Go-to-market teams have always moved quickly. But when the pandemic caused sales and customer interactions to go virtual practically overnight, the pace of that change went into hyper-drive. High-performing teams upped their automation in order to allow their sales teams to spend more time on selling. According to the Salesforce State of Sales report, roughly two-thirds of high-performing teams are automatically logging sales data and customer notes, prioritizing leads and opportunities, and determining which actions to take on accounts.
These complex automations require seamless integrations and accurate data. Operations teams need to be able to implement time-saving processes efficiently. But making those kinds of changes can come with a lot of risks. Change Intelligence takes the guesswork out of making operational changes. By being aware of the impact of change, ops teams can prevent the typical landmines that come with constantly evolving your systems and processes.
Understanding Change Intelligence concepts
As operations teams face pressure to implement more agile change management, they must embrace Change Intelligence to work more precisely and efficiently. To harness the power of Change Intelligence, here are the concepts you need to understand.
It’s a capability
Think of Change Intelligence as a capability, like problem-solving or project management, that requires a combination of tools and best practices to implement effectively. It should be a proactive consideration before making changes in Salesforce or to your tech stack as a whole. Without Change Intelligence, ops teams have to continually play a game of catch-up, where they’re constantly putting out fires unintentionally caused by modifications they’ve made.
It’s a record of what’s changed
Change Intelligence isn’t just about foresight. Maintaining records of all the changes you make to your tech stack is also an important Change Intelligence best practice. Although you can use the Salesforce Audit Trail and create Custom Objects to track some modifications in Salesforce, you need a more holistic view of all the changes you make throughout your tech stack.
It’s strategic
Ultimately, the goal of Change Intelligence is to drive better decision-making and strategy. Every tech stack is made up of thousands of moving pieces. In order for operations teams to make the best decisions about how to improve their systems and update their processes, they need Change Intelligence.
How to level up your ops career with Change Intelligence
Even though making change is a fundamental component of operations, most of the time, ops professionals are forced to go into it blind. There’s no way to know the impact of changes until you make them. But that directly interferes with the need to continually and rapidly evolve your operations.
Operations professionals who understand Change Intelligence can separate themselves from the pack. When you know which tools and best practices to implement to reduce the risk of change, you can add even more value to your organization:
- Implement the ideal tech stack with minimal disruption to users
- Maintain timelines and assure data quality when modernizing legacy systems
- Provide more accurate and complete user training and communications
- Maintain a comprehensive record of all changes for easier decision-making and training
- Maintain a minimal amount of technical debt
Many senior-level leaders are still defining the role of operations at their companies. Ops professionals who understand the concepts behind Change Intelligence, and how to apply them, can play a major role in demonstrating the value and true capabilities of operations.
How does Sonar define Change Intelligence?
For Sonar, Change Intelligence is having total visibility into your tech stack so you can make more strategic decisions. It’s impossible to keep up with all of the many connections between your systems. Sonar was created to show you how your data is connected and alert you to the impacts of change.
How Sonar helps companies use Salesforce to stay on top of Change Intelligence
Since Salesforce is already Grand Central Station for all your critical data, Sonar puts Change Intelligence right inside of Salesforce for you. Our tool shows you data dependencies from inside the admin panel. If you need to explore those dependencies in more depth, you can easily launch Sonar and see the full scope of your planned changes.
Within Sonar, you can also explore the potential impacts of change by searching for fields directly. You can see where fields are used in Salesforce and any connected systems and tag any other systems that are using a particular field. Sonar also shows you which flows, processes, builders, and apex classes would be impacted by your change.
Sonar keeps a timeline of every change you make in Salesforce. In the event something does go wrong, you can investigate the cause. By automating this necessary, but easily overlooked step, Sonar makes it easy for you to address the “documentation” aspect of Change Intelligence.
Operations teams will continue to play a vital role in improving the processes and tools that go-to-market teams rely on. Change Intelligence is key to reducing the risk that comes with scaling and modernizing operations. Tools like Sonar allow you to automate Change Intelligence best practices so you can spend more of your time on collaboration and strategy.