salesforce consulting partner

​ Most businesses have realized the significance of going digital. However, the digital landscape is extremely competitive and sustenance requires businesses to automate their processes while ensuring operational efficiency. This is where the need for a robust CRM arises. As a cloud-based platform, Salesforce enjoys huge popularity and widespread adoption. However, unlocking the actual potential of a Salesforce platform can be challenging for businesses without the support of a Salesforce professional. It’s crucial for organizations to partner with a reliable and experienced Salesforce consultant that can help them overcome their limitations and unlock the immense potential of this platform.  A consultant can provide necessary support and guidance regarding upgrades and customizations that can make your organization more productive across your business processes. Their ability to troubleshoot problems through Salesforce can help you deal with unique challenges while figuring out solutions that will help your business flourish. Why Should You Engage the Services of a Salesforce Professional? A Salesforce consultant has extensive experience in handling this robust customer relationship management (CRM) platform. Being professionals, they remain up-to-date on the latest product upgrades and applications while ensuring quality, productivity, and reduced costs. The services offered by a reliable Salesforce consulting partner include more than just the basic platform functions but can also help create custom tools, manage integrations, and leverage the complete capabilities of the platform. From nonprofits to building services to businesses in the financial and healthcare sector, almost every industry can take advantage of these optimizations. Listed below are some of the key benefits of Hiring Salesforce Consulting services: Data Migration from Other CRM platforms to Salesforce: If you haven’t used Salesforce before, you would not just require setting it up for the first time but also migrate your data from an outside source. A professional can help you set up the CRM seamlessly besides managing the migration in a way that every component is handled optimally. Additionally, they will help you keep your data organized and clean so that it becomes easy for you to sort through them. Setting Up Customized Dashboards: To draw maximum value out of your CRM, it’s important to get your dashboard customized. For creating customized dashboards based on your business needs, Salesforce offers multiple options. However, creating customized dashboards in Salesforce isn’t easy and requires custom fields for accommodating certain tools and calculations, which your team might require to find quality leads. A professional service provider can enable you to design a dashboard as per the unique needs of your business, which will maximize data analysis and ultimately give a boost to your business. With a dashboard, it becomes easy to filter your data, quickly find the information you require, and track your prospects. Providing Training and Support: The upgrades and updates of Salesforce make the platform valuable. However, several organizations struggle to keep up with these changes. To understand which upgrades will have the maximum benefits, you must consider getting in touch with a reputed consultant who will manage essential updates and upgrades for you that will increase productivity and benefit your unique. They also assist in training your employees so that user productivity on the platform increases. This will empower your team to bring in more customers and close more deals. Proper support for training and Salesforce implementation will allow everyone to work more efficiently. Maintaining an Organized System:  Data gathered by sales reps when organized from time to time plays an important role in upholding the usefulness and functionality of the Salesforce platform. Some organizations end up deserting their Salesforce integrations when their data becomes unsystematic and unmanageable. This problem usually arises when several sales reps log in at the same time and enter records incoherently. An experienced Salesforce partner can help by auditing the records while preventing a buildup of unusable records. They also help in sorting data and taking necessary steps to prevent the accrual of glitches in the first place. They can assist in the creation of custom wizards that will guide sales reps through data entries, creating uniformity and consistency within the data entry irrespective of who created the entries. Custom wizards can be used to streamline the Salesforce quoting process, which requires several steps and doesn’t assure uniformity. Augments Your Ability to Find New Leads: Salesforce empowers your sales reps to collaborate easily with prospects and several new customers irrespective of where they are. The robust CRM promotes communication skills along with collaboration within teams thereby boosting productivity, as well as the ability to find leads. Salesforce consultants play a significant role in motivating your internal sales team members. You can create healthy competition among your sales reps through gamification. Based on key metrics from the CRM, consultants can help create leaderboards so that all your sales reps can view each other's results, as well as bests in different categories. Final Words: Salesforce has emerged as the number one platform in the CRM space. With its wide array of features and functionalities, Salesforce has become the preferred choice of businesses. However, to make the most of this amazing platform, it’s important to partner with one of the best Salesforce consultants who can take customer communication to a new level. They can help businesses utilize the tools that can automate processes and ensure operational efficiency.

Managing superior customer relationships is no longer a choice but has become a necessity in today’s era. This is easier said than done as businesses are engaged in multiple activities including but not limited to managing multiple business processes. Salesforce – a robust cloud-based CRM has become one of the most popular and widely adopted CRM platforms across the globe. The innovative platform is endowed with multiple features, functionalities, and components that can be leveraged by businesses to resolve their business issues.

