“At its core, Workflow is going to help you drive operational excellence, ensure data integrity, and increase speed to market.” —Todd Buffum, Group Product Manager, Salsify
Implementing any new process can be a challenge for a team. Switching to something new can make even the most agile teams stubborn. However, once the benefits of a new process have been established, that can all change.
Todd Buffum, group product manager at Salsify, and Carsten Krohn, director of sales and marketing at Sitation, recently discussed implementing new processes across an organization, as well as the benefits of Salsify Workflow, a no-code, process building workspace that allows users to model simple to complex offline processes and stay in the know of a project’s progress.
What Is Salsify Workflow?
Salsify Workflow offers business value through:
- Speeding up the go-to-market process;
- Improving your team’s efficiency and cross-collaboration;
- Centralizing content enrichment and sourcing; and
- Controlling user roles and their access to data.
You’ll need fewer sync meetings and email chains and you can keep your teams productive, no matter where they’re working.
How To Get Started With Salsify Workflow
“We’ve been able to identify the big themes to get started with Workflow, and the main theme is to think big and start small. Don’t try to start by building a complete end-to-end process … instead, focus on a small use case, bring the value forward and extend that to larger opportunities,” says Buffum.
When implementing any new process, you first need to identify the opportunity in your business for increased efficiency.
Emphasize which pain point you want to target first, and describe an ideal goal to combat that. Determine how a new process can help your business and where to start.
Do you want to speed up time to market, reduce operational costs, save time, or increase revenue?
Next, you’ll want to define the value that the new process will bring and how you can show measurable impact.
How To Successfully Promote Large-Scale Adoption
First, implement your process with a team that can deliver a quick win. You can build on that value story to demonstrate to the rest of your organization why it’s an important and valuable investment.
“This is where a lot of our customers get stuck. They fall into the trap of trying to boil the ocean — they’ll invite stakeholders from every single department into a process meeting or fail to identify a champion or key stakeholder to promote this effort,” says Buffum.
Once you’ve proven a small-scale win, you can promote large-scale adoption. This is the point in the Workflow journey where you’ll be creating a process machine.
With each new iteration, you can optimize your new process and learn on the job. Extend the process to new use cases and decentralize your adoption. New teams, brands, categories, and geographies can be vetted as the next target of this adoption, built on the foundation of the original win.
During this implementation, training, education, and office hours are vital parts to adequately get every stakeholder up and running with the new process.
How Do I Make the Process a Part of Our Digital Transformation?
Buffum and Krohn note that for a new process to really make an impact on an organization’s digital transformation, you’ll need to deploy it across the entire organization. This is why starting with a small win with a strong team is critical — you won’t get allies in the organization without proven success.
You also want to identify the right opportunity for the initial success. The first step to this is identifying the business goal you want to achieve and finding where in the organization it would be best accomplished. If you want to lower the cost of customer acquisition on the digital shelf, start with marketing. If you want to increase revenue on Amazon, start with the ecommerce team.
Then, you’ll need to identify the stakeholders and teams that are invested in meeting your targeted business goal. Educate them on the process and why you think it will improve the business case. Understand their current process and evaluate if the new process will be better for them (and if they’re the right team to start with).
Finally, gauge their interest in the process. Explain what’s in it for them. To get these first allies, you’ll need to get them on your side before you implement the process.
“The one key takeaway is answering these questions during your alignment workshop in order to accomplish your workflow setup,” says Krohn.
Any new process can be a challenge to implement across an entire organization. The best thing you can remember, as Krohn and Buffum say, is to start small. You can’t run before you can walk. You can’t stand in front of a company and single-handedly change the entire way of doing things.
But with this easy process, you can create a more efficient workflow across your organization.
To learn more about Workflow and how you may be able to implement organizational change and efficiency, watch the full webinar: "Salsify & Sitation: Achieving Success With Workflow."
