💃 Salesforce Consultants Should Think Like Executives 🕺

Good morning, Salesforce Nerds! Do you like candy?

You: “That dude has free candy 🍭. FREE CANDY!!!”

Also you: “Hmmm, my mom would say not to take things from strangers.”

You: “What should I do with my money?”

Also you: “Hmmm, my financial planner would say maxing out my 401k should be my priority.”

You: “The approval process that the VP of Sales requested is unnecessarily complex. It’s going to be difficult to design and build, and the users are going to hate it.”

Also you: “Hmmm, the executive would want me to provide the VP of Sales my analysis - that this decision creates these impacts, the pros, and the cons. Quantify the impact if it strengthens my case.”

LAST WEEK’S POLL RESULTS

The winner of The Baddest Big Tech CEO was 🥁🥁🥁

Marc Benioff with a dominating 57% of the vote! 🎉

The Zuck and Tim Cook came in (a distant) 2nd and 3rd, respectively.

Thank you for your participation!!

GETTING INTO AN EXECUTIVE’S PERSPECTIVE

Perspective is Everything

You were right to conjure the advice of your mom, your financial planner, and the executive 👊.

You’ve been doing this your whole life.

👦 As a kid, your teachers, parents and coaches instilled important life lessons, some that you live by to this day.

🧑 As an adult, you receive financial, medical, and other professional advice. Their advisement is meaningful because it’s from professionals.

👨‍💻 As a Salesforce professional, you want to take the perspective of your client’s executive. Compared to the above examples, it’s the same, but different.

Here’s what we mean-

It’s the same because you are taking the perspective of someone else; an executive, in this case. You are aligning with the executive, just like you were aligning with your mom and financial planner.

It’s different because, unlike your unconditionally-loving mom and your premium financial planner, you don’t have the client’s executive at your fingertips.

Instead, you have to extrapolate their perspective on your own. You have to prompt yourself with the right series of questions. For example-

What does the client’s executive want? Why?

What drives the client executives? How are they incentivized?

What would the client executives not want me to do?

UNDERSTANDING EXECUTIVES

What Are An Executive’s Responsibilities?

Your mom’s objective was to raise the best kid she could.

Your executive’s objectives are to increase the value of their company.

If you have a half-dozen years of work experience, you have retrospective and knowledge to answer “what would the executive want me to do?”

If you don’t have a ton of experience, then you’ll need understand an executive’s responsibilities, so that you can align with them.

Let’s do that quickly-

You could write a book on executive responsibilities. Many have. But you can boil it down to 3 things-

1) Company Culture 🤝

Keeping it simple with these 3 components-

1. Be kind.

2. Ownership and accountability.

3. Effective communication.

2) Company Financial Success 💰

Maximize revenue and profits.

Minimize unnecessary expenses and losses.

3) Make Good Decisions 🧠

Set up the company for success. For example-

Budgeting $5 million dollars and 2 years for an ERP implementation gives your company a chance. Budgeting $100k and 6 months sets up your company to fail.

Understanding an executive’s responsibilities is a requirement for thinking like an executive.

When you have a good grasp on what they do, then you can start hitting on the things that make them tick ⬇️

EXECUTIVE PERSPECTIVE - ROI

Return on Investment

As a Salesforce consultant, you need to be delivering ROI to your client’s executives.

When the client is paying $200/hr, they expect results 💯.

You need to ask yourself - why does this thing that I am doing deliver value to the client? Can I quantify it? Make it a dollar amount?

And when you are being the best consultant you can be, your ROI will be multiples higher than the $200/hr they client is paying for you and your team 💪.

You need to ensure you are communicating the value-add to the executives. Ideally in a way that makes them look great, and you as the constant bearer of good news 😊.

EXECUTIVE PERSPECTIVE - REVENUE STREAM

Salesforce So Good, They Never Let You Go

As a consultant, you want to be a reliable source of revenue for your company 💯.

You will be fighting against the nature of SOWs, which have a start and an end. And at the end, there’s no guarantee of another SOW.

And so, you must be so good, that your client never lets you go. So good, that they cannot bear to part with you and the incredible value that you deliver 🤩.

Asking yourself “why would their executive sign a second SOW? And a tenth SOW?” is excellent practice.

You should also ask yourself “why wouldn’t they sign a second SOW?”

As a consultant, you must also understand that there are different games with different conditions. For example-

If you have a two week Discovery SOW, you can sprint pretty hard and come up for air in two weeks.

But if you have an 18 month CPQ implementation SOW, you will need to plan a marathon-like approach. You can’t go ham the first 6 miles of a 26 mile race without burning out 🥵.

Regardless, in both these cases, a second SOW needs to be your goal.

For the two week disco, you need to identify and define enough value-add deliverables to write up a meaty SOW.

For the CPQ implementation, ummm raise your hand if you’ve ever had a CPQ implementation go perfectly the first time 😬. If you’re setting proper expectations, delivering what you say you will, and backlogging the rest, then you will have a second SOW.

In both cases, your delivery on the first SOW is so good, the client cannot wait to work with you on the second one 😎.

EXECUTIVE PERSPECTIVE - THE PEOPLE

Salesforce Users and Beyond

As a Salesforce consultant, the Sales team are a major stakeholder for you.

But it doesn’t stop there.

An executive is responsible for all parts of the business and all the people.

Marketing, IT, and Accounting will be directly and indirectly impacted by the CRM.

👉 Marketing needs their impact to lead generation and growth attributed to sales revenue.

👉 IT needs to deliver application uptime, security, and business automation in serving the business.

👉 Accounting has a laundry list including revenue, accounts payable, accounts receivable, payroll, commissions, etc that some or all of will be managed in the CRM.

A Salesforce consultant is expected to consider all these things, to ask the right questions, and to deliver a value-add solution.

The only way to do this effectively is through taking the perspective of the executives. For example -

✔️ When you are interviewing the business teams, you are understanding their roles and responsibilities through their executive’s eyes. What parts of the business they touch, and how that attributes to revenue.

✔️ When you’ve identified that your client has a competent IT team, you give your team more space to build complex solutions that solve bigger business problems, because, through your executive-perspective, you know the IT team can handle it.

✔️ When the VP of Sales pushes for more auto-task creation, you push back, because you saw the high count of unmanaged tasks in their legacy CRM. Why do they think they’ll suddenly be more effective at managing tasks in the new solution?

WHY SHOULD YOU CARE?

Takeaway

Putting yourself in executive’s shoes is a great way to inform your perspective.

By taking their perspective, you are effectively aligning objectives. From the executive, to you, to your stakeholders.

And even when this doesn’t solve all your problems, it’s a good bet it gets you 80% of the way there. More than enough to get some traction on your next move 🙌.

And the more you do it, the better you get at it, and the more natural it will become. Just like when you were a kid and you didn’t know…but mom knew-

“Mom would say to remove the foil before microwaving.”

SOUL FOOD

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