There is a general consensus in higher education that institutions of nearly all types and sizes need to improve persistence and completion rates. While there have been slight improvements in recent years, data indicates that only half of the students complete degrees at the institution at which they start. Studies have suggested that many students complete their degrees at other institutions, taking completion to about 62%. Student departure remains a mystery for most educational leaders. They feel a compelling need to understand and fix the causes of attrition. There is no shortage of knowledge or reference on what works in student retention. Given all that, it is surprising that rates have only gradually improved. This could be for two reasons. First, institutions are flooded with data points and may not be able to identify the ones that must be tracked or which ones help would explain the persistence patterns of their students. Second, we may lack the connections between institutional supports and students who need them to see if we are truly doing something about it. Organize the Data Points with a Model Student success models can be helpful for educational leaders who wish to identify the key aspects associated with student success, persistence and completion. While there are many models to choose from, one of the most talked about is Tinto’s “Theory of Student Departure”. The model helps track the student lifecycle and identifies areas where both student and college attributes can impact the decision to stay in or leave an educational program. Tinto’s model, when analysed and condensed, suggests that there are five key areas where students may encounter challenges that disrupt their educational careers. Likewise, they may identify areas where students may have strengths that boost their success: Academic Integration Academic Integration in a college can be segmented into three parts: preparation, transition, and performance. These three can be connected sequentially, meaning lack of preparation can lead to a poor transition and weak ongoing performance, or they can occur in isolation, disconnected from one another. Experienced faculty and advisors probably know several cases where poorly prepared students were highly successful, well-prepared students failed, and those from both groups realized a trajectory in line with their levels of preparation. Social Integration Social Integration addresses the extent to which the student is able to connect with peers within the educational ecosystem. Adult learners often bond with other adults through common programs. The extent to which students have successfully bonded with their peers can be hard to read; it is not usually a one-size-fits-all model of social integration and student information systems are not typically built to collect and report the data that may be associated with this important area of student success. This aspect may also be useful when working on student faculty engagement.  This form of social integration in which students feel heard, seen and accepted by faculty is important especially for under-represented groups to feel a sense of belonging at their institution. Financial Support Financial Support is critical to enable a student to be able to afford education at that institution.. For those who complete annual aid applications, the resulting calculations serve as a proxy for the ability to pay. The data collected for this purpose does not include factors that can help a student afford costs such as support from family or those that can hamper affordability such as need of a student to work to support a elderly dependent household. We often have a different perception of need-based aid than how students view the issue: the amount of the education bill, less the aid is the amount to be paid or financed. More often than not, it is this bottomline number that impacts students’ real or perceived ability to remain in an educational program. It can also impact the value perception of the educational experience. Is this experience worth it’s price? Goal Clarity Goal Clarity indicates the degree to which a student recognises why they are enrolled in certain college, and the end goal of the program being pursued. Certain institutions might assume that a chosen program or subject translates to goal clarity but data often shows that students change subjects two to three times before getting a degree. A few of the factors that can determine whether a student may have clarity about program they have chosen are its requirements, their personal ability to meet required standards and their practical experience in that field. Faculty and advisors will spot a common situation of students feeling lost when they are unable to pursue a popular program. Support of Family and Friends One of the least investigated areas for measuring student persistence is the support of family. As the number of college students grows, the perception of the college experience amongst their friends and families may differ than those who come from families where college attendance is common. However, that does not mean all families don’t support of first-generation students across the board. In fact, many families place high value on college education. Having said that, there may not be an obvious relation between the program curriculum and career, time spent away from class, student services, and the potential of associated programs for providing key career skills. Create a Framework of Indicators for Lagging Using these five aspects of higher education as a model, it is possible to establish a data framework that measures what we know about students and their probability to continue and succeed. Lagging indicators are most commonly available data points that reflect things that have already occurred. These include grade point average (GPA), which don’t reveal student successes and struggles with certain concepts and skills. They also include the marks of courses finished in a term, unpaid fees that disallow registration for another term, abandonment of courses midway etc. While these data may support analysis of past activities, rarely do they provide understanding of current students. For insight that is “current”, institutions need data indicators that reveal outcomes in real time. Lagging indicator data is important. It allows the institution to conduct detailed, multi- parameter analysis to reveal student groups that may enter into high-risk situations. It may also aid in identifying remedies and support structures to support future students who may have the same characteristics. Too often, these analyses are univariate, such as GPA and one-year retention rate. Even while doing multivariate analyses, the data silos and not sufficient to form regression models with retention values high enough to explicitly establish the differences between students who continue and those who don’t. Human behaviour is complex and is driven by many factors. Consequently, analysis