Chapter 2: How You Make Decisions

Your organization needs to win the race for relevance. You need to be able to sense, anticipate, and respond to changes in your customers’ needs. This will enable you to stop treating every customer interaction with you as if it were their first.

You’ll start by organizing yourself around their profile, identifying more specific contextual opportunities to expand what you can cross-sell and upsell. This will then prepare you to expand beyond commodity transactions by understanding the broader “job to be done.”  You’ll be able to identify adjacencies you don’t currently serve and expand into those broader areas or more closely partner with an ecosystem, for example life interests, education, health, financial wellbeing.

This means auditing who your customers are and what their needs are. You need to think about how you earn this data from your customers, as you are incrementally building trust. You need to integrate the data together to create useful insights. And then you need to share it across the right teams, often breaking down a historical culture of hoarding where people believe “information is power.”

This is not about flooding the company with dashboards. How you visualize those data as actionable insights, share it, and collaborate around it becomes your data culture.

The stronger this data culture is, the more decisions your teams can make, faster — and the better your customers will reward you with more data. The more this happens, the greater your ability will be to understand and anticipate your customers’ needs before they do.

The best companies focus intently on earning and re-earning customers’ trust.  Customers show their trust in two connected ways: They give you their money and their data. The best way of earning more data is by using existing data to generate insights that become the DNA of improved experiences — which, in turn, earns you more data. And so the flywheel keeps spinning as long as you deliver what the customer wants: experiences that feel as effortless as possible.

When Salesforce was founded in 1999, we offered only a small fraction of the technology we offer  today. We grew into customer service, marketing, ecommerce, and more because our customers asked us to.

Our whole business is predicated on listening and delivering. Customer feedback is the engine that drives us — and it’ll help you evolve, too, for what comes next with your own customers.

Before you commit to too many changes, ask yourself and your peers: What stories are our customers telling us? Have we listened deeply to customer feedback recently? Embed customer listening into your company’s DNA to ensure transformation efforts are hyper-focused on their needs. 

To prioritize where to ignite change, it’s best to get an understanding of top needs for each customer persona. Here are some of the best practices Salesforce follows: