The Challenge
Sapient is a marketing and digital services agency that helps marketers transform their business to go digital, and the culture of Sapient goes back to its roots. In a 2013 article in inc.com, it’s clear that culture was always at the forefront of the company:
“’The most important thing in your business is not what you're going to sell but what you value.’ That's according to Bill Kanarick, Chief Marketing Officer of global services company Sapient, who helped steered this former startup through the ups and downs of the digital age. Culture was so integral that when the company finally reached 49 employees, Sapient dedicated two of them to keeping it intact.”
As Sapient has continued to grow and expand, its dedication to culture has never wavered. And learning is clearly a deeply held value at the core of many of its founding principles.
The People Value Proposition Sapient uses brings several topics to light, including the need to “cultivate openness to create the conditions for curiosity and change.”
One of Sapient’s core values is openness and the company is committed to exchanging information, feedback and ideas which engages employees, piquing their curiosity. Sapient understands that learning is continuous, no matter an individual’s role in the organization.
When each day begins with the acceptance that one doesn’t know everything, there's room for curiosity, experimentation and piloting to take root.
This core value, just one in its series of very specific, meaningful founding principles, can only be achieved by continuous learning and growth.
The Opportunity
In order to deliver at the speed and agility of the changing marketplace Publicis.Sapient required a world-class business platform, and selected Salesforce. It also selected Salesforce to help promote better collaboration and visibility into the pipeline.
Because Sapient’s culture is highly creative and opt-in, it doesn’t mandate training on its new CRM. Knowing that its team would benefit from Salesforce, the organization decided that it needed a solution to drive adoption, quick onboarding, and a clear path to competency for all Salesforce users. To get the team’s buy-in any sort of training, it needed to create a highly engaging experience that would pull the users in. It also needed the training to be in a highly scalable format that clearly shows each employee what’s in it for them.
The Approach
Enter the new Salesforce On-Boarding and Adoption Program developed in partnership with Baker Communications Inc. This program addresses the challenges of global diversity and opt-in culture by creating an engaging, informative and creatively executed end user salesforce.com on-boarding and adoption strategy.
To sustain learning and encourage self-paced, incremental growth, the program focused on three main areas: strategy, implementation, and fine tuning. The design of this effective strategy included a comprehensive blend of:
Unlike most other one-size-fits-all adoption programs, this unique blend appeals to all learning types and, because it is delivered over time, it maximizes retention and effectiveness. Additionally, the e-learning series is driven on a top-notch interface by an engaging video host that takes end users through an informative and enjoyable learning journey that introduces the new company sales philosophy and methodology, along with step-by-step Salesforce process demonstrations, knowledge checks, and even a little singing.
The deployment has so far impacted over 1,200 users across North America, the Asia-Pacific region, and the European Union. Based on the success of the initial program, Publicis.Sapient, which is comprised of Sapient as well as digital agencies Razorfish and DigitasLBi, will continue to use and evolve this approach in the future to drive end user adoption and consumption with its Salesforce platform.
The Results
Sapient has seen measurable results since it began the implementation. It has a 50-percent increase in early-stage entry, improving the accuracy of its forecasting and pipeline. It also has 75 percent engagement in Salesforce, showing that the team is opting in and making use of the company’s major investment.
Based on the success of this initial program, Publicis.Sapient is continuing to use and evolve this approach to future drive end-user adoption and consumption with its Salesforce platform.
“We selected Baker Communications Inc to help us drive global adoption of Salesforce,” says Seth Bartlett, Global Chief Operating Officer at SapientNitro. “As an extremely creative, opt-in culture, we needed a highly engaging solution to captivate the imagination and clearly show our end users the benefits of using the system.”