💃 How To Spot the Salesforce Professional You Need🕺

Good morning, Salesforce Nerd Executive! Congrats, you’ve gotten your house in order 😃!

But you still have a huge decision to make that will directly impact your white-hair-count 👵🏼.

Seemingly, every Salesforce partner you meet is ⬇️

🧑‍💼 Confident, polished.

🧠 “Deeply experienced in your industry.”

🫡 Shockingly aligned with everything you just said.

This is where many smart executives make a fatal mistake. They confuse sales excellence with delivery excellence.

Like a lot of professional services, the person selling you the work is not the person accountable for the outcome. Knowing how to spot the real pros is the difference between fist bumps 🤗 and fists to the gut 😖.

SCAR TISSUE

Salesforce Pros vs Pretenders

The fastest way to identify real operators is simple 👇

“Tell me about an implementation that went sideways. What happened? What did you do?”

True pros ⬇️

💥 Get specific, fast. About your industry, about the problems to be solved.

💥 Name their own mistakes (lessons learned!).

💥 Talk about trade offs, not blame.

Pretenders ⬇️

👎 Blame the client.

👎 Blame Salesforce.

👎 Blame “unclear requirements.”

Experience leaves scars. If everything they’ve touched was “successful,” you’re talking to marketing or sales, not operations.

Personally, when I had 5 implementations in the same industry, I felt decently proficient. At 12 and I felt expert, and understood this would be an endless learning journey. There’s a lot of scar tissue under that expertise, but you don’t get wine without smashing some grapes 🍷.

BEWARE THE HIGHLIGHT REEL

Salesforce Partner Meet and Greet

This one is controversial, but the benefits are not - see if you can meet some of the delivery team before signing that paper.

You should meet ⬇️

🧑‍🍳 The engagement lead who keeps the team humming.

🧑‍🔬 The Salesforce architect shaping the solution.

👷 The Senior Consultant translating business to platform and spending more time with your team than with their family.

Listen to how they speak ⬇️

🗣️ Do they ask sharp questions?

🗣️ Do they push back respectfully, with an experienced counterpoint?

🗣️ Do they simplify complex ideas?

🗣️ Do they talk about users, not just flows, objects, and validation rules?

A great sales pitch with a weak bench is how implementations fail.

This tactic, asking to meet the team, is controversial because consultancies run with high utilization rates, which means more often than not, the implementation team isn’t going to be identified until you’ve signed paper.

But the partner ecosystem is competitive, and the leadership will do what they need to do to close the deal…it doesn’t hurt to ask.

As a Salesforce implementation partner, i’d never had a prospect’s executive ask to meet anyone who’d be on the frontlines implementing. But if I’m a business executive I want to meet the person we’ll be paying $200/hr+ for the next year 💯.

YOU CAN’T FAKE EXPERIENCE, EXPERTISE

Uncommon Pushback and Judgement

When you describe your vision, the best partners will make you slightly uncomfortable.

They’ll say things like ⬇️

🗣️“That’s possible, but here’s the risk”

🗣️ “We’ve seen that pattern fail at scale”

🗣️ “Salesforce has a feature for that now, are you sure you want custom?”

If a partner agrees with everything, they’re optimizing for deal closure, not long-term success.

Real pros protect you from your own worst instincts, even when it’s inconvenient.

You see, Salesforce’s power is also its trap 🪤. There are always ten ways to solve a problem. A talented architect will ask the right questions in the quest to design the best option.

As the customer, you need to ask questions like ⬇️

🤔 “Where do your other clients go wrong?”

🤔 “When do you avoid customization? Why?”

🤔 “What if we 10x our team in one year? Or 10x our revenue? Or 10x are marketing spend?”

🤔 “How will this impact our 100 salespeople?”

Listen for ⬇️

✅ Opinions grounded in experience.

✅ Respect for standard platform capabilities, but also the limitations and how to manage that.

✅ Awareness of admin and user experience. How the business will do the things when the consultants are gone.

Pros design systems that survive leadership changes, growth, and inevitable pivots. Amateurs design demos.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Takeaway

Selecting a Salesforce partner is one of those decisions that compounds over time, for better or worse.

The right team doesn’t just configure objects and flows, they shape how your business thinks, sells, and scales.

When you choose partners who bring judgment, pattern recognition, and the courage to say “no,” you’re not just paying for an implementation, you’re buying happier users, faster adoption, and a good night’s sleep 😴.

SOUL FOOD

Today’s Principle

and now....Your Salesforce Memes