How to Create a Salesforce Roadmap
In previous articles, we shared with you how the Salesforce machine operates. We shared with you how it structures its organization and the tactics it uses to maximize its revenue from your company.In this article, we are going to dive into your single most important weapon against Salesforce in your negotiation . . . Your Salesforce Roadmap.
What is a Salesforce Roadmap?
Simply put, a Salesforce Roadmap is nothing more than a table outlining:
- What you are going to buy
- When you are going to buy it
This sounds simple, yet most companies don’t go into a negotiation with Salesforce clear on these two points. As a result, Salesforce hijacks the conversation and creates a roadmap for them.
What you are going to buy
This question isn’t always as simple as it sounds.
Do you need Enterprise or Unlimited?
Do you even need premium support? Or would that money be better spent on a 3rd party consulting firm?
Have you run a utilization report to see how many of your licenses are actually being used?
Is marketing actually using that instance of Pardot you purchased three years ago?
The “what you are going to buy” conversation isn’t always easy. One company we worked with ran a utilization report to find that only 63% of their licenses had even been logged into in the past year. This means they were paying for 37% more licenses than they actually needed!
Another customer realized that a large portion of his organization could get by through downgrading to a lower license level. They were only using basic features that didn’t require them to be at the Unlimited License.
It’s easy to think you know exactly what you need going into a negotiation, but sometimes you need to do a bit more digging into understanding how each department actually utilizes the tool.
When you are going to buy it
Another common tactic Salesforce uses is to tell you that you cannot roll out licenses over the course of a three-year contract. Your rep will tell you that you need to buy them all up front now if you want to get a discount.
This ironically always works out in Salesforce’s favor as the added revenue from those dormant licenses makes up for the discount one rates. The truth is you can negotiate to roll out licenses at set periods of time throughout your negotiation.
In order to do this though, you need a clear roadmap and to create confidence with Salesforce that this is what you actually need and when you need it.
Why Is Building a Salesforce Roadmap So Important?
Before we dive into how to create this roadmap, let’s first dive into explaining why this roadmap is so important.
A roadmap is your best defense against divide and conquer
Remember the divide and conquer tactics we described in our guide on negotiating with Salesforce? We shared with you how Salesforce will make contact with multiple individuals and decision-makers throughout your organization.
Its goal with divide and conquer is to create conflicting stories which develop chaos in terms of what you actually need.
Creating your own Salesforce Roadmap helps you prevent against that.
When you create a roadmap and get buy-in from all your key stakeholders on that same roadmap, you create alignment within your organization. In addition to the roadmap, we are also going to give your internal stakeholders key talking points on what to say if Salesforce approaches them. It’s also important to know that timing is everything with regards to these key messages.
As a result of being aligned on talking points and what your organization actually needs, your organization begins to speak from one voice. Instead of having Salesforce gather conflicting stories from each department, they suddenly are left dumbfounded when they receive the same story from all contacts within the organization.
Flip-flopping your wants in the negotiation focuses the discussion on the wrong things
Whenever you don’t have your roadmap aligned, you spend your time in the negotiation with your rep going back and forth on how many licenses you need or what add-ons you do or don’t want.
Every time you go to your rep with a revision on your renewal because you and your team changed your mind, you are wasting a valuable chance to negotiate a key term or reduce your rates.
Without a roadmap, you will end up flip-flopping on what you want during the negotiation and spend your time focused on what licenses you are even going to buy instead of the price point or the terms. The entire negotiation gets focused on just figuring out what you need instead of getting you the best rates.
Your roadmap creates that clarity and alignment and lets you spend your time focused on getting you the best deal.
A lack of alignment undermines the key contact of the negotiation
Imagine for a moment that you are a Salesforce rep. You go into conversation with the Salesforce Admin who is your main point of contact in the negotiation. The Salesforce Admin request a 20% license count increase but is not interested in adding any new products or expanding their Salesforce footprint into any new departments.
Then two days later, your sales management team comes back from a basketball game with the CEO of your client organization. They tell you “we just met with the CEO, he wants to roll Salesforce out to his entire marketing department as well.”
As a Sales rep, you immediately jump to the conclusion that your Salesforce Admin is not the authority or decision-maker on this account. All respect you had for this Salesforce Admin’s decision-making ability has gone out the window.
As a result, that Sales rep treats the Salesforce Admin differently in the negotiation. He starts going around them and maximizing his divide and conquer tactics because he knows the Salesforce Admin is not in charge.
This is what happens when your organization is not aligned.
It undermines the individual who is the face of the negotiation. It doesn’t matter if it is a Salesforce Admin, CIO, or CFO.
