CEO Perspective: Leveraging Salesforce® Data to Navigate COVID-19
5 years ago, we made the strategic decision to run our entire business on the Salesforce® platform. Since then, we
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5 years ago, we made the strategic decision to run our entire business on the Salesforce® platform. Since then, we have been building all of our business applications — sales, marketing, operations, and recruiting — on the platform. Now, as companies around the world face the uncertainties of COVID-19, it’s this decision and the data that it provides that has enabled us to navigate them with certainty.
When making this decision we looked at where our business was, and more importantly, where we wanted it to go. While a global pandemic was not something we expected, scaling our business in a way that could adapt to change and pivot quickly definitely was.
Centralizing our business applications within the Salesforce platform has provided us with the ability to easily access our sales and financial data, model potential scenarios, and quickly identify our areas of risk during the COVID-19 crisis.
As with any crisis plan, our first action was to determine areas of risk. To do so, we asked ourselves three questions:
Since these areas were already actively tracked in Salesforce, we were able to create and run scenarios as to where we thought these numbers would be in the coming months.
In doing so, we needed to change some of our underlying assumptions about how we previously forecasted our sales, revenue, and cash collection.