At Dreamforce ’16, we had a chance to interview Kelly Bentubo, Salesforce MVP. She talked to us about industry trends, best practices, and the path to becoming one of the most celebrated Salesforce Admins in the community.
In this piece, we discuss Kelly’s organization’s journey of digital transformation. She shares her philosophy of digital transformation, how she thinks through change management, and how she designs her solutions through the perspective of the end user.
Kelly’s approach is very similar to Skuid’s: more human, less machine. At Skuid, we know that human-centered design leads to amazing results.
Digital transformation can place a huge stress on companies and employees. Change in general can make employees feel like they aren’t heard or are being overlooked.
This can fragment an organization, compromise employee trust, and ultimately be very detrimental to a company. Most of this stress can be offset if leaders take time to listen to their employees and respond according to their needs.
Address the problem.
Kelly Bentubo, Salesforce MVP, knows this well. Kelly is the Salesforce admin at BlackArch Partners, a leading middle-market investment bank based in Charlotte, NC. Under Kelly’s leadership, the company's Salesforce org is thriving, her users are happy, and adoption rates are soaring. But it wasn’t always that way.
When Kelly started at BlackArch, the company had been without a Salesforce admin for over eight months. Every user was given admin permissions (yikes!), and while many changes were being made to the org by many different people, no one documented the changes that were made and the reasons for them. In other words, their Salesforce org was a mess.
Thanks to Kelly’s dedication to excellence and willingness to learn, she transformed the org. This was a huge undertaking for Kelly, but the most significant accomplishment in the process was that she made her end users very happy. As a result, she saw nearly full adoption rates from her end users and a major improvement in data quality.
What was Kelly’s secret sauce to such a successful and fully adopted digital transformation? As Kelly began to implement changes, she adopted two mantras: “change management” and “What’s in it for me?” (WIIFM), or rather, her end user.
Take one step at a time.
Kelly knew that too many changes all at once would result in unnecessary stress and further fragmentation to the org. As she made changes, she gave users time to understand and accept the change before moving to the next big one.
She created a timeline for what the next 90 days would look like for her org, and she communicated that timeline to the end users. She solved the immediate problems and designed for the future. Kelly prioritized change management without compromising a speedy delivery.
With thoughtful communication to her end users, Kelly was able to involve them and create ownership among them. This ultimately led to a more effective and equally quick digital transformation.
Ask: WIIFM? Or rather, my end user?
The other side of Kelly’s success equation was that she kept her end user in mind and designed the org around their needs. At each turn in the road or decision she made, she asked herself, “what’s in it for my end user?”
Rather than including superfluous or unnecessary data, she started by identifying what data the end user needed to make informed business decisions and propel the business forward.
This meant that adoption rates and data quality would take care of themselves. Kelly knew that their teams would have an incentive to keep their data updated, and subsequently adopt.
“If you show a user where the benefit is and how this will make their job easier or better, they have incentive to keep it updated and adopt,” says Kelly. Some practical actions she took to build an enjoyable user experience for her users included making the data easy for them to access and avoiding page clutter.
Her rule of thumb is that scrolling more than twice on a page is too much, Amen, Kelly!
Make humans the center.
At Skuid, we know the value of human-centered design. Every day, we see how it leads to amazing results. Our customers are great examples of this. Kelly’s user-centered approach to digital transformation is something Skuid believes in 100%. It’s more human, less machine.
We applaud you, Kelly!Want to hear more? Kelly presented these ideas to more than 1,000 people this year at Dreamforce in her session, “Admin Roadmap to an Existing Org.”
Get the freedom to innovate today with a free trial of Skuid’s user experience platform. Since our initial interview with Kelly, she has moved on to Duo Security as their Senior Salesforce Manager.
