What makes someone a great Salesforce consultant
It is noticeable that Salesforce’s tremendous growth over the past decade has brought Salesforce consultancy companies to the spotlight. Salesforce consulting partners play a critical role in its success. Their lifeblood relationship creates the strength of the Salesforce industry and the confidence of customer success.
Among more than 250,000 Salesforce channel partners globally, you could imagine the number of Salesforce consultants out there. So, what does it take to make you stand out in such a competitive industry among the best of the best?
I have worked as a consultant throughout my career in the past decade and with consultants as a customer. In this article, I will share with you, from my experience, 4 qualities that top-performing consultants adopt that make them more than just great consultants.
User-centric over Technology-centric
A great consultant is never someone who knows everything about technology. Instead, it is someone who cares everything about the users. I was often asked the question about what is the most challenging part of a Salesforce consulting project. My answer has never changed and will not change in the future. It is to stay focus on your users.
Everyone claims that they’re applying the user-centric approach. But the real question is how far they can stay focus on this approach. It’s not only about the user interviews or user acceptance test. It is also a constant fight to find the balance between delivering what matters the most to the users and showing off the consultant’s cutting-edge technologies. This is where a consultant typically loses their user-centric mindset. And I mostly find the top performers can find their way back to the users and blend the technology into it.
There is no universal method or steps to follow to help you build up such a skill. But the key message here is to not shift your priority from users to technology. Instead, you should always find a way to blend them and prioritize your users’ needs.
Have a focus
Salesforce offers a large number of solutions in different areas and verticals. And this number is likely to be increasing day by day. It is probably not possible for anyone to master all of them. But as a consultant, it is essential to have the skill that will help you find what you need quickly and adept the knowledge into projects. And the foundation of such skill is your solid and in-depth understanding in a focused area.
A common issue I have seen over the years among consultants is valuing the broadness of the knowledge over its depth. This might not be an issue if you have a focused area where you’re confident. But if this is not the case for you, you might want to focus on one area and become an expert in it first. Trust me, this will not only help you speed up the learning process of other areas but also build up your credibility and confidence in front of your customers.
Strong opinions, loosely held
Being confident and having strong opinions in what you do is essential. Simultaneously, being open-minded to others’ voices and suggestions should also not be ignored. Many senior consultants are overconfident in their past experience and technical skills. They like things to be done in a particular “best practice” way. Those so-called “best practices” can be obstacles in achieving excellent delivery.
Your end-users or junior consultants might not have as much technical experience as you do, but their ways of thinking and looking at problems can bring different perspectives to help you form better ideas.
My favourite approach is hearing out extreme user’s ideas and being open-minded and less judgy about them. On the extreme ends, people might bring ideas that often make you feel uncomfortable (you might even think them to be ridiculous from a technical perspective). But trust me, when you stand with them and be open-minded to consider their ways of thinking, something extraordinary and innovative might happen.
Make it simple
As you learn more and more about Salesforce and get more and more certificates, you will likely want to use more complicated concepts and approaches to solve problems. But always remember, your goal is to solve the problem, not to complicate the situation.
Most of the problems are easy and straightforward to start with. It is us, the consultants, who made simple problems more complicated. We sometimes call it “critical thinking.”. When you do so, ask yourself, are you really critically thinking about the issues, or are you just trying to make problems more complicated?
Like I said at the beginning of this article, those are just some observations from my personal experience. I am sure there are tons of other great qualities your can list for top-performing Salesforce consultants. I will be happy to hear your share and thoughts on this.