needs to be detailed and based on comprehensive data to allow analysts to investigate multiple factors to understand the patterns of their students. Leading indicators allow institutions to impact persistence in real time. Awareness of a student not connecting with faculty as expected, assignments, fellow students, lets the institution to intervene and attempt to resolve the issue before the student feels isolated to a degree that compels him/her to leave. Identifying students who have pending program fees within the term, which usually happens because loans applied on parent creditworthiness, have not been approved, allows the institution to intervene and find a solution. The institution can support in bridging the gap and mitigate the stress felt by the student before it becomes overwhelming. These are but a few examples of how leading indicators can be used to impact student persistence. Identify and Address Gaps There is typically more data available on lagging indicators than leading indicators, which implies that we have been more attuned to collecting and using data that reflect information on something that already occurred. It must be re-iterated that lagging indicators are help in analysing patterns and suggest interventions for future students. There is far less data available and used as leading indicators, however, and this implies an emerging area of practice that demands more attention. Analyses need to have robust and comprehensive data, yet those tend to exist in various systems/data silos. Institutions that have data warehouses are one step ahead; identifying the important data and extracting them from those systems may still be a challenge, even with solutions in place. Many other institutions that lack these data tools find themselves wishing for better insights and tools to help them collect, assemble and analyze their data. Certain areas suggest polls or surveys. While there are a number of solutions available today, these can also have limitations. One of these is the timing of offering a survey to new or current students, when receive the data back and place those into the hands of those who need it (especially advisors). Some of these instruments allow comparisons of student responses at your institution to others, which can be helpful, but that may be outweighed by the timing, where these data then become lagging, not leading, indicators. Short polls, such as those that ask students to rate how they are doing that day with facial emojis, may capture those who are feeling overwhelmed. Longer polls, that tease out the nuances of family and friend support, shouldn’t exceed 10 questions and five would likely increase response rates. Survey overload can be avoided by good planning and timely distribution of short polls and surveys. Connect the Dots (and the Data) Collecting, assembling, analyzing and acting upon a robust dataset is an evolutionary process. Institutions should start with what they have and gradually augment and enhance their data and its usage as part of a quality development process. Knowing what the desired state looks like is important to creating a strong road map toward it. Assembling a robust set of lagging indicators means getting data from multiple systems, modules and tables in to a unified dataset. Once aggregated, data analysis and visualization should reveal the interaction of the data categories within the framework. Human behavior is often complex and more often than not the decision to stay or leave a program is a mix of multiple factors originating from various parts of that experience. And there may be outside factors as well such as childcare, work pressure etc. External factors may be harder to capture through these data collection mechanisms and may not reveal the true picture. A proper assessment of the internal factors within the control of the institution will augment the analysis and sidestep simplistic, one dimensional solutions about why students are staying/leaving. Assembling and using a robust set of leading indicators is often a tremendous challenge at the most forward-thinking institutions. Is anyone following up to check if any student needs help on unpaid balances? Does the financial aid office, who may be equipped to discuss solutions, even know that this has occurred? Is financial stress causing the student to look for additional outside work, such that they have less time to read and complete assignments? Is the early alert system complicated to use by faculty?  Do residence hall advisors have a similar alerting mechanism for issues they might spot? Who is following up on these and what data do they have that will help them facilitate an empathetic and inform conversation with the student before they make a decision to leave? Adopting a case management methodology to understand student persistence and success has been used by institutions in first-year programs. Some of the more remarkable results have linked students to institutional resources, as well as community services and supports, in a “wrap-around” approach to student success. These approaches can only work when cases are surfaced and those empowered to act have sufficient information to meaningfully interact with the student. It requires that the information from disparate systems is brought together. Improving student outcomes also requires that the care teams and staff can see the relationship between suggesting services and resources and the student’s engagement or lack thereof. Higher education. student support has been based upon a “build it and they will come” approach, as well as an invitational approach to student referrals. Become a part of the Innovation eco-system Girikon is a certified Salesforce Consulting Partner with extensive Salesforce Consulting experience. Get access to experts who can help you adapt fast and achieve success. Contact us today. Questions? Our reps have answers. CONTACT OUR SALESFORCE CONSULTANTS

