Salesforce Strategist

At Horizontal Digital, we hold ourselves to one key belief: You're only as good as your worst customer experience. This mantra drives our digital consultancy to think beyond the easy answers and create websites, apps, portals and other experiences that solve customer needs for Fortune 500 companies in intuitive and empathetic ways. We make this lofty standard a reality by fusing strategy, data, design and technology together to arrive at solutions that set the bar higher for everyone.

Our values fuel superior results:

1. Lock arms: We forge relationships that make our impact 1,000x stronger. This means working across departments and engaging both our clients and our communities to deliver the greatest good.
2. Show hustle: We're not ones to sit on our hands and wait. Instead, we anticipate opportunities, collectively roll up our sleeves and find ways to execute the exceptional.
3. Embrace change: From new technologies to workplace philosophies, we welcome the unexpected and constantly anticipate what's next.
4. Elevate empathy: We listen before we take action. This means understanding a variety of perspectives and holding ourselves to a higher standard of accountability.
5. Never settle: We motivate each other to push past the easy answers and collectively arrive at bigger, more inspiring ideas.

But enough about us. Let's talk about you.

As a Salesforce Strategy Lead, you will serve as a key strategic advisor to our client as they embark on their digital transformation journey. You are viewed as a trusted partner and advisor to our Fortune 500 industry clients who are engaging with us to help lead them in their digital business transformation. Such transformation programs could be across multiple technology stacks but with a high focus on the core Salesforce products and how they can be adapted and fit in to meet the customer needs. Expectations are that you are highly proficient in current state business process reviews, solutioning and future state business process design and optimisation, and providing the vision, strategy and direction to define and articulate a holistic customer and worker experience strategy that can be translated into a technical solution on Salesforce products.

Specifically, you will interrogate and recommend core internal business processes and changes thereof to support the future state and business applications that support their end customer relationship management processes, and workflow from Sales, to Marketing to Customer Services and Support and ongoing customer engagement and retention and growth.

You are expected to be highly proficient in big picture thinking of a client's industry and business processes around sales, customer service, marketing, and field services from a process-centric lens to capture current state business process, workflows and provide an industry POV as compared to their competitors and industry advances and identify areas for process improvements, greater internal efficiencies and opportunities for growth of their business overall. You will then lead them through your thinking and define a future state POV on the changes they need to their processes and workflows and tools for the transformation agnostic of technology.

What you'll do:

• Participate in Pre-Sales and Sales efforts on the pitch process to win engagements.
• Lead the cross-functional client engagement team as part of the initial Discovery phase, with a specific focus on eliciting and understanding incumbent business objectives and challenges, foundational gaps and pain-points, as well as pillars for the aspirational future state connected digital experience.
• Plan and run Discovery and Strategy workshops (Business Objective and Prioritization, Impact vs Efforts and MoSCoW).
• Assess qualitative and quantitative aspects of the client's current state in conjunction with additional market/industry/competitive research to help articulate the guiding strategy and future vision.
• Collaborate closely with cross-functional team members to develop insight-oriented deliverables to not only guide the development of an achievable digital roadmap, but also provide the basis for successful mobilization of the implementation phase.
• Serve as a subject matter specialist and strategy leader in all things customer experience, digital and Salesforce leading the way in defining the future vision, while exceeding brand and customer needs.
• Manage day-to-day interactions with client stakeholders as it relates to data collection and validation, hypothesis development, analytical insights and out-of-box thinking required for the development of the overall strategy.
• Mentor and manage junior team members, while contributing to, and advancing the strategy competency as a whole.
• Define and elaborate high-level and end-to-end business processes including third party systems (external vendors) with the cross-functional team at Horizontal Digital and the customer teams.
• Create and oversee and enable the teams to execute change management plans for the customer on their transformation and adoption of the solutions.

Who you are:

• You have professional, concise, and effective written/verbal communication skills.
• You are a collaborator and a critical thinker, analytical detail-oriented with the seamless ability to lead workshops, develop polished client-facing deliverables, and interface with cross-functional teams, client, and executive stakeholders, to drive business objectives.
• You are a self-starter who anticipates and completes project assignments in a comprehensive manner while still remaining intimate with the project details.
• You have strong analytical skills, including a thorough understanding of how to interpret the client's overall business objectives, processes and challenges and translating them to foundational strategies future state processes and achievable roadmaps.
• You are able to prioritize a dynamic workload, while being flexible and adjusting to shifting client needs.
• You contribute effectively towards competency development efforts and business development activities.
• You have the ability to navigate complex organisations and personalities to drive project and client outcomes.
• You have a strong Martech understanding with the ability to bring forward best practices aligned with technology and how this affects both the customer and external teams.
• Ultimately you do need a technical solution. While you are not expected to be a technologist, you are expected to have a general understanding of technical solutions in the CRM landscape, their fit for businesses and be able to facilitate a conversation with technical experts on our team for the clients and help rationalize the right solution to solve their challenges and achieve their transformation goals. Exposure to CRM application at a functional level and experience being part of transformations with said CRM applications or being well versed in them are critical to your success and you continue to always stay informed and educated on the latest in the marketplace from Salesforce and other CRM Platforms and technologies.

What you bring:

• 8+ years of progressive experience working on enterprise digital initiatives, focused on the strategy function at a reputed consultancy.
• Strong understanding of the digital ecosystem including associated business processes (e.g., marketing, sales, service), and functional areas such as CRM, Customer Data Platforms, commerce, marketing automation, content strategy, personalization, customer service care, that are critical to the success of client initiatives.
• Strong experience in the development of strategy artifacts (e.g., capability assessment, digital brief, findings report, digital roadmap, business case development, service blueprint, operating and org model design, other strategic PoV's) foundational to delivering connected digital experiences.
• Strong understanding of Agile methodologies and the digital design/development life cycle.
• Strong familiarity with digital platforms such as CMS, CRM, ERP, PIM, DAM and how they interconnect to enable the end customer experience.
• Knowledge and experience in the Salesforce ecosystem is preferred; however, in absence of that, capabilities of competitive products such as Microsoft Dynamics along with Contact Center, Customer Service, Case Management, sales management, CRM analytics reporting.
• Salesforce certifications are a plus.
• Bachelor's Degree preferred.

The above description is not designed to cover or contain a comprehensive listing of activities, duties or responsibilities that are required of the employee for this job. Duties, responsibilities, and activities may change at any time with or without notice.