💃 3 Practical Leverage Examples for Salesforce Consultants 🕺

Good morning, Salesforce Nerd! Leverage is the engine that makes the Salesforce consulting machine go go go 🏎️💨.

Here are 3 practical examples of leverage from 3 perspectives ⬇️

INTRO

Roles in Leverage

Leverage is not equal across Salesforce consulting roles.

A senior resource is leverage. A junior resource is leveraged (by a senior resource).

Offshore is leveraged.

See the pattern 👀? Leverage is generated by lower-earning resources doing most of the work. Senior roles apply that leverage.

Let’s take a look at 3 levels of a consulting shop and see how they work to create leverage 👇

SCENARIO

Three Levels of Leverage Scenarios

Business Analyst or Salesforce Consultant I

1) Automating a repetitive task.

Example1: Your client requires their Jira board be the source of truth but your internal team uses a Salesforce custom object for project management. You build a little Zapier Zap that syncs your Salesforce with their Jira, saving tons of hours of double-entry.

Example2: Your client is replacing their Excel spreadsheets with Salesforce. They’re struggling to grasp Salesforce’s Lead to Opportunity process and their IT team asks you for help in managing volume of questions. After 3 business meetings and 200 inbound emails, the questions persist. So you create an Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) document with step-by-step instructions and screenshots.

The document is distributed and the questions diminish. And when there are questions, the IT team simply resends the document. Leverage!

The numbers:

Let’s use the 2nd example, client-facing SOP:

Without leverage

🥵 Effort: Client - 20hrs/week. You - 3hrs/week

👍 Upside: You bill $600/week (3hrs x $200/hr) for easy work. Salespeople get personal support.

👎 Downside: Low value to the client- IT team and Salesforce consultant utilization for a basic task.

With leverage

😅 Effort: Client: 5 seconds per distribution of SOP. You: 2hrs, one-time to create the document.

👍 Upside: Your one-time-2hrs document is distributed an infinite amount of times. Massive leverage for your client and warm & fuzzies for you as a consultant. Additionally, you can use the SOP as a template for future clients. More leverage! Just not the monetary kind….

👎 Downside: None.

Senior Salesforce Consultant

2) Delegation

The Senior Salesforce Consultant is one of the most challenging roles in consulting because you need to be a stud individual contributor AND a prodigious delegator. Here’s what we mean-

Individual Contributor - responsible for all but the most challenging tasks.

Delegator - responsible for teaching your team things you can do in your sleep but they need 8hrs of sleep and 8 cups of coffee just to be proficient in. This is the where the leverage is.

Example: Your discovery session with the client yields the need for a custom object to manage inbound leads for every inbound lead source. You own the senior-level work and delegate the rest-

• (4hrs) You discover and plan the solution.

• (60hrs) The Business Analyst gathers the requirements and creates user stories for the objective you’ve given them.

• (8hrs) You design the solution.

• (40hrs) The Consultant builds and tests the custom object and the flow that you’ve designed.

• (40hrs) The offshore development team builds the Apex job that will manage the complex duplicate scenarios across multiple objects, that you’ve provided the functional design for.

• (16hrs) You test the crap out of the solution, end-to-end.

168 hours total.

The numbers: 

Without leverage

🥵 Effort: You: 168hrs over 4+ weeks. 3x or 4x the timeline if you have multiple projects.

👍 Upside: You have total control over the entire solution, from A to Z.

👎 Downside: The client pays out the nose for your $300/hr Senior Consultant rate, $50,400 total. The juniors ($200/hr or less) on your team get no exposure and miss learning opportunities. You have other projects and can’t work 40hrs/week on only this.

With leverage

😅 Effort: 168hrs in less than 4 weeks

👍 Upside: You contribute 28hrs ($8400 billed). The rest of the team kicks in 140hrs ($28k billed). Client pays $36,400 and gets the solution in less than 4 weeks. That’s a $15k + timeline savings to your client 💪. Your team gets exposure to clients, a slick solution, and you - a quality senior resource to be learned from.

👎 Downside: You have less control when you delegate tasks to juniors. In a nutshell, this can be a frustrating experience 🙂. It’s why you get paid (and bill the client) the big bucks 💰.

Senior Manager

A senior manager’s role, boiled down, is to have the client’s unwavering trust. If your client’s CMO has a gambling problem 🎲, they will tell you about it, and you will put it in your trust vault 🤐.

This level of trust creates extreme examples of leverage.

3) Unexpected High-Effort projects like CPQ or Data Migration

A 30 minute meeting may produce a $1,000,000 project for their company.

It sounds outrageous, but think about it - the client decides they can’t manage the data migration themselves and want you to do it. Or the client’s CTO tells you they decided they will not swivel-chair the contract writing and want users to be able to CPQ in Salesforce.

Let’s use converting CPQ to Salesforce as the example. There’s already an ERP partner doing the ERP things, so this will be the Salesforce-side. By the way, Senior Managers only deal in leverage. They are nothing without their teams.

• (60hrs) we said 30 minutes, tongue-in-cheek, but lets say it took the Senior Manager 6hrs of meetings and SOW writing to put this deal together and then a healthy chunk of hours to manage internal and external escalations.

• (120hrs) Integrations Architect - you’d best bring your own integration architect to the game to match wits with the ERP partner. There’s some predatory vendors out there….

• (600hrs) Lead Salesforce developer to manage the dev team, set the architecture foundation, and monitor and control the development.

• (1200hrs = 400×3) Offshore Salesforce developers to do the boilerplate code, write test classes, and simple LWC.

• (400hrs) Business Analyst because you will die without a BA.

• (800hrs) Senior Salesforce Consultant to manage all the functional solutions and resources.

• (500hrs) Project Manager to keep the day-to-day needle moving and meetings scheduled.

• (200hrs) QA analyst because there’ll be so many Jira cards to validate it becomes a full time role.

Even at a rate of $200 across the board, this is already close to $1 million 💰.

Now the Senior Manager just needs to resource plan, capacity plan, recruit, hire, staff the project, and push it to completion for the next 9 months. Easy peasy 😎.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Takeaway

You already know leverage is powerful 💪.

Seeing quantitative examples of how it can send revenues through the roof (assuming you have the bodies to bill the hours 😉) shows you exactly how you can be eating filet mignon every day 🥩.

And regardless of where you are in your career, and which role you’re in at your company, your contribution to the leverage model is invaluable.

SOUL FOOD

Today’s Principle

and now....Your Salesforce Memes