💃 What Does Implementation Look Like For the Client? 🕺

Good morning, Salesforce Nerds! If you have contributed to a Salesforce Implementation, then you know it is no walk in the park. Despite Salesforce being a high-functioning platform with a ton of out-of-the-box features, it needs to get dialed in for the users' specific business processes. As Salesforce Professionals, it is a core job responsibility to get Salesforce up and running and then to keep it running.

But what about the people on the otherside - the client? Consider this - as a Salesforce Consultant, you may see 5-10 implementations in one year. The sales person at the company you are servicing may only experience one implementation in their entire life 🤯🤯!

Agenda for today includes

• What Does Implementation Look Like For the Client?

• Daily Principle

• All the Memes

What Does Implementation Look Like For the Client?

Salesforce implementation is hard, even for the most skilled and experienced consultants. It's our job, it's what we get paid to do, and it's what we love to do (most of the time 🙂)! Sales people, on the other hand, do not get paid to implement Salesforce. But they are stakeholders in the implementation, and they may even be a named-resource in the SOW who is required to attend meetings, validate requirements, or other project activities.

For a look at what Salesforce Implementations look like from the client's perspective, let's use a sales professional - this could be a sales manager, director of sales, regional sales manager, or any number of titles. The point is, this person has a 40hr/week job to sell or manage sales people. The implementation project is IN ADDITION to the 40hr/week job, for however many weeks it takes to implement. This is time away from their other job responsibilities, from their family, friends, and pets. But it's to get a badass CRM in place for the good of the company. It's a big commitment.

Let's look at some of the major milestones a project runs through, from the client's perspective -

Presale

The Sales Manager will be a member, along with senior leaders, on the Steering Committee. This may include an RFP (Request For Proposal) process to decide which CRM to go with. For this Sales Manager, this may be a few hours per week of inputs and meetings.

The SOW

Before the sale is won and a CRM is selected, the SOW is reviewed by both teams. Along with the legalese, deliverables and partner resources, the client commitments are line-item-ed. Once section of the SOW will include the client resource commitments to attend meetings, make decisions, and sign off on designs and functionality.

Often, at this point, the Sales Manager is not aware of the level of effort required to manage all those things. They may be over-zealous and say "we know we want Salesforce implemented and it's a one-time project - I will make myself available for anything we need!" Famous last words...

Sale-Won

Exciting! The leadership team has done their job - budget approved, steering committee has steered, and the SOW is signed. The keys to the project are handed to the project team, including the Sales Professional.

Kickoff

A good consultant will set their client up for success in kickoff, discovery and business requirements gathering. But even a great consultant is just a facilitator in this phase. The business, ie the sales professionals, need to answer the consultant's probing questions. Many skeletons will be brought out of the closet and the sales professional will need to make tough decisions on how the scenarios that created those skeletons in the past, will be managed in the future. Then, they'll need to decide what to do with those skeletons, hopefully based on a few options that their consultant provides them.

This phase will require a lot of long meetings. Discovery, alone, may take multiple days. Full days away from their 40hr/week responsibilities; that work will pile up and be waiting for them when they're back

Design & Build

Meetings are fewer in this phase, so some breathing room for the client. There will still be weekly meetings for project status updates and design and build validations. The sales professional will need to be dialed in as they will be making critical design decision that will impact their team and company.

This will also be the phase where they get to see their solution take life, in the form of demos that the consultant prepares. After a long discovery and reqs gathering process, the demos are the first tangible thing the client sees in months.

UAT & Training

Two client-heavy phases. Consultants may facilitate portions of this, but the sales professionals will play a major role. For UAT, consultants can define some test cases, but only the client may know those exceptional scenarios specific to their business and customers.

Training is tricky because partners are not often built to do this, and the costs associated with it can make it prohibitive to outsource. So who's plate does that fall on? The sales professional! They client may have a sales trainer or IT trainer on staff, in a best-case scenario. Either way, the sales professional will need to coordinate it.

Go-Live

All of the big and little things need to come together so that when that flip is switched, and users go from the old CRM to the new one, they know how to use it and everything works as intended. The only person stressing this harder than the consultant is the sales professional who has been working two jobs (their sales job and this project) for the past 6 months.

The sales professional should be up early to be available for their sales people, and stay late to roll up a summary of the Go-Live success to their leadership team.

Takeaway: As consultants, empathy and kindness goes a long way. Of course it's a 2-way street, the client has as much to gain with being kind. Let us all be mindful that implementations are difficult, whether they are full-time job (consultant) or an additional responsibility on top of our day job (client).

Daily Principle

and now....Your Daily Memes