A Salesforce consulting partner is sought after for a variety of reasons. Whether you're starting from scratch and need a consultant to guide your firm through the onboarding process or you have a unique project that requires help with customization, a Salesforce consulting partner can meet various requirements.

While Salesforce provides helpful advice for selecting a partner, we have highlighted seven critical characteristics a Salesforce consultant must possess.

Salesforce Certifications

Any Salesforce consulting partner should have several credentials to assist businesses in various roles. While over thirty Salesforce certifications are available (see a few examples here), your partner only sometimes requires some of them. Please inquire with the prospective consultant about their credentials since the answer ultimately relies on your business's requirements. Most projects need:

• A Certified Administrator

• Certified Platform Developer

• Sales Cloud Consultant

• Service Cloud Consultant

• Community Cloud Consultant

• Data Architecture and Management Designer

• Integration Architecture Designer

Be familiar with the Client's Business

Even though many partners may arrive at your organization working under a tight deadline to finish a project, the ultimate objective of any partner should be to comprehend the heart of the issue and strive toward delivering the most comprehensive solution possible.

A consultant who performs this function will consider the larger picture, i.e., what is the company's objective with this project? They will not ditch you after the contract term to figure out the remainder on your own. As you speak with and meet with prospective partners, consider if they prioritize long-term value or just project execution.

Orientation Procedure

A Salesforce consulting partner should be able to provide a complete procedure for you. Consider if a possible partner has a well-defined process that covers each phase when you ask them questions. How should the design look?

Initial Engagement – Kick off, defining objectives and success criteria, establishing communication channels and frequency

• Requirement Gathering

• Change Control Process

• Solution Delivery and Testing

• Documentation and Training

• Go Live Process and Support

• Knowledge Transfer to Internal Team

• Measuring Success

• Ongoing Support

Application Construction and Architecture

Most Salesforce consulting firms excel at project-based specialized tasks without considering your company's existing solutions and processes. During the first contact, you should consider the following:

Examine the mentality of your consultants to see whether they have an integrated, coherent, and comprehensive approach to solutions, taking into account your current system and application investments.

Salesforce is a vast platform with several clouds, capabilities, tools, and an extensive ecosystem of third-party apps, but there are better solutions for some situations. Therefore, consultants should be open to integrating Salesforce with alternative systems. In this case, Salesforce consultants with previous expertise or knowledge of alternative non-Salesforce technologies may need more skills and resources to give the optimal solution.

Before contemplating custom code, it is a wise practice for application maintenance and total cost of ownership to use as much out-of-the-box functionality as possible. Examine consultants' administrative and technical expertise to verify that they have the appropriate breadth and depth to give the most optimal and cost-effective solution.

Complex and Creative Problem Solving

The capacity of a Salesforce consulting partner to customize via inventiveness and complicated issue-solving is a crucial competence. Your company's problems are unique. Thus, a partner should avoid tackling them like other businesses.

In addition, being a SaaS platform, Salesforce is a complicated platform with several features and resource limitations. Sometimes it is beneficial to offload storage-heavy and computationally expensive Salesforce apps to platforms like Heroku or Amazon Web Services and then integrate the results into Salesforce through data integration or UI integration.

Previous Projects and Citations

Ask your prospective consulting partner for references and samples of past work, just like you would when recruiting a new employee. This will enable you to determine whether they have the relevant expertise for your company's project and to speak with references and inquire about their experience dealing with the potential partner. This might be a warning indicator if no former customers are prepared to discuss the partner's work.

Long-Term Partner and Reliable Counselor

Look for a Salesforce partner with whom you can picture your business having a long-term relationship. This indicates that you can rely on them as a trusted counsel and that they can tackle new Salesforce issues as they occur. Even if you begin with just one project, as your company's demands evolve, more will undoubtedly appear.

Conclusion

If you are looking for Salesforce Partner for your firm then abovementioned 7 traits/qualities has to be look for in them in order to succeed in the market. 10Pearls is providing top notch salesforce consultants hire them now and kickstart your project.

7 Traits of an Ideal Salesforce Consulting Partner