Bodhtree salesforce com consulting partner by Bodhtree Consulting Ltd.

Selecting the Right Salesforce.com Consulting Partner

Finding the right Salesforce.com consulting partner can be a daunting task. The success of your Salesforce.com implementation largely relies on your partnerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s understanding of your organizational needs and their ability to seamlessly integrate Salesforce within your enterprise IT infrastructure. There are umpteen service providers in this area who come from diverse backgrounds, have novel focus areas and offer robust frameworks, which can enable them to approach and address your business challenges in a unique manner. This whitepaper recommends a structured methodology to catalogue and evaluate Salesforce consulting partners based on proven methods that have benefited a lot of your industry peers.

Homework and ground work Be an intelligent and knowledgeable buyer. You would be witnessing a structure with stupendous proficiencies, competencies, which might already be gift wrapped and tailored exactly for your business needs. While this can be an overwhelming process, the demos and whitepapers published on the provider’s website can easily help you evaluate the experience and competencies of the service provider. Technology cognizance is a must and if you are sort of not up to date, feel free to work with industry analysts and intermediaries who could help you connect the dotted lines and can expedite the turnaround time in terms of finding the right partner. More than just the world’s #1 CRM tool, Salesforce is an operational platform that could potentially transform the way you run your business. But more often than not, the dividends it offers are not reaped to the fullest possible extent. When you’ve decided that Salesforce is the right CRM for your organization, the next step is to find the best consulting partner who has the potential to address your business needs with an impeccable, unwavering, rock solid and best in class solution. The upcoming sections illustrate a few best practices to be considered that can simplify the process and ensure that you select the best partner.

1. Shortlist the partners Schedule conversations with 1or2 partners based on the feasibility study done backed by your ground work as suggested in the prelude. Block your calendar to meet them in person do discuss your business needs in person. If you are working with a Salesforce Account Executive, he or she can provide you with some recommendations. If not, the AppExchange is a great means for finding consulting partners. Last but not least, don’t forget about the partner’s own website! You can find a lot of information there, such as services offered, awards, clients and testimonials. You can also know if the partner has a regularly updated blog, provide trainings and webinars and publish whitepapers. This is a great way to gauge the partner’s expertise in the field. Engaging your COE professionals to assess the technical dimension of the partner capability would give you a holistic picture into their capabilities and the extent to which they would be able to serve your business needs.

2. Get to know each other Once you’ve selected a few partners to speak with, your personal engagement with them would be the perfect opportunity to know about each other. The partner’s mission and values and most importantly the concurrence on the business principles should align with yours, they should have professional, ethical and moral practices. The conversation could be spun along the following lines: 1. Their work experience in Sales force 2. Kind of engagements they have been in and their details 3. Different types of organizations they have worked with 4. Different types of methodologies the firm has followed in remediating the complex business problems 5. Similar implementations that they had worked upon earlier 6. Accelerators, ready to use plug ins which would help reduce project timelines & cost 7. Their appetite to understand and implement new trends 8. Their post implementation support policies

3. Evaluate the proposal Sometime after your call, you should receive a project estimate. If the partner you contacted listened and understood your case well, the estimate should reflect your project objectives. It should also detail your stated budget, timeline, and functionality requirements. If something is not possible because of these constraints, the partner should be able to communicate that, set of realistic expectations, and suggest alternative solutions or should be thinking in terms of moving certain pieces to a later phase. You can very well assess the partner based on the types of questions he asks, generally they would inquire into the business needs as they must have witnessed similar engagements and must have sailed through the problems with flying colors. You can feel their experience. On the flip side of the coin there would be some service providers who just listen to what you tell them and send out a quote without asking any extra questions. With hundreds of implementation partners out there, finding one that is right for you can be a daunting task. Don’t lose sight of your organization’s goals and constraints, follow these guidelines, and you’ll be on your way to find THE one!

9. The level of interest shown in trying to cater to your needs 10. Emphasizing on the partnering, technical nuances without ignoring the relationship part of the deal Bearing all these things in mind would help you identifying a partner perfectly suited for your business needs.

4. Client reviews The best way to foresee how your project will turn out is by looking at a consultant’s track record. Your consultant should give you a feel that he is a specialist in this particular technical arena; he should have innumerable positive reviews with minimal negative reviews and the best case being no negative reviews at all. The reviews should be analyzed from a qualitative and quantitative aspect. A trend analysis out of the reviews provided would give you an absolute gut feel about the strengths and possible weaknesses of the partner. The track record should be progressive and the partner should preferably be a firm which is currently at the peak. Partner with a strong history and a weak recent past would not help.

5. Diversity of clients dealt with

6. Certifications

After analyzing on the client reviews it’s important to look at the diversified experience of Salesforce consultants with varied clients. The more experience a Salesforce consultant has with diverse clients in different fields, the more expertise they will have in addressing your needs. Because every organization is different, each project will bring new experiences and learnings. This expertise enables your consulting partner to develop effective, customized solution for your organization.

Once you are assured about the diversified experience of the Salesforce consultants another important aspect to look for is about the number of certifications your consulting partner has. Considering for a partner with a multiple range of client types, you should also look for a partner whose employees hold multiple certifications.

If you’re a small business you need a consulting partner who not only understands your needs and requirements but also has the required resources who gained knowledge by working with larger organizations. The same applies to profit / non-profit and consulting businesses too.

7. Longevity Projects don’t always complete in a precise way after launch and training. Post implementation issues can pop up at any time. You may also have new projects coming up. A good consultant should be accessible to you even after the project is completed. It is recommended that you should have an element of support or follow-up mentioned in the proposal or contact. It is important to set the expectation that you need to create the right Salesforce support team in order to see long term value. An AMC/AMS could also be considered to overcome this issue in the long term.

Conclusion The essential ingredients of choosing a good Salesforce partner are pretty simple as long as they are religiously followed. While the technical expertise, diversity of the projects handled, excellent track record, the demos on the website, contractual terms, post production support, quality of the staff engaged, organizational hierarchy (on the partner side), escalation mechanisms and the respect given to the customer irrespective of the size and scale of the engagement are pretty important. The basic engagement ethics, willingness to nurture the relationship, flexibility and the inclination to serve the customer during tough times are the building blocks for engaging the right Salesforce partner. Bodhtree having performed more than 150 successful Salesforce.com implementations, knows how to quickly align the system with the unique goals and processes of your organization. Additionally, Bodhtree’s expertise in Force.com development enables you to customize the platform to suit your organization’s changing business needs.