The decision to adopt Salesforce is a big one. The platform has the power to transform and streamline your business processes, driving success for your marketing, sales and service teams — but that success depends on a strategic, effective implementation. That’s why you’ve brought in a consulting partner to guide you through the journey.
As you wait for your upcoming project to begin, however, you’re probably wondering exactly what’s going to happen. You’ve heard that a “discovery process” comes first, but what does that even mean — and what will be expected of you?
Let’s start with a definition. When I say “discovery process,” I’m talking about the initial stage of a project when your implementation team conducts a kind of investigation to understand as much about your company as they can, including your pain points and the goals you have for your upcoming project.
To help paint that picture in more detail, we put together this quick rundown of Torrent’s discovery process, including the methodologies we use.
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A snapshot look at Torrent’s discovery process:
The Customer LifeCycle
When conducting a discovery, we use two different critical frameworks. The first might be familiar to readers of our blog: The Customer LifeCycle.
In a nutshell, the Customer LifeCycle charts the entirety of the buying cycle, emphasizing how a service-centric approach is the best way to move a customer from one stage to the next and ultimately turn them into a repeat customer.
Our team will start the discovery process by focusing on the particular stage of the Customer LifeCycle your company needs help with. Are we going to assist you in implementing new marketing strategies, for example, or is it your sales process that needs reworking? We’ll help you see where your pain points fit within the larger context of the LifeCycle, and how addressing that pain point can help the full scope of your business run more effectively — kind of like fixing the broken cog on a wheel.
People, Processes, Tools
From there, we’ll narrow our focus — specifically to the people, processes and tools that define the area of your business we’ll be working on. We’ll ask questions of your team to uncover all the different roles that make up your organizational structure, taking note of specific skill sets, responsibilities, and challenges. That way, we’ll be able to create your Salesforce instance in a way that addresses every kind of person who will be using the platform and that provides solutions to common problems. It’s important to note here that we really are focused on roles, and not specific individuals. We want to make sure we’re designing a system that will continue to work well, even as veterans leave your company and new hires are onboarded.
Next, we’ll ask about your processes. How do all these roles function together in order to get things done? What steps are they supposed to follow — and how well are those steps working? Are your processes bringing your company its desired results? If you’re talking with us, there’s a good chance that they’re not. We want to understand how your team currently functions and measure that against how you’d like the team to function. Once we have that information, we can develop more effective strategies and ideas for your team to implement via a brand new process flow.
Which brings us to tools: What technologies is your team currently using to put its processes into action? How functional are those tools? Are people even using them? With a firm grasp on the problems your team has with existing platforms, we’ll be able to design Salesforce in a way that won’t lead to the same issues.
Ultimately, our goal is to learn as much as possible about where you are now and where you want to go. Then, we’ll help you build the bridge to get there. The time it takes to build that bridge obviously depends on the project, but the discovery period usually lasts about one to two weeks.
Once that’s done, we’ll work in “sprints” (each one lasting another week or two) to tackle each core element of the project scope. Finally, we’ll spend another week or two on end-to-end testing and user training, ensuring that your platform is working as it should and that your employees know how to use it in a way that brings value to their roles.
Have other questions about the discovery process? Don’t be afraid to let us know!
