| | June 20178CIOReviewIN MY OPINIONFrom Sales as an Art towards Sales as a Science--How Salesforce.com Enabled Philips To Strengthen Commercial CapabilitiesPhilips Electronics is a 125 year old company with presence in over 100 countries and truly a global visionto make the world healthier through innovation. Our goal is to improve the lives of 3 billion people a year by 2025.One of the enablers to execute on our compelling vision and strategy is to unlock the entrepreneurship of our commercial organizations by equipping them with the right capabilities allowing them to drive sustainable impact. Coming from different ways of working across the geographies and businesses, scattered and different tools and limited management attention, we aimed to bring one way of working, single source of truth for our business and fact based decision making. We wanted to focus on each sales professional by providing him with the right tools that are easy to use and experience, with coaching and guidance on how to become better and more efficient, ready for tomorrow. To do this, in 2014 we set-up a global transformational program, Market to Order Excellence with the bold ambition to:· Increase fact-based decision making· Create a single source of truth for all information related to our Commercial Performance and Accounts· Implement one standard way of working and reporting on our commercial performance · Foster Best practice sharing between all global entities · Drive Continuous ImprovementI had the privilege to run and deploy the program, and in 18 months we harmonized the processes and implemented Salesforce.com across 100 countries and trained 15,000 sales professionals globally how to use it to manage their funnel of opportunities effectively. Today, 3 years later we clearly see the benefits of laying down this solid foundation resulting in increased visibility and transparency in our business allowing us to make fact-based decisions and collaborate better with our customers. Doing such a transformation in a global scale and in a short period of time is quite a challenge and we learned a lot how to execute a sustainable change that delivers business value. For those of you that are embarking on similar journey, I would like to share some of our leanrings.1. Do Not Focus Only on the ToolThere is a saying "Fool with a tool is still a fool." Many organizations focus primarily on implementing CRM as a tool and wonder afterwards why it does not yield the expected long-term results. Leveraging a great technical platform like Salesforce.com which is intuitive, easy to use, accessible everywhere and of different devices, easy to configure, support and upgrade, with strong innovation pipeline is a key enabler and helps to drive adoption. However, equal attention should be on harmonizing and aligning the ways of working across the organization, on cleaning-up and harmonizing the data and reports, on the people--change management, learning and coaching. This will ensure that people across different geographies and management levels follow the same ways of working and can interpret information in the same way to take fact based business decisions. We had a team of process experts from the different businesses and geographies working along with data and solution architects to align, standardize and document the processes, data elements and reports. This work was input for configuring Salesforce, for developing the change management, learning and coaching materials.2. The Importance of DataData is the blood that flows in the veins of the organization and is critical element for every business. There are several aspects about the importance of data--harmonized data and reports allow everybody in the organization to "speak the same language," data By Lazar Detchev, VP, Head of Business Transformation North America, Philips [NYSE:PHG]Lazar Detchev
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