“What would you say…you do here?” – Bob Slydell, Office Space
On a daily basis, I’m surprised at how much variety this job provides. Just when I think I’ve seen it all, a new day dawns and new projects are sent my way.
Check out the variety in just one week of calls:
- Presented a business process flow diagram to a leadership team that had never actually visualized their business process.
- Conducted a Pardot audit over screen share (now referred to as Marketing Cloud Account Engagement or MCAE).
- Presented an updated website design for a regional bank (yes, we do website design and development as well).
- Mapped out an integration plan to connect third party apps to Salesforce via Mulesoft.
- Integrated Avalara with Salesforce so proposals sent to my client’s customers would contain the correct tax amount (including new tariff regimes).
- Updated page layouts in Salesforce to show dashboards from the 6sense platform.
Yes, I’m a Salesforce Consultant. That is my title. But as Shakespeare wrote – what’s in a name? What is the essence of a Salesforce Consultant?
So allow me to take you through the nickel tour – part of a series presenting the life of a Salesforce Consultant.
Salesforce Consulting — Not for the Faint-hearted
While my product speciality is – as you might have guessed – Salesforce – a Salesforce Consultant must have far more than just Salesforce knowledge.
So – after 10 years of experience leading and designing Salesforce orgs – I present to you the first part of a series that dives into the most important skills a Salesforce Consultant must have to be successful.
How can I help you today?
In many ways – the beginning of a relationship with a new client can feel similar to a session with a therapist. Most likely they have been struggling with very specific issues for so long that they know exactly what is going wrong and what they want to accomplish but they just can’t get it done themselves. They often need someone with vision and the ability to execute that vision. As Edison said, “vision without execution is hallucination.”
For example:
- They may know they need better forecasting tools but they are not clear how to enable them in Salesforce.
- They may know they spend way too much time collecting information from their customers as part of an onboarding process after a sale. Whether it be trade references for a credit check, getting hardware shipped to customers, or collecting wifi details to set up connected hardware – it can all be sped up without the need for back and forth emailing.
- They may have all their pricing models stuck in spreadsheets that could be moved over to a Salesforce quoting application and proposal tool with an eSignature integration (such as DocuSign or CongaSign).
- They may know they are paying a lot of money for their marketing automation tool but only using a fraction of its features.
- They may want to integrate website activity and email activity to Salesforce to help guide better marketing and sales initiatives but have no idea where to start.
The list goes on….
Two Words: Solve Problems
The job of a Salesforce Consultant is to dive deeper into these issues that are causing frustration and inefficiencies – and most importantly – solve problems.
In many cases, my clients come out with solutions to issues that they are already paying for out of the box but simply did not know about. Other times, my clients know exactly what they need help with but they don’t know how to execute. Other cases involve new and unique custom solutions, and custom integrations between Salesforce and other business technology applications (Power BI, Sage Intacct, Acumatica, Square, Shopify…and so on).
Ask questions. Listen. Guide. Provide clear solutions and next steps. Follow up and execute. Solve problems. That’s what a Salesforce Consultant should do.
Stay tuned for the second part of this series where I dive into how to “set performance baselines”. In other words, how to analyze a businesses’ current tech stack performance across web, marketing operations, sales operations, and post-sale processes in order to identify areas for improvement. Then how to measure the “improvement” that is made over time in order to justify the change and cost associated with that improvement.
Spoiler – it involves a clear cut audit (what is working, what is not) and a business flow diagram in order to help visualize how all the the parts of your tech stack work together. Once you have a map, you then can determine where you are and where you want to go.
In the meantime, feel free to reach out with any questions.
Roy Wimer
(roy@parquet.dev)
