Tips for Salesforce Success: Discover and document
Supermums hosted the first ever Consultancy Dreamin’ event in early July, and our principal consultant, Paul Harris joined the ‘Experience Tract’ line up. Sharing 18 year’s worth of Salesforce ecosystem experience, Paul delivered a session on the ten things you might not expect as a Salesforce consultant.
So you can learn everything there is to know and focus on what to expect as a consultant, we will be sharing each of the top ten tips over the coming weeks on our blog. This week, we talk about how important it is to discover and document what will be best for your customer.
Tip #2. Discover and document
Stephen Covey, famous for the book The 7 habits of highly effective people once said “Seek first to understand, then to be understood” – As a registered Salesforce implementation consultancy, this is something that we strive to take action on when working with our customers to develop a system that is right for them.
One of the most important roles as a consultant is to discover and document the needs followed by conducting an analysis of those needs. These steps are included as part of our Coacto service delivery process – Each of these steps are crucial to enable the information to be played back to the customer for confirmation, comment and refinement. The process serves a number of purposes, but most importantly it helps to ensure that the right system can be built depending on the specific requirements. After all, it would be difficult to build if both the consultant and the organisation doesn’t quite understand the full functionality needed to improve and develop the staff (and customer) experience.
Our team previously worked on a Salesforce implementation project for a busy property company. During this particular project, the business subject matter experts were instructed by the executive to get the Salesforce project done which resulted in a focus on their understanding and not the wider needs of the executive or the business. The business teams were generally too busy to get involved in a new system. The business subject matter experts specified a marketing heavy system, when actually what was needed was a lean sales and a property acquisition system with great reporting.
Helping customers to understand
A key part of the consulting services we offer is following our service delivery process. This helps us to discover, document, design, develop and deploy effective solutions for our customers as well as:
- Recognising that some customers don’t understand the technology, the language we use, the project needs or in some cases what they want.
- Ensuring that we understand the wants and needs, so we can help customers understand and expectations can be set.
- Understanding what a customer wants is what they actually need.
- Providing clear forms of communication using precise business terms and avoiding acronyms, buzz words and phrases.
- By talking less and listening more we can help customers understand their requirements and develop a system with value.
Need to discover and document your own requirements?
What the business needs may not always be what the customer says they want, which can involve some delicate internal discussions. As a registered Salesforce consulting partner it’s good practice for us to not make assumptions or question anything that customers are not certain about or do not understand – we can simply provide listening ears and the relevant advice.
Using Salesforce? Let’s chat about how we can make it work better for you with a free review. Book now limited places available. Our registered Salesforce partner team is available to provide as much or as little support that you may need. Contact us on 033 0233 0229 or get in touch for a FREE Salesforce Consultation.
