How Elements.cloud can help you become a Salesforce pioneer

In today’s digital landscape, Salesforce is the cornerstone of many organization’s digital transformation and alignment efforts, allowing them to streamline operations, enhance customer relationships, and drive revenue. The platform’s vast capabilities come with blessings, but there are challenges in managing it. How can you be sure you’re using Salesforce most effectively?

The team at Elements.cloud are dedicated to maximizing the full potential of Salesforce efficiently. We are the providers of the only Change Intelligence Platform, built especially for empowering teams who manage Salesforce.

This article explores the intersection of Elements.cloud’s Change Intelligence platform and IBM’s ‘State of Salesforce’ report- a study that serves as the benchmark for Salesforce success. Together, we can offer a compelling roadmap for any organization aiming to elevate its Salesforce projects and operations.

Whether you’re a CIO, Product Manager, Admin, Developer, or Architect- regardless of your role within Salesforce, this report is your guide. Discover how Elements.cloud can help your organization embrace the pioneering attributes that the best teams managing Salesforce hold.

The State of Salesforce Report: A Benchmark for Success

The State of Salesforce report by IBM, is a comprehensive study which delves into how businesses leverage the Salesforce platform, to drive value and innovation.

Based on a year-long research initiative, involving over 3,000 executives, this report is a benchmark for organizations aiming to maximize their ROI from Salesforce. It categorizes Salesforce users into four types (Pioneers, Prepared, Prudent, and Pensive,) each with distinct characteristics and levels of success in utilizing the platform.

The report seeks to identify best practices, key attributes, and strategies that distinguish the most successful organizations, offering a roadmap for others to emulate.

Elements.cloud: The Change Intelligence Platform for Salesforce Pioneers

In a landscape where agility and informed decision-making are key, Elements.cloud has emerged as a Change Intelligence platform designed to empower Salesforce users. Elements.cloud provides a comprehensive suite of features for long-term Salesforce change management strategies. It serves as a single source of truth for all business and Org analysis, enabling organizations to make confident changes to their Salesforce Org faster.

What is Change Intelligence?

Change Intelligence refers to the ability of an organization to learn about their business and systems configuration rapidly and leverage that knowledge, to execute digital transformation. 

Imagine a retail company that wants to transition from a traditional brick-and-mortar model, to an e-commerce platform. Change Intelligence is about pooling together all of the systems, that enable the company to swiftly analyze its existing inventory systems, customer databases, sales channels and the organizational processes it supports. From this, they can then develop a streamlined plan, to prepare for their transition, identifying potential risks, dependencies and impact on various stakeholders.

Fundamentally, Change Intelligence equips organizations with the insights, tools, and methodologies they need to adapt to change, not just reactively, but proactively and strategically.

By aligning the robust capabilities of Elements.cloud with the attributes of Salesforce Pioneers, as outlined in the IBM report, organizations have a unique opportunity to elevate their Salesforce game.

Summary of Findings from The State of Salesforce

The Salesforce User Landscape: A Spectrum of Engagement

The State of Salesforce is more than just a report. It’s a playbook aimed at executives, Salesforce users, and decision-makers, who are serious about maximizing their Salesforce ROI. It is also an essential piece of resource, that contributes to undertanding the attributes that set the most successful Salesforce users and innovators apart.

The State of Salesforce report, categorizes Salesforce users into four distinct types, each with their own level of engagement and success with the platform:

• The Pioneers: At the top, these are the trailblazers who optimize value on all fronts, leading the way in maximizing the value from Salesforce.
• The Prepared: These organizations experience bursts of value but need to think at an enterprise level, limiting their overall success.
• The Prudent: These organizations are stuck in silos, limiting the value they can extract from Salesforce.
• The Pensives: These are organizations that have invested in Salesforce but need to capitalize on its potential fully.

The 5 Attributes of Pioneering Organizations

Focusing on the Pioneers: the Trailblazers of Salesforce.

Pioneers stand out, with several key attributes that set them apart:

1. Generative AI Experimentation

Pioneers are at the forefront of AI innovation, exploring generative AI use cases to significantly increase profits. Not only this, but leveraging AI effectively means that manual processes can be automated, leaving more time for experimentation, innovation and progress within the organization.

2. Leveraging Industry Clouds

Pioneers make effective use of specialized Salesforce cloud solutions tailored to their industries. Industry clouds, such as Manufacturing, Education, or Financial Services cloud, can help you leverage industry-specific features pre-built into your Org. Organizations that do this reduce the headaches of building everything by hand, giving them more time to focus on innovating in other areas. 

3. Data Integration

Pioneers excel in integrating data across organizational silos, enabling more informed and agile decision-making. Shared data sources mean fewer mistakes and less time spent fixing them, if they do occur. It also makes reporting, analysis and data-driven decisions significantly more straightforward.

4. Change-Ready Culture

Beyond technology, Pioneers invest in creating a culture that is not just open to change, but is enthused by it. These teams open themselves to new ideas, constructive criticism and learn to embrace constant innovation and change. This attitude allows organizations to be the early adopters of new technologies and methodologies.