Alignment and a roadmap gives power to the negotiator
Let us imagine another scenario for a moment here. Imagine that you are a Salesforce rep. You go into a conversation with your Salesforce Admin who is your main point of contact. The Salesforce Admin tells you they want to increase sales cloud licenses by 20% and consider a demo of Pardot in their marketing department.
Then two days later, your sales management team comes back from a basketball game with the client CEO. They tell you “we just met with the CEO, he wants to grow his licenses by 20% and is considering expanding Pardot into their marketing department.”
As a Sales Rep, you just heard consistency.
You heard that your Salesforce Admin is aligned with the CEO.
You heard that your Salesforce Admin is actually in charge of this negotiation.
When you have organizational alignment on your roadmap, it gives power to whoever is running your Salesforce Negotiation. It doesn’t matter of it is the Director of IT, CIO, or CFO. Whenever you have that alignment of stories, it gives that person in the negotiating seat power to drive the negotiation on their own.
When to Create your Salesforce Roadmap
We typically recommend companies start building their roadmap six to nine months prior to their negotiation. You are going to want at least three months to handle the actual negotiation with Salesforce so a six month runway gives you an additional three months to get that internal alignment.
Each organization is different, but that internal alignment won’t happen overnight. Give yourself some time to meet with all key stakeholders and achieve that internal alignment.
Three Steps to Creating your Salesforce Roadmap
A Salesforce Roadmap is not complicated. It is a simple table of “what you need” and “when you need it” over the next three to five years.
Even though most Salesforce renewals are only three years, it is helpful to plan five years in advance so you can think of a bigger picture of what may be coming down the line. This helps you in creating an aligned story for Salesforce at your renewal.
Step 1) Create a rough draft alone
If you are reading this, chances are you are the one who is driving the Salesforce negotiation. You have extensive knowledge of Salesforce and can probably fill out 80% of the roadmap on your own.
The key in this step is to document all of your ideas for the roadmap on paper.
You don’t want to go to your key stakeholders with a blank slate and build the roadmap from scratch together. That is not a good use of their time, and it is going to create too much debate.
By crystallizing your thoughts about Salesforce into a rough draft of the roadmap, you can share that document with others. It becomes a starting point for the entire roadmap discussion.
Step 2) Take the rough draft to key stakeholders for feedback
This rough draft of the roadmap is purely for internal use. Once you have this rough draft complete you are going to present this document, typically in the form of a PowerPoint presentation, to your key stakeholders within the organization.
This may be your CEO, CFO, CIO, COO, VP of Sales, Director of IT, Salesforce Admin, Sales Management Team, etc.
You are going to take this roadmap to them and say “This is what I believe our 3-5 year Salesforce roadmap looks like...what feedback do you have?”
As you go into these meetings you may find yourself saying, “I have an idea here but I don’t know exactly what X department needs.” This roadmap and these conversations are meant to help you refine the roadmap and clarify those needs with each department in the organization.
What is great about this step of the process is that this allows your team to have internal dialogues about what you need with Salesforce. Without doing this internal roadmap, these contacts would not be brought into the conversation until a contact from Salesforce had reached out to them.
Instead of letting Salesforce guide these conversations, you are getting in front of them and taking charge. This helps you own and drive the conversation.
Step 3) Gather all feedback and refine your roadmap
Once you have gathered alignment from each of your key stakeholders on the roadmap, you are going to want to take some time to sit down and refine that roadmap into a final polished version.
At this point, you are almost ready for entering the negotiation. But before that we need to build a communication strategy and negotiation plan.
Lastly, it's also important to realize that a Salesforce Roadmap is essential for SELA Agreements (Salesforce Enterprise License agreements). Read our guide for more details on how to renegotiate your SELA Agreement.
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3 Strategies to Elevate Your Software Supplier Relationship
Over the years, our TNG client family has requested more and more guidance related to managing and elevating their commercial supplier relationships. Within this article, you’ll find our top 3 proven strategies to transform IT supplier relationships from tactical to strategic.
Strategy #1 – Control the Flow
When we say “control the flow”, we’re referring to conversation, meeting, and engagement flow.
When prospective clients reach out to TNG, they almost always have the complaint that the supplier knows more about the “needs” of their organization than they do. This most typically is due to the internal lack of time and/or resources to focus on a specific supplier or digital capability. On the other hand, the supplier’s sales team is laser focused on opportunities to grow their business inside of your organization. Immediately, this creates an unfair environment for all parties involved.
You may be thinking that this only creates an unfair advantage for you, the customer. Well, in most situations that’s true. However, it should also be noted that in some circumstances, the supplier’s sales team may be operating with good intentions and simply answering your internal stakeholder’s demand for attention. In short, when one side knows more than the other, it creates an uncomfortable situation for at least one party.
As our team brings 100+ years of collective experience, we have seen just about everything. Most of TNG’s clients are very well-established companies that have $5 billion+ in annual revenue. These companies typically have a “center of excellence (COE)” and/or a “software asset management (SAM)” team. While the overall intent is good, we typically see only about 10% of our clients leveraging these teams of resources correctly.
What happens to the other 90%? Well, one of the most classic inside sales techniques is for a supplier’s sales team member to establish, chair, and/or participate in a COE with a specific focus on their software and its many digital capabilities. This type of group typically meets either monthly or quarterly and is sold as a way in which the sales team member can “inform” the COE/SAM team members of the “demand” coming from inside of the organization. The reality is that the “demand” is often created by the sales team member who has been pushing a land-and-expand strategy inside of the organization.
The easiest way to not only level the playing field with your software suppliers, but also elevate the relationship from tactical to strategic, is to set up strict governance around the overall engagement. Every supplier engagement is slightly unique, but we recommend focusing on the following core tenants:
- Focus your efforts on your Top 10 software suppliers.
- Develop a steering team of executive IT leaders that are in control of the Digital Capability strategy for your company.
- Develop an internal COE for each of your Top 10 suppliers. The size and scope of them should proportionally match the importance of the supplier’s impact on your business.
- Identify and assign clear roles & responsibilities for each employee team member that is part of their performance objectives.
- Do not allow supplier sales team members to be a member of the core team but rather serve as an invited guest on a routine cadence.
This is about the time where traditional sales team members will indicate that this approach will slow down process, innovation, growth, etc. The reality is quite the opposite when properly set up and managed. The primary outcomes you want to achieve are the following:
- Shift the communication paradigm from outside-in to inside-out. This allows the company to ideate, contemplate, and organically socialize a software roadmap (vs. constantly asking the supplier for a list of their asset inventory).
- Share information with suppliers only when it has been fully vetted and approved as a sanctioned project or approved proof of concept. If done properly, this drastically decreases the chance of duplicate purchasing, split requirements, and/or random unwarranted proof of concepts (that usually turn into shelfware) around the enterprise.
- Allow everyone to be more efficient and structured with their time by eliminating the need for follow-up meetings, etc. In other words, engaging suppliers only after decisions have been made internally by the COE will enable the COE to be treated as a true authoritative entity vs a “check the box” exercise.
- Provide opportunities for suppliers to suggest innovative solutions in a fully committed environment.
We find that our TNG clients save an average of 26% annually by deploying this strategy alone (with our help, of course).
Strategy #2 – Manage Upwards
Anyone who knows the basics of selling understands that the easiest way to make a sale is to identify and influence the decision-maker directly. For large enterprise sales teams who are managing multi-million-dollar contracts, that decision-maker is very often an executive leader within the company. Far too often, we find that organizations provide unfettered access to executives without reason. This, in short, usually enables a very unhealthy and complacent comfort for the supplier sales team that (if not properly managed) rarely produces intrinsic value for the company.
By far one of the most effective ways to elevate your supplier relationship is to set up strategic business discussions between company and supplier executives. The key here is to establish equal representation on both sides and ensure there is proper attention and respect established between both companies. Access to your company’s executives should largely be restricted to these meetings which, where possible, should be set up by the COE/SAM teams mentioned in Strategy #1.
Subsequently, it’s important to know that you can leverage access to your executives to exemplify to a new supplier that any new proof of concept, tool, etc. will be given the highest level of attention and visibility. This means a lot for any supplier (new or existing) as it ensures the right eyes are engaged.
Strategy #3 – Set Realistic Milestones that are Mutually Achievable
Just as employees like to understand their performance objectives for each year, it has been proven by TNG that suppliers who understand what “great looks like” outperform those that are not given clear business objectives. Nearly everyone in the business world understands the concept of milestones; however, the implementation of the methodology is highly inconsistent.
One of the many mistakes companies make when establishing a milestone-based contract is they make the actual milestones either ambiguous or unrealistic. Both are equally as dangerous. Ambiguity allows everyone to be right and wrong at the same time. Unrealistic milestones, if accepted by the supplier, often induce unhealthy behaviors by those chartered with meeting or exceeding the same. It doesn’t take much to set a once “strategic” relationship on a path to implosion with either of these scenarios.
Establishing realistic milestones is important for your suppliers. Everyone, at every age, enjoys accomplishing a goal. It’s important to recognize this fact since at the end of the day, as this is a human reaction, and well, we’re all human.
To learn how to properly set up a milestone plan and/or implement any other strategies mentioned above that drive performance for both the company and the supplier, here’s a hint: It’s not just the supplier that has performance milestones!
Start with a CIA.
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