💃 An ACTUAL Day in the Life of a Salesforce Consultant 🕺

Good morning, Salesforce Nerds! What does the day in the life of a Salesforce Consultant look like? There have been articles with similar headlines, and they did not capture the....essence of how grind-y it often is.

The emails with the clients, the project team, the developers and the sales teams. The Teams, Zoom, Slack, Webex (?!??) and in-person meetings. The pre-meetings before the meetings. The meeting scheduling/calendar tetris. The project documentation updates for timelines, statuses, change orders, test scripts and training scripts.

Sooooo, when do we Salesforce(ChaCha)?!?! It is a surprise to many new Salesforce Consultants that they will not spend a lot of time hands-on building cool things in the org.

Agenda for today includes

• The Morning

• The Midday

• The Afternoon

• Daily Principle

• All the Memes

The Morning

• 7am | Wake up, get your morning routine in.

• 701am | During your routine, don't think about that Weekly Blocker Removal client call, or the four consecutive meetings from 10am-2pm.

• 702am | Gratitude that you aren't your west coast coworker who has east coast clients and has already been on calls for 62min.

• 8am | Get just-barely presentable for your morning scrum, run by the village idiot Certified Scrum Master, and sip your coffee obnoxiously loud.

• 830am | Go time! Pound coffee. Check calendar. Sort, skim, prioritize, categorize, and flag emails like a savant. Respond to the most urgent or to the offshore development team who will be signing off soon.

• 9am | Prep for client calls. Review action items, follow ups, and refresh your notes. Message the offshore developers for updates, and organize your web browser for your client demos and presentations.

The Midday

• 10am | First client meeting of the day.

• 1015am | Meeting is going well! Prep paid off!

• 1020am | Client asks why their multi select picklist reports are shit. You kindly remind them you advised against it for this and many more reasons, but they insist it "needs to be fixed, and reporting is in the SOW so we aren't paying for the fix."

• 1055am | Time check with the client and reminder you have a hard stop at 11. Client disregards your existence and talks to the other attendees into 1105.

• 1106am | Rush into your next meeting, apologize to client's VP of Sales for your tardiness, as you scramble to find your notes doc. Take a deep breath, then dive in.

• 1140am | Deep into requirements gathering and design elements. Call is going well, excellent engagement from the client and you are flowing. This is going to be a great solution!

• Noon | Call ends on time and as you transition to your next call, you realize how tired you are from the uber-productive previous call...and also that you haven't taken a bathroom break in 4.5hrs

• 1245pm | The call mercifully ends early and you rush to the bathroom. On your way back to your desk, you grab a handful of peanut m&ms and string cheese for lunch, then prepare for your 1pm call.

• 1250pm | When you get back to your desk, you see it, the all-glorious "Sorry something came up, can we reschedule this meeting?" You now have a response at the next team meeting icebreaker session when they ask "What's something that makes you genuinely smile?"

• 1255pm | Get a more robust lunch, and settle into a trailhead that has been a work in progress for a month.

The Afternoon

2pm | Your last client meeting of the day - The Blocker Removal Meeting where all the project managers on the call take turns passing the buck. "Whose responsibility is this?" is met with crickets, until you finally volunteer, just to keep it moving. There are 20 more items to review....

325pm | The project manager sends out the meeting notes and action items, and you review the 17 new ones on your plate.

330pm | Meeting with your client's Salesforce Account Executive. They see that the client has Pardot, and want to know your thoughts on why Marketing Cloud will be a better solution for them. It is not a better solution for this client, but the AE does their best to cherry-pick some reasons it could be.

4pm | No more meetings. You even had time to get a trailhead in! However, that was at the expense of rolling up your meeting notes and action items for the day. You can do that now, and be well setup for tomorrow. Or, you can logoff for today, and let the tomorrow-you deal with double the work (chills).....you decide to do it now.

630pm | All notes updated and communicated to relevant stakeholders. Action items have story/task/bug documentation and sent to their owners with expectations. Logoff.

Daily Principle

Do you know someone who always seems to be winning? One reason they are successful is because of their mindset that they are always behind, and could always be doing more.

Is this a healthy mindset? It can be if the proper checks and balances are in place. It can also be a quick road to burnout if you do not have the self-awareness, discipline, and plan to mitigate going too hard. Accomplish big things, and also take care of yourself.

and now....Your Daily Memes