💃 5 Signs You're Slaying your Salesforce Implementation 🕺

Good morning, Salesforce Nerds! My first year running Salesforce implementations was hilarious.

I had no Salesforce experience. No consulting experience. No exposure to sales or marketing processes.

Needless to say, those first few implementations generated more groans 😩 than high-fives ✋.

But each of those butt-kickings I took, each of those teammates who led and supported me, and each of those clients who met my incompetence with sympathetic humor (a “glad you’re the one getting beat up and not me” kinda vibe 😅) extended my exposure to all the things.

Here’s a few insights I gained during those trials-

SLAY THE DRAGON 🤺 🐉

5 Signs You’re Slaying Your Salesforce Implementation

1) “I Wish We Had More Time”

It might feel stressful going into a meeting, knowing you won’t have time to cover everything you want to cover.

But turn that frown 🙁 upside down 😃! This is a form of over-delivering and keeps your clients wanting more.

It’s like saying “we’re gonna have steak, burgers, lasagna, ice cream, cake” and when you’re 1 hour in - “oh that steak and burger were good, sorry we didn’t get to the lasagna and dessert, we’ll do that next week 😋.”

2) On Time, On Budget

This is what you’re supposed to do. But IYKYK, it is reeeaaallly hard to do 🥵!

The McKinsey nerds 🤓 claim 52% of IT projects exceed time and/or budget. Honestly, that seems really low 🤷🏻. But you can trust Mckinsey 😘.

So be in the minority! Be on time, on budget!

3) UAT is a Breeze

UAT is never a breeze! Ever! If it is, you either-

👉 Didn’t do it right.

👉 Are really really good at software implementation.

UAT is the ultimate cat-herding exercise. Identifying business testers, scheduling testers, test script writers, test dataloads, consultants to monitor and control, project managers to organize the test scripts and outcomes. 😓

I’ve never actually seen a breezy UAT. Have you?

4) You’re Nurturing Your Client Champion

Feed your client champion. Let them EAT!!

What is a client champion?

They’re the client-side stakeholder who loves the idea of the solution, has a bit of influence, and is bringing Big Implementation Energy much to the delight of the consultants 🙌.

Your client champion is like a roomba - it’s working for you autonomously. Love them like you love your roomba ❤️.

5) The Second SOW Writes Itself

This one is money 💰. Literally 💵.

You’ve deftly managed your deliverables, designing and building beautiful solutions 💃🕺.

As you’ve been exposed to your client, you learn their exceptions, skeletons in the closet, their nuance, their industry’s nuance, etc etc.

You advise on the art of the possible, and what the future could like for them. How they can position themselves to be the market leader if they had Experience Cloud and an integration with their ERP.

The ninja 🥷 that you are, you’re compiling this list of future deliverables, and structuring them into a roadmap.

Are you picking up what we’re putting down?

You are writing the second SOW while concurrently delivering the first SOW.

The benefits of this are too many to count, but let’s list a few-

💰💵💰 No sales team overhead. A delivery resource sold the deal without the business-class flights and steak dinners.

💰💵💰 No downtime between SOW1 and SOW2. No disruption in cash flow. Print money money!

💰💵💰 Customer Satisfaction is excellent if they’re signing SOW2 before SOW1 is completed. A perfect target for a client testimonial!

💰💵💰 An ideal change request process. It’s actually a waterfall-ish approach, versus agile where you’d cram in change requests in sprints that have room, or you’d backlog legacy deliverables.

💰💵💰 Your leadership will notice SOWs are writing themselves on your projects. They want to be on the deals so they get their spiff. When you make leadership money, your career-track kinda starts to change 🚀🚀🚀.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Takeaway

Don’t get it twisted - these are exceptionally difficult things to do. But “Slay your implementation” isn’t something that’s gonna be easy.

Shoot for one or many of these 5 things, or come up with your own.

So, what did we miss? What are the different ways you’ve slayed your implementations?

Click the below to share your thoughts!

SOUL FOOD

Today’s Principle

and now....Your Salesforce Memes