Healthcare Leader Finds Prescription for Success With Sales Cloud
Highmark Health had a good problem. Its innovation program, thinkUP, was pulling in ideas from across a workforce of 35,000 employees, and the volume had outgrown the tools meant to manage it. Executives couldn’t see which ideas were moving, financial projections lived in a complex data model that was slow to work with, and reporting meant manual effort every time. We delivered a Salesforce Sales Cloud implementation that turned thinkUP into a single central database, with Campaigns and Opportunities tracking every idea, customized Lightning Components handling the complex flows, and a Salesforce Tableau integration giving leadership a visual view of the whole portfolio. Today, more than 300 executive-level users work from that platform, with a 360-degree view of every project’s status and financial projection.
A Healthcare Leader Managing Innovation at Scale
Highmark Health is one of the largest healthcare organizations in the United States, spanning health insurance, care delivery, and a wide range of related services. With 35,000 employees, it has a deep pool of people who see day-to-day where the business could work better, and thinkUP was built to capture those ideas and turn the best of them into funded projects.
The challenge with any program like that is scale. A few hundred ideas can live in a spreadsheet. Tens of thousands of employees contributing ideas, each with an owner, a status, a business case, and a financial projection, need a real system behind them. That’s what Highmark Health’s CRM team came to us for: a Salesforce healthcare implementation that could handle idea management the way Sales Cloud normally handles a sales pipeline.
The Challenge: Too Many Ideas, Too Little Visibility
Highmark Health asked us to provide a solution that would do four things the existing setup couldn’t:
• Handle the sheer number of ideas being generated among 35,000 employees without losing track of any of them
• Speed up the repetitive processes involved in reviewing ideas and manage a complex financial data model behind each business case
• Let executives view, create, and track ideas generated by themselves and their team members in one central database rather than across scattered documents
• Provide a way to visualize and report on the data so leadership could see the portfolio as a whole, not one idea at a time
Underneath those four requirements sat a technical one. The existing approach was code-first, which meant every change to the process required a developer, and every developer change added complexity that the CRM team had to maintain long after go-live.
Our Approach: A Salesforce Sales Cloud Implementation Built on Configuration, Not Code
The first decision shaped everything else: we built the solution on Sales Cloud’s standard objects and declarative tools wherever possible, and reserved custom code for the places where configuration genuinely couldn’t do the job. That’s a deliberate choice in any Sales Cloud implementation services engagement, and here it was the difference between a platform Highmark Health could support in-house and one that would always depend on outside developers.
We mapped thinkUP’s idea lifecycle onto Sales Cloud’s Campaigns and Opportunities. Each innovation initiative became a Campaign, and each idea within it became an Opportunity, carrying its owner, stage, status, and financial projection the same way a sales deal would. That gave Highmark Health a central database out of the box, with all of Sales Cloud’s native tracking, ownership, and stage history working immediately.
The complex flows were where the real work happened. Idea review at Highmark Health involves multiple steps, approvals, and financial calculations, so we enhanced those flows with customized Lightning Components. The components handled the parts of the process that standard page layouts couldn’t, while still living inside Salesforce’s configuration framework rather than a separate codebase.
For reporting, we designed custom report types that matched the thinkUP data model exactly, so the CRM team could build reports on the fields and relationships that mattered without workarounds. Then we integrated Tableau for visual representation, connecting Sales Cloud data to dashboards that let executives see portfolio health, project status, and financial projections in one view.
Throughout, we worked as a Sales Cloud implementation partner alongside Highmark Health’s Director of CRM and his team, so the people who would own the platform after handover were involved in every configuration decision along the way.
Tools and Products Used
This Salesforce healthcare implementation stayed close to the core platform, with Tableau as the one major addition:
• Salesforce Sales Cloud: the platform at the center of the solution, repurposed from sales pipeline management to enterprise idea and project tracking
• Campaigns and Opportunities: standard Sales Cloud objects used to represent innovation initiatives and the individual ideas within them
• Lightning Components: customized components built to handle the complex review and approval flows that standard layouts couldn’t support
• Custom report types: designed to match the thinkUP data model so the CRM team could report directly on the fields and relationships that mattered
• Tableau: integrated with Sales Cloud to give executives visual dashboards of project status and financial projections across the whole portfolio
The Salesforce Tableau integration was what turned a well-structured database into something executives actually wanted to open. Sales Cloud held the data, and Tableau made it readable at a glance.
The Results: One Platform, 300+ Executives, Full Portfolio Visibility
The most visible outcome is adoption. More than 300 executive-level users now work in the platform, viewing, creating, and tracking ideas from their own teams and across the organization. For an internal tool at a company of Highmark Health’s size, that level of executive use is the clearest sign the system fits how people actually work.
The second outcome is what those executives can see. The Salesforce Sales Cloud implementation, combined with Tableau, gives Highmark Health a 360-degree view of all project statuses and financial projections in one place. Leadership no longer has to ask for a report to understand where the innovation portfolio stands.
The third outcome is the one Highmark Health’s CRM team feels every day. Moving from a code-first approach to a configuration-based deployment decreased the complexity of the platform and made it far easier for the internal team to support and extend thinkUP without waiting on developers.
| Area | Outcome |
| Executive adoption | 300+ executive-level users on the platform |
| Portfolio visibility | 360-degree view of all project statuses and financial projections |
| Idea tracking | Ideas from 35,000 employees tracked in one central database via Campaigns and Opportunities |
| Ongoing support | Configuration-based deployment reduced complexity and improved the CRM team’s ability to support thinkUP |
In the Client’s Words
“Switching from a code-first approach to a configuration-based deployment decreased the complexity and increased our ability to support the thinkUP project.”
Paul Shatlock, Director of CRM, Highmark Health
If your organization is running an important process on spreadsheets or custom code that only a developer can change, our Sales Cloud implementation services team can help you rebuild it through a Salesforce Sales Cloud implementation your own team can own. Get in touch to talk through what that could look like.
