Your Team Is Already Tapped Out
- kirstenlongnecker
- Sep 19, 2024
- 3 min read
Updated: Oct 31, 2024
How to Get Them on Track & Provide The Help They Need
If you think your team may be burned out at work, they are. The statistics are stunning and widely publicized: 44% of U.S. employees feel burnt out at work according to SHRM research* and that number is as high as 82% per a 2024 Global Talent Trends study by Mercer**. American workers are tired. And branch employees are not immune. Think about it: regulatory pressures, interpersonal issues, security threats, not to mention pressures at home.
Your marketing and operations teams may feel that to an even greater degree. Cognitive overload is a real issue for these teams; they have so many competing priorities that none are completed in a high-quality way. Excessive workload is one of the contributing factors cited by the Mercer study, accounting for 37%; exhaustion makes up another 40%. I noticed discussions on several forums and boards recently debating the optimal tools to use. It’s clear that it’s an important but potentially confusing decision; and it must be made repeatedly as platforms and technology change.
The bottom line is that most of the teams we interact with are stretched thin, and they need help. Even well-supported teams can’t do it all. But they can do it, and they can do more when enhanced with expertise. Here are my recommendations on how to improve productivity when it comes to your Salesforce management.
Determine success metrics and align projects to those metrics.
This seems like a ‘duh,’ but when we engage clients, we always find that goals are not aligned to marketing programs. And when they are, often the programs are designed with such complexity that they take 3x as long to complete. That’s a bad deal for your teams because it’s literally 3x the work, but almost never 3x the performance of simple programs aligned to the same goal.
Have a roadmap, prioritize it continually, and make the prioritization transparent.
I rarely arrive at a new client and receive a clear set of achievable goals with projects prioritized for them. It’s very rare and even rarer when it comes to Salesforce projects. One artifact we give to all clients is a personalized Roadmap that we use on our projects, teaching clients to use it, and then transition to them for use with their stakeholders. It’s an excellent and simple tool that shows what is active, when it’s going to be done, and what is next. The conversation is always about what is next, and we see our clients begin using this tool with their internal stakeholders to create transparency around what marketing and sales teams are working on. This transparency allows the team to work across LOBs to prioritize efforts to their goals and have LOB leaders change their minds in an open dialogue. It’s simple and powerful!
Bring in reinforcements and new approaches.
Three tips to select a Salesforce partner that works well for your goals.
Look for past experience in your business to make sure the partner can add value related to process understanding, not just Salesforce understanding.
Find out what tools and frameworks are used by the partner. Frameworks are critical because they give your internal team a tested approach for managing projects of different types. For instance, if you are building Dashboards & Reports, the framework or strategic approach for creating a good deliverable is completely different than if your team is building a new Sales Process.
You need to understand how the partner trains your team at handoff and if they can support you after the project is over. We use a Collaborative Handoff that ensures teams are trained and comfortable with the new tools, then offer multiple options for working with our team in support mode after a project ends.
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