By: Raisa Gupta

With every season’s Salesforce release, comes a fresh set of consultants eager to get started. This lot, especially the ones straight out of college, are ready to spread their wings and soar, while still missing a strong professional perspective. We at Appluent, pay a lot of attention to training our team, moulding them in a way which helps them gain personal and professional growth, that is aligned with company culture.

As a rookie, here are a few simple, yet critical, pointers to evolve as a Salesforce consulting professional:

Proactively anticipate needs for Salesforce implementation clients

Anticipate problems, questions, answers in advance. Be a conversation starter. Don’t wait to get an invite for the call, send one. Publish follow up notes before being asked. It is a life saver to inform the client about a known issue before it becomes a problem during testing.

Ask all the questions you need to confidently implement a Salesforce Org

Ask even the silliest of questions. No one can know it all. If not too upfront find a ‘work buddy’ and ask for help, even if it’s on the client side. Don’t worry about being judged for asking; but be prepared to in case it comes down to a delay or misinterpretation because you were too shy to ask 3 weeks back!

Research client needs and match them to digital workflow solutions

Learn about the client you’re consulting with and explore their pain points so you’re able to suggest relevant solutions, and find issues before they become major problems.

Be organized with your documents, files, and more

Yes, no matter how tedious or non technical it seems, it’s always a good habit to keep project related documents in one place. You don’t want to embarrass yourself by scrolling through downloads while the client is pointing out changes on a previously shared document. Want to take it a notch higher? Imagine your screen is shared and the whole team plus the client is watching you search for the document!

This also includes the dreaded, totally boring component sheet which has a list of all the work in place. It’s irritating and time consuming for a deployer trying to deploy a build, which fails to validate as a dependent field goes missing because the developer was too lazy to note it down while creating it.

Be honest and trustworthy about your knowledge

Don’t try to act smart about the things you’re not aware of. It’s okay to say that you don’t know, and you will get back to them after a discussion with your team.

Avoid Jargons

Your client does not want to know how well you can throw technical terms at them. They are more appreciative when you demonstrate how an implementation can help improve their business.

Practice Consistency across all Salesforce implementations

Consistency is the key. It’s important to gain trust of the client through quality deliverables. Your managers and peers should know you work to deliver consistently as per plan and not just sporadically when the fires need dousing.

 

And last but not least, be genuine, trust your instincts. In words of a famous author, “Winners don’t do different things, do things differently.”