The story…

A client with a new Salesforce implementation of Service Cloud was planning to extend their commercial SaaS product to automate and digitize the new customer onboarding experience within the product. For this client, successful onboarding of their new customers required collaboration from design and technical staff who have begun working their new CRM. However, the policies the client used to create a prospect, customer, or partner Accounts in CRM during the implementation did not correlate to the way the customer is represented in the product. One Account in CRM could relate to multiple instances of their product but, it was expected there would be one Account per instance without creating “duplicate” Accounts. Uh-oh.

Once engaged, we led asynchronous collaboration on documents to identify and define terms with the handful of key stakeholders empowered with authority and accountability to solve the problem. These stakeholders earned the buy-in from their business partners iteratively as we decomposed processes and data relationships to discover the immutable elements. With the knowledge of the bare entities consistently understood, the recomposition of the elements into a harmonious flow and structure gathered resounding agreement swiftly.

Primarily, the solution shifted definition of CRM Accounts to lean into standard Salesforce capabilities for defining prospect, customer, and partner organizational relationships. Secondarily, the solution invested in custom objects and flows for the areas of product correlation that were truly unique and market differentiating for the client. This kept it simple where it could be and emphasized where it would help the client stand out with correlated insights for their onboarding and success teams.

Overall, we spent about one week in each phase of define, design, develop, test, and deploy with initial changes being focused primarily in updating policies and procedures for more “standard” handling of Accounts and secondarily focused on extending the CRM platform with a connector layer of custom objects to correlate commercial product delivery and usage structures into CRM. This architectural adjustment set the client up to orchestrate product/CRM interactions with customers and delivery staff…