5. Innovation Over Inertia

Equally important, is the ability to pivot when needed and acknowledge when to move away from projects that are stalling or not providing the promised value. Be reflective and ready to improve and innovate when needed. Pioneers are agile and quick to adapt, using innovation as a tool to overcome traditional enterprise limitations.

Where does your organization fit in?

Try and think about where you stand in this landscape. What are you doing well, and what could be better? What are the biggest challenges you face when it comes to managing Salesforce successfully and where do you think they come from?

How can Elements.cloud help you become a Pioneer?

Elements.cloud is a Change Intelligence platform offering you a complete solution that goes beyond solving isolated challenges and provides you with the tools and insights you need for long-term success with Salesforce. The cloud-native platform offers a more complete view of your Org: it supports your business processes by understanding the risk and cost of changes you make to your org. All of this is powered by automated insights and accelerated by leveraging AI to increase your time to value with Salesforce.

Read on and learn how Elements.cloud, can empower you to strengthen these five key attributes in your organization, no matter how big or small.

1. Generative AI Experimentation

Elements architecture maps, help you to highlight process inefficiencies and candidates for automation in your organization and infrastructure. Any changes you implement can then be easily documented and understood by your teams, so there is always certainty about what has been built, why and how it works.

Improve adoption of new technologies and features, by utilizing Elements.cloud’s end-user documentation features – surfacing training materials and documents, natively in Salesforce, when needed.

2. Leveraging Industry Clouds

Elements.cloud can facilitate the planning of new Cloud implementations, allowing you to understand your organization’s processes and where technology can support them. By mapping the Salesforce Industry Cloud-specific components, to your business processes, you can make the most of what’s provided and speed up the analysis phase of your implementation projects.

3. Data Integration

We work where you work, meaning that you can surface Elements.cloud insights from Salesforce setup, offering ease of use and the ability to see your historical and planned changes to the Org.

Elements.cloud also offers bespoke integrations with Jira, Copado, and Salesforce DevOps Center, as well as an open API and webhook infrastructure, allowing you to connect your ticket management and DevOps systems. This offers flexibility for your teams who need to work in other systems while ensuring that the teams who need Elements.cloud insights can see the link to relevant planned and released changes. This reduces silos between teams and empowers a collaborative culture, where data is shared and strengthens a team’s ability to make quick, accurate decisions.

4. Change-Ready Culture

Elements.cloud provides you with solutions across the change management cycle, allowing you to address the challenges that arise when managing Salesforce intelligently. Be change-ready, by investing in thorough documentation of your processes and technical architecture. The platform offers a complete picture of your Org configuration, reducing the time needed to understand the impact of changes, from weeks to hours. It drives your team’s agility and adaptability, ensuring they’re confident in the changes they’re making.

5. Innovation Over Inertia

Make use of our AI-powered suite to reduce time-to-value. By automating the generation of user stories from a process map, you can save time on the manual portion of change management and avoid the apathy that arises from repetitive and low-value tasks. Overall, Elements.cloud provides you with the tools required to innovate and be proactive about change in your organization.

Center of Excellence

Elements is rated as the front-runner in Change Intelligence Platforms and the most complete Salesforce solution for managing change; demonstrating the qualities of Pioneers and recognized as the leaders in their industry.

By leveraging Elements.cloud, you can feel confident in running your Salesforce Center of Excellence (COE) as we provide you with the history, insights and collaborative tools required, to govern Salesforce successfully. A COE, supports a robust internal structure for change management.

Change Intelligence with Elements.cloud

Elements.cloud provides an aggregated view of your Org’s related documentation: what has been configured and why, as well as the proposed changes, dependencies, risks, and impact.

As the IBM report states, pioneering organizations have “a clear, comprehensive view of the future, partly because they have eliminated the silos that would prohibit the bird’s eye view”. In other words, they ensure open access to the data, analytics and documentation, that empowers innovation and consistent results over long periods. Elements.cloud, can give you a 360° view to understand, analyze and act accordingly, quickly.

Teams can easily document and embed these decisions and changes into Elements.cloud, serving as your organization’s single source of truth.

Using Elements.cloud as your organization’s Change Intelligence platform, helps guide your teams into making the right decisions, building the right things and thinking ahead, thus giving them more time and resources to be pioneers of change.

Conclusion

In a rapidly evolving digital landscape, the need for agility, innovation, and informed decision-making has never been more significant. This report has demonstrated how Elements.cloud, as a Change Intelligence platform, aligns perfectly with the attributes of Salesforce Pioneers, as outlined in IBM’s State of Salesforce report.

By leveraging Elements.cloud’s comprehensive suite of features, organizations can break down silos, foster a change-ready culture and drive innovation over inertia. Whether you’re just starting your Salesforce journey, or looking to elevate your existing practices, Elements.cloud provides the tools, insights and methodologies to help you become a true Salesforce Pioneer. 

Are you interested? Book a call with our team. Let us show you how to improve your Salesforce ROI, using Elements.cloud.

Watch our customer testimonials, to learn how Elements.cloud has transformed how organizations manage change.