAPABILITY MAP• Lead Management• Campaign Management• Campaign ROI• Account Management• CTI Integration• CPQ

INTEGRATIONUse Rest API (Near Real Time) • Object A, B, C • Field X, Y, Z

MIDDLEWARE ETLOne-way sync: • Orders • Quotes • Transactions

Solution

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A Road Map ultimately is a visual representation of what solutions need to be built for each stakeholder or team, and when. Obtaining desired state in one phase is difficult because there are always post-implementation changes, bugs and support. This eats resources exponentially with each addition to the scope. Building a Road Map is more efficient, cost effective and delivers functionality faster. Each phase should include:

• Scope and schedule• Cost and resource estimate by phase (internal and external costs)• Team impact• Dependencies

Road Map

IMPACT

Team: 2 Biz Analysts Time: 8 Weeks Cost: $8,000 (App + Consulting)

Training: 2 Weeks Support: Internal

Q1

Team: 2 Biz Analysts Time: 8 Weeks Cost: $8,000 (App + Consulting)

Training: 2 Weeks Support: Internal

Q2

Team: 2 Biz Analysts Time: 8 Weeks Cost: $8,000 (App + Consulting)

Training: 2 Weeks Support: Internal

Q3

Team: 2 Biz Analysts Time: 8 Weeks Cost: $8,000 (App + Consulting)

Training: 2 Weeks Support: Internal

Q4

MARKETING

EXECUTIVES

SALES

• Deal Management• Pipeline• Forecasting• Account Planning

• Visible Pipeline• Sales Performance

• Lead Velocity • Sales Cycle Times

• Lead Balancing

• Lead Management• Lead Distribution• Web-to-Lead

• Marketing Automation• Social Monitoring

• Lead Noti�cations

• CPQ • CTI Integration

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Steering CommitteeAs with any big change the importance of executive sponsorship is crucial to success. It is equally important to support and govern what you put in place. Here are our best practices when creating your committee:

• Executive Sponsor - This is the CRM champion for the organization.• Accountability - For the project success.• Governance and scope management - Reviews all scope change requests based

on business value.• Approvals - Authority to make investment decisions.• Budget and resources - Project team is adequately resourced to deliver success

and investment is proportional to expected return on investment.• Communication Plan - Ensure everyone knows what to expect and when.• Organizational Change Management - Drives adoption.• Support model - How will the solution be supported once it is implemented

(partner, vendor, internal).

ActionThis is where we resource the project team and implement Phase 1:

• Project plan, tasks and milestones, and Gantt chart.• Implementation methodology - Plan, analyze, design, build, validate, deploy.• Use and support - Monitor solution adoption, track success metrics, manage fixes,

and plan further training.• Product Backlog - Record requests for future enhancements.

Measure and MonitorOnce Phase 1 produces the expected outcomes (success and adoption metrics indicate the solution is meeting expectations), it is time to turn your attention to future phases.

• Review Success Metrics and determine if you are ready for future phases.• Review product backlog to include in future phases.• Review vision and strategy. Has your vision changed?• Make any Road Map adjustments as needed and get Steering Committee Approval.• Action - Implement next phase.• Measure and Monitor (Repeat).

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Our Best Practices

• WIIFM: Focus on What’s In It For Me! All users must see the value.

• Source of Truth: If there is a conflict, which system is the source of truth?

• Guiding Principle: If it is not in the CRM, it did not happen.

• Governance: Have a Steering Committee.

• Enhancements: Have a mechanism for users to suggest changes.

• Change Management: Prepare end users of change and set expectations early.

• Training: Provide multiple training options.

• Support: Build a Center of Excellence (CoE).

• Adoption: Use sticks, carrots, and gamification techniques.

• Measure: Use success metrics in the CRM to discuss performance (Make it real).

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PATH TO SUCCESSadventure

VISION

SUCCESS METRICS

SOLUTION

ROAD MAP

STEERINGCOMMITTEE

ACTION

MEASURE& MONITOR

WORKBOOK

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STEP Vision

Below, enter in your vision statement based on:

• Voice of the customer (VOC): Teams, Customers, Executives• Current state analysis• To Be State• Gap analysis• Strategy

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NOTES:

What in our CRM isn’t working? What needs to get better?

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STEP Success Metrics

Measuring your success is important. Let’s identify what metrics are important to track.

1. Key Result Area: What do we want to change? • Revenue Generation • Customer Satisfaction • Costs2. Value Drivers: What levers that influence the KRA do we have? • Improve sales effectiveness • CSAT surveys & create actions to improve • Reduce steps to complete and send document.3. KPIs (Key Performance Indicator): How can we measure we got what we intended? • Revenue by rep by quarter grows by 20%. • Average Customer Satisfaction score increased 2% per quarter • Time to complete, send, and sign document reduced from

one week to an hour.

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NOTES:

What in our CRM isn’t working? What needs to get better?

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STEP Solution

The solution is a visual reference of what the final solution should look like. This may include some or all of the following items:

• Build a solution architecture map• What are some existing capabilities to use?• What apps will help meet your needs?• What integrations do you need to build?• What processes do we need to map out?• What data is the source of record (SOR)?

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SOLUTION MAP & NOTES:

What do we need to get the job done?

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STEP Road Map

Let’s plan when we will implement each phase of the solution. Create a realistic schedule and add contingency. Even after implementation, there is change management, training, and support that needs to be considered.

• How long will each phase take?• Who does it affect?• What are the costs to implement each phase?• What is the implementation process and who is responsible for

supporting each phase?• Who will be providing training and managing change?• What are some identifiable risks & obstacles?• What are the key milestones and mitigation strategies?

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When we are implementing, how long will it take, and how much is it?

Impact Q1/M1 Q2/M2 Q3/M3 Q4/M4

Sales

Marketing

Other

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STEP Steering Committee

Now is the time to identify who will drive the execution of the plan and who should be part of the discussion when decisions need to be made. Forming a steering committee ensures each stakeholder has a say and each team is held accountable.

Here are the steps that need to be taken for your Road Map:

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Write the Road Map

Who needs to be on the Steering Committee?

Who is the executive sponsor?

Who approves the Road Map?

What external/internal resources are needed for the Road Map?

Who is the executive sponsor?

What needs to be communicated for the first phase?

How are we going to ensure adoption?

Who owns the project? Who is accountable? Who makes decisions?

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STEP Action

Let’s build it! We have identified our first phase of the Road Map and we need to create a detailed project plan that includes:

• Project Plan: tasks and milestones• Project Gantt: plan, analyze, design, build, validate, and deploy. . .• Project Team

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Road Map approved

Create project plan

Create project Gantt

Project close for Phase One

Measure & monitor early adoption and success metrics

Support solution: fix bugs, tune, and further training

Create product backlog of items not in scope for first phase

Let’s Build It!

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STEP Measure & Monitor

After implementing the first phase, now is when we reflect on what we said we wanted to implement and how it affects the future phases.

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Deployed Phase One

Are the critical bugs addressed?

Have we met our adoption goals?

What system tuning is needed?

Do the success metrics indicate we got what we expected?

Are we ready for the next phase?

Create backlog of items not in scope for first phase

Did we get what we intended? How is adoption? Is it working?

Redpath simplifies and accelerates transformational change,

empowering you to focus on your organization’s mission.

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