💃 Choosing a Salesforce Implementation Partner🕺

Good morning, Salesforce Nerd executive! Would you let this place touch your Ferrari?

👎

Let’s start with the quiet lie almost every executive tells themselves before a Salesforce implementation…

“Salesforce is best-in-class. Any certified partner can implement it.”

Can any mechanic make your Ferrari hum? Can any chef whip up an omurice? Can any…you get the point.

Salesforce is powerful, but requires a skilled team to deliver it, just like it requires a deft mechanic to service a Ferrari, or a practiced chef to cook omurice.

The partner you choose for you Salesforce org becomes the mechanic of your revenue engine.

BUSINESS SCALPEL

Organizational Surgery

Executives often frame Salesforce as a technology purchase. That’s understandable- it shows up in IT budgets, it has licenses, and it’s “in the cloud ☁️”.

But in reality, Salesforce is closer to organizational surgery.

You’re asking it to-

🩺 Redefine how sales teams work.

🩺 Standardize customer data across departments.

🩺 Enforce process where improvisation used to live.

🩺 Expose inefficiencies that were previously hidden.

That’s a behavior change, first, and a technology change second.

And behavior change is where most implementations fail.

The partner you choose will either help you surface and manage those changes thoughtfully, or plow ahead, configure exactly what was asked for, and leave you with a system nobody loves.

On paper, both partners “delivered Salesforce.”

In practice, only one delivered value 🙂.

PARTNER ECOSYSTEM

Salesforce Partner Echo Chamber

But as an executive, how do you find the good consultants among the thousands of consultancies?

If you’ve sat through a few partner pitches, you’ve probably noticed something unsettling 👇

🤹 They all sound the same.

🤹 Same clouds.

🤹 Same certifications.

🤹 Same slides.

🤹 Same promises about “best practices” and “accelerated timelines.”

That sameness is not accidental. It’s a sales response to executive fatigue.

Partners know you’re busy. They optimize for familiarity and reassurance. Unfortunately, familiarity is a terrible proxy for competence.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth- most partners can configure Salesforce, but far fewer can guide a first-time implementation through organizational resistance, misaligned incentives, and half-baked requirements.

And those are the things that matter most in your major Salesforce project.

THE MOST LIKELY OUTCOME?

Picking the Wrong Partner

When partner selection goes sideways, the damage rarely shows up as a dramatic failure. It’s more insidious.

You’ll see it as-

😩 Slower sales adoption.

😩 Workarounds in spreadsheets.

😩 Friction between Sales and IT.

😩 “We’ll fix it later” technical debt.

😩 Leaders quietly losing confidence in the system.

By the time someone says, “Salesforce isn’t working,” the real problem is already baked in.

Worse, many executives assume the issue is internal, “Our teams just didn’t adopt it.” 🤷🏻

Sometimes that’s true…

But more often, the system was designed without enough respect for how the business actually works, and how the user experience will be. That’s a partner problem, not a platform problem.

And fixing it later is always more expensive than doing it right the first time.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Takeaway

Selecting a Salesforce partner is an executive responsibility 💯.

You don’t need to become a Salesforce expert or technologist.

But you do need to:

🫡 Set the tone for what success means

🫡 Ask the right questions during selection

🫡 Resist the urge to optimize only for speed or cost

Where This Series Is Going

Over the next few weeks, we’ll walk through 👇

🤔 How to prepare internally before talking to partners

🕵️‍♀️ How to spot real expertise versus polished pitch decks

🪤 The most common traps that sink first implementations

🧑‍💼 How to run a partner selection process that reduces risk instead of amplifying it

Stay tuned!

SOUL FOOD

Today’s Principle

and now....Your Salesforce Memes