The Source of Sales ROI

One of the biggest challenges businesses face today is understanding how they deliver value. 

Business process delivers value; technology delivers value; each requires the other. Increasingly, these two aspects are becoming even more intimately linked. But where are we going? How should we understand? 

Peter Coffee offers an incredibly useful tool to help. Author and VP for Strategic Research at Salesforce, Peter serves as a liaison between the IT and business community, so it makes sense that he could bring these two worlds together under a single term. 

In his keynote presentation at Salesforce for a Platform Innovation Day in Atlanta, he said, "Yes it is important to be aggressive in adopting new technology but it is equally important to be thoughtful in integrating technology into your business process and even more importantly into your flow."

Flow. There it is. IT says technology. Business says process. But the combination of these things is flow - the series of repeated processes and technologies that accomplish business objectives every day.

For many companies, Peter's statement represents a goal, in and of itself because "flow" is defined inconsistently across the business. 

Do you know your flow? Do you know how to get there, what to do, and how to do it? Or do you find yourself searching for documents in multiple locations, not certain who has the latest copy of a contract, or where it is in the approval process? 

Elevating sales operations starts with understanding your flow: where you stand in the vast space of sales enablement tools, what you use and how you use it. Understanding your flow gives you a way to improve.