7 Aussie Businesses Share Tips on How They Put Digital-First, First

We had a great opportunity to learn from Trailblazers during a series of Grow your Business from Anywhere events that took place in Auckland, Brisbane and Melbourne over May and June. At the event, leaders shared how they’re putting technology at the core of their business using Salesforce. Here are their tips on how to embark on a digital transformation project, wherever you are on your business journey.

Tip 1: Don’t stop the customer journey at the point of sale

— Katie Dance, Business Transformation Manager, Intrepid

Operating across seven continents, Intrepid Travel is the world’s largest adventure travel company. Their top priority is creating a seamless customer experience, regardless of the channel. 

Change your mindset about the customer journey. Stop viewing the sale as the endpoint, but rather one element in a cohesive journey. For example, at Intrepid we create personalised journeys for our customers that extend well beyond the point of sale. These journeys should continue to inspire and excite them as they progress towards their travel date.

Don’t underestimate the role of data in giving you a 360-degree view of your customer.  So before you start on your digital transformation, clarify internally what qualifies as good data and set rules around data flow and how data is leveraged.

Tip 2: Decide on your north star before you start the digital transformation process

— Michael Edwards, Transformation Program Manager, Olympus 

You may recognise Olympus as a consumer camera brand, but it may surprise you to learn that their primary business is creating medical technologies to improve cancer diagnosis with a focus on making people’s lives healthier, safer and more fulfilling. With the majority of their customers in healthcare, the Olympus Australia and New Zealand team was driven by never being the cause of their customer’s downtime.   

Decide on your north star before embarking on a digital transformation journey. Here at Olympus, we landed on availability as being the guiding light for our processes. 

Since implementing Salesforce, we’ve been able to keep our inventory data in one place, meaning we can serve our customers better by offering them exact delivery dates. And in a situation where a hospital needs certain medical equipment to conduct a surgery, having confidence when the equipment will arrive is essential in scheduling the operation. We’ve changed the paradigm to be significantly more customer centric, it’s shifted from “expect your delivery any time in the next eight weeks” to “what day would you like it to be delivered?”

Tip 3: Bring your stakeholders on the journey

— Simon Wirth Head of Technology, Planning and Delivery, AFL

The Australian Football League (AFL) governs more than the big stadium games. Their remit covers everything from community games to ticketing. They embarked on a Salesforce journey to make the company more connected.  

Our digital transformation journey was kickstarted by a need for a central source of truth. Before we introduced Salesforce, there were a lot of spreadsheets and different systems that didn’t talk to each other — resulting in, you guessed it, siloes.  

We’re around six months into creating a shared services model so all arms of the AFL can access the same technology. 

My top advice? Be very deliberate during the change management process. Remember, change is hard and you’ll encounter naysayers along the way. Start by getting the important people trained up at the right time. Doing this will show them Salesforce’s benefits early and bring them along on the journey.  

Looking to grow your business? Get advice from our Trailblazers.

Tip 4: View your CRM as an investment in your business

— Ryan Robertson, CEO Bittn

Bittn is a pest control company that relies on science and technology to banish those unexpected housemates from your home or workplace. The Bittn team spends a lot of time in the field, meaning their scheduling systems have to be seamless.

My biggest piece of advice is to view Salesforce as an investment in your business. We tried every CRM under the sun, but we found ourselves hitting a wall. Scheduling was starting to feel impossible and we couldn’t communicate as a team. 

So view the transformation as an investment and commit to finding an experienced Salesforce partner who can help you roll it out. You’ll see the benefits pretty quick!

Tip 5: Make time for discovery — internally and externally

— Monica Vecchiotti, Vice President of Growth Operations, Go1

Go1 is a leading educational technology company with a mission to unlock positive potential through a love for learning. Go1 has a comprehensive collection of hundreds of thousands of workforce learning and development resources from the world’s best providers, all in one subscription. 

Like many startups, Go1 was started in a garage. Today though, we’re in the scale-up phase, with our team and user base growing exponentially. Our number one tip is to take the time to do the discovery work, both internally and externally. When it comes to external discovery, you’ll get more accurate insights by speaking to your users and understanding their wants and needs. This will help you build a more accurate customer lifecycle. 

And when it comes to data, be super clear in how you’re planning on using that data later on. Having a view of the end state will help you determine the most important data to capture.

Tip 6: Make adoption as easy as possible for your staff

— Liz Svensk, CEO, Adept Engineering

Businesses that use pressure equipment need to have them inspected by a competent person on a regular basis. That’s where Adept Engineering comes in. The team has recently transitioned from a paper-filled workflow to a completely digitised one on Salesforce. 

We’re about 10 months into our transition from paper to paperless here at Adept Engineering. And the process has been, well, as smooth as sandpaper. When I say paper-based, I mean our engineers were carrying around piles of it to do their inspections previously. Simple customer queries resulted in our team having to sift through piles of paper. This was inefficient (to say the least!). 

Moving to a cloud-based system has been a drastic change, especially for our team members who have been working with us since our early days. My top tip for managing such a profound transformation is to spend energy making your Salesforce CRM as user-friendly as possible for staff to pick up. This will reduce how much training is needed to be able to use the basics of the system.. To do this, you need to put yourself in your team’s shoes, ask them to use the programs and provide feedback and really listen. 

Unite your team around a single shared view of each customer with Customer 360.

Tip 7: Don’t accept “we’ve always done it this way” as an answer

— Priya O’Grady, Head of Marketing, Felix

Felix provides vendor management and procurement software for the construction industry. The team is passionate about helping the Australian construction industry prosper by reducing risk within the supply chain by eliminating arduous administrative processes like paper filing systems and Excel spreadsheets. 

My biggest advice: accept that you don’t know what you don’t know. Start your Salesforce journey by questioning the status quo and involving people who will challenge your processes. We signed up an implementation partner and encouraged him to ask why. Because of this, he could guide us to a more effective way of working together. 

Another big consideration is to document your processes across the company. This will help you design your Salesforce implementation.

Read more: 

• How Salesforce Helped PaySauce Transform From a Startup to a Scale-Up
• These are the World Tour sessions most relevant to you
• How can your startup grow, scale and connect with a CRM?
• Norths Collective serves community members by going deeper into customer data and marketing personalisation
• Customisation: Everything small businesses need to know

Inspired? Head to Salesforce+ to hear more from other Australian and New Zealand Trailblazer stories.