As Salesforce continues on its impressive growth path, the demand for talent is ever-increasing. And like all professionals in the Salesforce ecosystem, Salesforce consultants are in high demand. In order to stand out from your peers and to boost your success, it’s helpful to know what the differentiators are between a good Salesforce consultant and a great Salesforce consultant.
To help you out, we’ve put together a list of some of the things that you can do to ensure that you stand out from the crowd and become even more successful in your career as a Salesforce consultant.
Managing expectations
As you’ll know, communication is key for a Salesforce consultant and managing expectations is definitely part of this. It can sometimes be uncomfortable when managing expectations and pushing back on the client’s requirements.
It’s common for clients to have niche requests, telling a consultant how they want something built and want these delivered as soon as possible. On these occasions, it’s important to remember that, as a consultant, you are being paid to offer advice and best practices based on your experience as well as ensure that your clients understand the time frames in which processes can be delivered.
Never be afraid to manage your client’s expectations whether it’s regarding their requests and how realist it is for you to deliver these or whether it’s to do with time frames and how long a project might take. You will stand out as a great Salesforce consultant if you remember to manage expectations at all levels.
Take the time to understand your clients
As a consultant, understanding your client and the teams you’ll be working with can help with informing your decisions about how best to tackle a project. Like any job, it’s important to get to know who you are working with, both on a personal and professional level. Depending on the length of the project, you may be engaged for over a year – take some time to get to know the people you will be working with!
It’s also a good idea to understand the political landscape of the project – who is sponsoring it? Who in the firm is most concerned with its success? Where does your team fit? For example, if the team you are predominantly working with are under a lot of pressure, finding ways to help streamline processes and ease workload could help to win you some brownie points.
This kind of attention to detail and understanding of your client and what is important to them – is the kind of thing that truly separates the good Salesforce consultants from the great ones.
Trust your experience
When you first start your career as a Salesforce consultant it can be all too easy to become a yes-person. As you learn more about the platform, you begin to realise the potential for custom solutions to every client request. Whilst this is great and another reason why Salesforce continues to grow rapidly, just because something can be done, doesn’t mean it should be done.
This is where you can identify yourself as a great Salesforce consultant. It’s of course, important to listen to your client requests and see them as individual and unique requirements. However, as a professional, you have the ability to recommend the best processes. Leveraging your industry experience allows you to justify your recommendations for different processes, and in turn, demonstrates your expertise and value to a client.
Consulting is a skill and like any skill, everyone has to practice. Ultimately, the more you spend time consulting, the better you’ll become.
As always, networking will help you on this journey! Connecting with other Salesforce consultants and finding out how they have achieved success is something that you should definitely be doing. Your peers are the people who can help you avoid common mistakes and adopt good practices.
Our #SalesforceQA blog offers advice from MVPs and experts across the industry, so for some sure-fire tips on how to achieve success in the ecosystem, check them out here.
For a confidential conversation about your Salesforce career, and to hear about our latest roles, get in touch with our specialist Salesforce consultants today!
