💃 9 Stakeholder Hacks for Salesforce Professionals🕺

Good morning, Salesforce Nerd! You know how to choose Flows or Apex.

You can perform business analysis with your eyes closed ☺️ and your hands tied behind your back.

But do you know how to make your stakeholders melt 🫦?

9 STAKEHOLDER HACKS

Stakeholder Hacks for Salesforce Professionals

When stakeholders like working with you, friction diminishes, tailwinds emerge, and success is at your fingertips.

Here are 9 stakeholder hacks in 3 categories 👇

🥹 Emotions: Make them feel good!

🥹 Say Their Name

Dale Carnegie said “a person's name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language.” Try it 🙂. Say your stakeholders name intentionally, when making a funny, or objective, or argumentative point.

Or in a casual scenario - “Hi Sarah, how’s your morning going?” lands way better than “Hey.”

🥹 Be the Thermostat, Not the Thermometer

Stakeholders are stressed. Projects are messy. If you bring calm, people relax. Instead of matching their tension, radiate a steady, positive vibe.

During a stressful, weeklong, on-site UAT session with a buttoned-up client, our analyst joked about “Salesforce being allergic to bugs today.” Everyone laughed, tension eased, and we were all reminded to touch grass 😮‍💨.

🥹 Be a Great Listener 

Brags. Complaints. Be a great listener to all of it.

By doing so you’re nurturing a psychologically safe environment. You’re becoming a trusted resource. An empathetic teammate.

Obviously don’t let the pendulum swing too far - you’re not an emotional punching bag and you’re not a interested in hearing about what they do past 10pm on a Friday the 13th full moon 🧛.

🤝 Thoughtful Professional: Make their workday easier!

🤝 Take a Thing Off Their Plate

When it’s time to send out the next meeting invite and the stakeholder begrudgingly volunteers to do it, tell them you’ll take care of it, you have it ready to go (lie!).

Take something off your stakeholder’s plate. It doesn’t have to be big. The state of the working world is MAX PRODUCTIVITY and people are tired 😪. It can be meaningful to take a little load off of someone.

Put that good karma out there and maybe it comes back you’re way when the next data import request comes in 😅.

🤝 Add Insightful Value

An industry insight from a white paper or a podcast. Your favorite AI prompt. INDEX-MATCH as a replacement to VLOOKUP 😘.

Make your hacks their hacks. Change their life with the things that changed your life!

Bonus - if you start looking for insights to share, you’ll end up bettering yourself through exposure and identifying insights!

🤝 Be Open About Your Gratitude

If you like working with a stakeholder, tell them! Be honest and gracious about it. Give them their shine ✨.

You will make their day. You could be a topic at the dinner table with their family - “the Salesforce person at work told me how prepared I always am in our meetings!”

If it seems like a small thing, just think about how many times a coworker has complimented you and how it made you feel 🥰.

🫶 Thoughtful Personal: Make them like you!

🫶 Genuine Compliments

If you go looking for trouble, guess what you’ll find 😈.

But it works the other way, if you go looking for something nice to say, you’ll find it. It’s genuine, it’s flattering, and you’re stakeholder will appreciate it!

Compliment their shirt, their glasses, their healthy house plant in their zoom background.

🫶 Personalized Resources

Your stakeholder going to Tulum for the first time, and you’ve already been 3x? Send them your recommendations, your hotel reviews, and the off-the-beaten-path spots they must visit!

Other resources to share when your stakeholder shows interest are recipes 🍜. , exercise routines 🏋️, and books 📚.

Sharing insights that are personally valuable is an effortless way to win your stakeholder’s heart ❤️!

🫶 Remember Their Birthday 🎉

A client…a real battle axe…sent me an email and she’s always trying to get free work. What was it gonna be today - page layout updates to their 75 record types, data imports, or changing their opportunity stages again?!

Nope.

It was a happy birthday email. The only client who wished me a happy birthday. I don’t even know how she knew it was my birthday.

Dang…that was sweet of her, made my day 🥹.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Takeaway

Salesforce projects live and die on human cooperation.

Features matter ✅.

Data matters ✅.

But nothing moves faster than a project where stakeholders like and trust you 💯.

Pick just one hack this week and try it!

SOUL FOOD

Today’s Principle

and now....Your Salesforce Memes