The Secret Ingredients to a Successful Salesforce Project Delivery
Learn how candid conversations as a Salesforce project delivery leader can be the secret ingredients to scaling successful outcomes for your clients.
Managing high-stakes technical projects for enterprise level companies and teams for the past 20 years has taught me a number of lessons as a project delivery leader, but none more important than the power of being direct with your client stakeholders.
In this leadership resource, I will be sharing why direct conversations are important for delivering successful Salesforce projects to completion, our unique approach to project delivery at Kander, and how leaders can get the most out of their Salesforce investments. Let’s dive in.
Candid client conversations and investing in discovery will contribute to success
Candor, our core value at Kander has always been centered around truly understanding business leader’s needs - it's our North Star for client success. We place a strong emphasis on discovery and assessment when working with clients. It is important for us to understand the reason behind their needs and goals before rushing into a solution. We value honesty and will always be candid with our clients, even if it means recommending something that may cost us financially. That's why we always start with a discovery phase for every project, where we ask a wealth of questions up front to intimately understand not just the business, but its goals and challenges.
“We are willing to have tough discussions with our clients to ensure their success and avoid endless fees and never-ending implementations.”
We want to fully understand the client's objectives in order to create an effective roadmap for achieving their goals. This may involve bringing in other partners who specialize in certain aspects. Our goal is to provide comprehensive services, even if that means bringing in additional expertise from our trusted network of partners. This amount of time invested in discovery allows us to provide the best strategic advice possible for the business, rather than just offering lip service. Our priority is what is ultimately the right and best decision for the customer - even if it means recommending you to another partner.
Want to introduce Salesforce to your organization, but feel unequipped to create change with limited internal resources?
I always recommend to our clients that they get an initial assessment for their org, but don’t expect the need to commit! From my client experience, it's important as a business leader to gather feedback on your business and tech stack challenges from an outside technical observer who can understand the current limitations of the business workflows and systems.
This will help others in your org see the potential benefits of incorporating Salesforce into their operations. There are countless capabilities and functions that Salesforce solutions offer, so I always suggest to people to determine their specific business growth and operational needs before diving in. That initial assessment is key in getting people comfortable with Salesforce and realizing its potential.
“Salesforce is similar to an iPhone in that it has a lot of power on its own, but you can also enhance it with additional tools for specific tasks…an initial assessment is key in getting people comfortable with the system and realizing its potential.”
Many people are intimidated by the idea of taking on a large system Salesforce and question why they should spend money on it if big companies already do. Can they even afford it? But what they don't realize is that those enterprise systems have complex workflows because they have many employees to manage. As a small business owner or individual, your needs may be much simpler and can easily be satisfied with out-of-the-box configurations.
From my experience driving Salesforce implementation and technical project consultations to completion is that in order to understand the capabilities of a tool, you need to first understand where you want to take your business. Oftentimes, the solutions can be a lot more simple than you realize.
Demonstrating the value of Salesforce quickly helps with long-term concerns during implementation projects
Your favorite client success stories can often start as the most challenging ones. I can confidently say that one of my favorite projects has been a recent one where we were brought in based on some guidance from leadership at an enterprise org. Initially, some project leaders were hesitant about our involvement because they thought we asked too many questions - never forget being direct and getting discovery up front, rising project delivery leaders.
We warned them that challenges would arise with the more complicated aspects of their business that needed additional customizations and that's when our expertise would be valuable. Our team showed them all the possibilities and enhancements that could be implemented to ensure successful timelines. It took some convincing from their leadership that was sold on Salesforce as an out-of-the-box solution, but not ready to invest in the additional time needed to build in customized automation for their workflows. But having a candid and honest (albeit difficult) conversation up front helped them to see our value.
Remember that if your company has complex infrastructure, there are many customization and configuration requests that will need to be fulfilled. Furthermore, do you have the internal resources to help you make these changes faster or do you need additional technical experts to augment your team and help ensure success after the implementation is over? And if you are a Salesforce consulting firm, how are you empowering clients through training to make sure that you are not running up a bill, but training yourself out of a job by showing the power and flexibility of their Salesforce solution investments?
Having led successful project completions for Fortune 500 companies to innovative startups to global non-profits, my team of Salesforce technical experts have been able to utilize past experiences to help business leaders expedite project delivery from past real world experience.
My final advice to be successful with driving your Salesforce projects to a successful outcome?
If you want to lead a successful client project to completion, start with the hard questions during discovery, really understand where they want to take the business, and how Salesforce can increase their efficiencies.
And if you are a business leader? Do not shy away from consulting partners that are invested in discovery up front even if it takes more time than you anticipated. This will help you partner together and co-build solutions that will scale quickly with your business needs and help you get the most out of your Salesforce investments.
Discover how we thought-partner with our global clients for successful Salesforce project deliveries.
