Salesforce.com Consulting Success Tips

Salesforce Consulting is a process which is focused heavily on collaboration between you and your consulting partner.  It is a combination of process work, IT, management consulting and project management.  Here are three ways to ensure your engagement helps you get to your goals:

1. Clarify Requirements: Ensure you and your Salesforce consultant are able to communicate with concrete requirements.  Each requirement needs to be articulated and captured in a checklist of deliverables.  Where there is a chance for ambiguity, ensure you feel you are being understood and clear.  A helpful way to refine requirements is to tell stories of how you envision working with customers or collaborating within your team.  Your Salesforce consultant should be adept at translating your analog story into a digital reality in your system.
2. Work Iteratively: The process of gathering requirements, implementing the Salesforce.com requirements and using the system should be done in short cycles.  The advantages of using a SaaS customizable system is the ability to iterate quickly.  Don’t get stuck on perfection.  Get to testing and refinement quickly.  Fail forward fast.  This will help continue refining your requirements.  Break up the deliverables in short, meaningful cycles.  This also requires fluid communication between your Salesforce.com consultant and your team.
3. Establish A Strong Champion: Business is easy if it weren’t for the people.  Your team invariably has different levels of computer skills.  A strong champion who can drive change, adoption and feedback is critical for consulting engagements.  They act as the project ambassador and should be able to drive buy-in.  Allow them to be the information hub between the implementation and adoption teams.

There are a lot of details which typically need to be managed in a project system.  If you are able to focus on these three areas, the details will become much more manageable.  The goal of aligning your people and system towards business benefits will be realized.  Feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments section below.