LEADING SOCIAL PLATFORM LEVERAGES SALESFORCE TO SUPPORT REV GEN PROCESSES

The Challenge

A leading social platform was struggling to provide transparency across its content, partnerships, and ad sales groups. More specifically, the company’s partnership business development efforts were in need of a holistic overhaul spanning processes, data flows, and technology. The company and team had experienced rapid growth, and as with many high-growth organizations, disparate spreadsheets quickly became the system of record for critical data. Efforts around the content and partnership teams were becoming increasingly important in the company’s growth strategy as they drove highly innovative partnerships which helped drive revenue. In addition, the existing Salesforce deployment was highly focused on complex ad sales process flows and data modeling, creating a challenge to incorporate a content and partnerships-focused design within the same global instance.

The Results

V2 began the project by leveraging its D(3P) management consulting framework. Through executive, manager, and end-user workshops, V2 helped map out the current state flows, identify the numerous “magic spreadsheets” used to manage-various-processes, discuss collaboration challenges, and map out a new set of processes and solution design. The resulting solution was based largely on Salesforce’s Platform Cloud, in order to reduce the risk of business disruption to other teams currently leveraging Salesforce. V2’s design was highly innovative in modeling partner negotiations, agreements, agreement addenda, amendments, and programming plans. In addition, V2 enabled the content and partnership teams the flexibility to build their own database of media partners and brands and associate such entities with a set of global Accounts already established by the ad sales organization.

From a data and integration standpoint, V2 invested significant energy helping to restructure and cleanse legacy data before migrating records into Salesforce and reconstructed historical rights-related records to provide insights in past deals formerly captured in scattered spreadsheets or emails. In addition, V2 helped to leverage and modify a pre-built connector to integrate Salesforce with the company’s contract lifecycle management solution.

V2 developed highly customized training plans for each user group which not only outlined the new solution design, but aimed to educate team members around the newly formed process flows, expected data capture, and anticipated collaboration. And in light of the legacy culture which valued speed and agility over uniform processes and centralized data capture, change management communications were carefully weighed and delivered throughout the lifecycle of the program to foster engagement and adoption.