💃 Solutioning in Salesforce Meetings 🕺

Good morning, Salesforce Nerds! You are a master of meetings!

And true masters know there is still much to know 😉.

So what do you know about solutioning in meetings? Designing and building on calls with stakeholders?

It’s fine, right? Until it’s not? Here’s what we mean ⬇️

SCENARIO

Solutioning on Calls Considerations

First, solutioning = designing and/or building a solution. It does not include gathering business requirements for a solution. Or testing a solution.

Secondly, solutioning is going to happen on calls 💯. As the Salesforce professional, you’re probably going to be leading it. But, there’s optimal times to solution on calls, and there’s bad times to solution on calls 👇

When you should avoid solutioning in meetings-

❌ Project meetings that are focused on time, budget, task ownership/management and status updates.

❌ Meetings with salespeople, executives, and others who are not directly responsible for the designing, building, and delivering of solutions.

❌ When there are a lot of cooks in the kitchen. ie “A lot” of people on the call. Four people seems like the upper-end. 10 would be way too much.

When solutioning is appropriate in meetings-

✅ Dedicated problem-solving meetings.

✅ Meetings specifically for delivery resources - business analysts, developers, and other functional and technical talent.

✅ Meetings with the delivery-focused members of the project team.

SCENARIO

We’ve all done it. In the middle of a call with our business stakeholders, you turn into the artist 🧑‍🎨 - pull up the org, get into setup, and start building out a Flow, or creating fields, or setting up a Lead queue, or adding fields to the Lead Conversion automation…

You’re a Salesforce professional, problem-solving is your happy place.

And most of the time, you design and build something that works 👌, that the stakeholders are thankful for 🙌, and that you can check off of your to-do list ✅.

But sometimes it doesn’t work out.

Sometimes, the vastness of Salesforce requires more consideration than a live build allows.

Sometimes, there’s an automation, or business process, or integration that was not accounted for.

Or a permission set, formula field, or report that was not considered.

So why play with the fire that is solutioning on calls? Why would a busy chef cook in front of his hungry guests? Why would a football coach draw up a play in the middle of a drive?

WHY SHOULD YOU CARE?

3 Reasons You Shouldn’t Solution in Meetings

Here’s 3 reasons not to solution in meetings-

👉 The Art of Winning

Football teams exist to win games for their fanbase.

Why?

Because fans pay their bills through buying tickets, jerseys, and watching games on tv where advertisers pay billions for your attention.

Salesforce professionals exist to setup users and executives for success.

Football teams don’t design plays with their fans ❌. Coaches know the game better than you Monday-morning-quarterbacks. But don’t mistake your exclusion of drawing up plays with your team not caring about you. Your team needs you. And they keep you by winning (unless you’re an Arizona sports fan 😭).

You, the Salesforce professional, need your users 💯. But you don’t need them to be involved in the solutioning. Business requirements? ✅ Yes. Testing? ✅ Yes. Design and build? ❌ NO!

👉 A Plethora of Considerations

Enterprise tech is hard. There are so many considerations, just to name a few-

• Your Array of Stakeholders

• Upstream/Downstream Business Processes

• Data Synchronization

And it would be challenging to make all of those considerations on a call, with your stakeholders, solutioning in real time 🥵.

👉 The High Bar for Consultants

You Salesforce consultants are billing $200/hr. Your stakeholders are expecting perfection at that rate.

For $200/hr, a Production bug is going to diminish a lot of the trust you worked hard to build with your client.

Besides, clients are paying a metric-ton of 💰💰💰 for you to put in the effort to do it right the first time. Both sides are incentivized to get the solution right-

💰 Consultant - getting paid for the effort.

🫶 Client - investing in their company; paying to deliver their decision-makers more value.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Takeaway

Set yourself up for success to be the best problem solver you can be.

Meetings with stakeholders is the polka dots to the problem solving stripes - they don’t go together 🙅.

You want to design and build your solutions in a environment that you can give max focus and attention to the complexity that is enterprise implementation.

And a Zoom call with eager salespeople and budget-hawk project managers feels like you’re walking a tight rope while the audience is throwing eggs at you.

Meetings are to setup stakeholders to make good decisions, to get their validations, and to earn their trust. Control your designing and building of solutions in your Bat Cave, Fortress of Solitude, or wherever you do your best work 💪.

So where do you stand on solutioning on calls? Respond to today’s poll 👇

SOUL FOOD

Today’s Principle

and now....Your Salesforce Memes