Whether you are already running a Salesforce instance in your organization and would like to upgrade it, or you want to set up a Salesforce implementation from scratch, you will probably need the expertise of a Salesforce consulting partner. With the global adoption of the world’s No.1 CRM platform, the Salesforce consulting partners network has been growing over the years, ranging from individual consultants to global partner firms, offering extensive expertise across Salesforce products and industries and third-party apps. But, how do you find a consultant that is best suited for you?  Here are the top 9 mistakes companies usually make when Salesforce consulting partner and how to tackle them. Mistake #1: Not having a clear definition of business goals As a business leader you are expected to show the way. It’s not the job of a consultant. Before you decide what type of implementation you want, it is critical to understand why you need the proposed solution in the first place. How does it address your business goals? What problems is it going to resolve for you? What direction do you want your business to take post implementation? Without a clear understanding of these aspects, you may end up squandering time, money and effort on an underutilised Salesforce implementation and never really realise its full potential. To set the right direction for your business with the help of your Salesforce implementation, you need to clearly define: Determine Business Objectives – Enlist what you wish to achieve with the Salesforce platform, just in the immediate term, but over a 3-4 year period. Define Optimal Project Schedule – Set realistic expectations you’re your project execution timeline. Typically, implementation times take months for for mid-size businesses. Define your budget – Do thorough research and establish the budget range you are willing to invest into Salesforce implementation and administration going into the future over a 3-4 year period. Establish your Partnership Model – Determine the implementation scenarios of your project based on budget, time and resource constraints: will your Salesforce Implementation Partner perform complete implementations, will you split responsibilities with your partner, or you will do everything with internal resources while being guided by your partner. Define Project Stakeholders – Identify key people from your team who you want to involve in your project implementation. Amongst them, identify a champion who will drive the project. Define Salesforce Partners Roles – Identify the project roles and responsibilities that can be outsourced to your partner. Draft an RFP based on these roles which will help you to simplify discovery sessions with your prospective partner. Mistake #2: Lack of Basic Salesforce Knowledge This step is often overlooked.  To be on the same page with your implementation partner or consultant, you need to be familiar with the most common terms and capabilities of the Salesforce platform. Educate yourself with product demos, Case Studies and Whitepapers on the Salesforce websites to know about the features relevant to your business domain. Knowing how Salesforce has helped companies around the world in your domain, will help you speak the same language as your partner. Mistake #3: Prioritizing Price over Quality Yes, you would like best Salesforce Consulting Partner your money can buy. And there is always a tendency to attracted to cheaper offers. But sometimes, when you hire a low cost alternative with tight budgets, there are costs overruns and hiring that consultant may actually result in even higher running costs than originally planned, schedule overruns or worst case, project failure. Eventually, you may decide to invest only in Salesforce developers. Initially it may seem financially viable. However, if your developers do not have holistic expertise on the domain as well as the product, you may end up with an implementation that may either be underdeveloped or well developed but under-adopted by your end-users. Which is why Salesforce recommends working with Salesforce Certified partners so that there are no surprises in the long run. It is an expensive option compared to others, but the chances of success are much higher. Mistake #4: Underestimating the power of reviews All companies design their websites to look great. And why wouldn’t they? They want you to think that are the best at what they do. However, that’s not the entire story. But what are their clients saying about them? Customer reviews on AppExchange are a great indicator of customer satisfaction levels. Read reviews to know what’s good and what not about a product or app. There are also third part websites which publish reviews of companies for their services. Mistake #5: Rushing into a decision Investment into a Salesforce implementation is a huge decision. There is absolutely no reason to rush into it just because your competitors are doing it. Take your time, understand how a partner can help you and make an informed decision. Ping your network for references, surf through Salesforce platforms like AppExchange and the Trailblazer Community to access a larger pool of consulting companies. Go through their portfolios in detail. Browse through their client case studies for similar projects, determine how their work experience matches with what you need and compare. Mistake #6: Ignoring the marketing background of a Salesforce partner At the core of its business, Salesforce is a digital marketing company that empowers businesses to manage customer relationships and enables marketers to launch campaigns, track conversions, and measure ROI. However, not all Salesforce consultants have adequate digital marketing experience, and while it’s not mandatory, in order to maximize utilization of the power of Salesforce, you should find one that does. Solution implementation customization and administration are not the onoy things you need help with. You need to know how your business goals align your marketing goals., Mistake #7: Hiring a Salesforce Consultant with inadequate relevant experience You will find that there is no dearth of skilled technical experts on the AppExchange platform. But are technical skills and certifications enough to ensure the success of your project? No doubt, relevant technical knowledge is critical for successful Salesforce implementation, and you should always pay importance to the proper certifications of the consultants on your partner’s team.  However, domain expertise is equally important. What if Salesforce doesn’t offer out-of-the-box solutions for you line of business. You will then need to identify experts that can customize Salesforce for your unique business needs. Lack of relevant and adequate industry experience may lead to an implementation with cracks and consequently impact adoption by your team and your ROI. Besides domain knowledge, you should also look for partners who have enough resources to work with a company of your size and have worked on similar projects. Your due diligence on your prospective partner’s technical and marketing background will augur well in the long run. Take your time and do a thorough investigation into identifying the best fit partner for your project. Mistake #8: Not Choosing an Expert Why do you need to hire an implementation partner? Because you don’t have that level and kind of competence and experience available within your organization, right? And the last thing you want is a partner that readily agrees to every suggestion you make. What you need is a real expert who has the technical as well as the industry expertise to examine and inquire your business in-depth, and will confidently take the lead and suggest the path forward. Certified Salesforce Consultants avoid common mistakes, because they’ve learned the hard way, and will suggest the best path forward even though it may not appear right to you.  In other words, they will not hesitate to disagree with you. Mistake #9: Not looking long-term One of the most common misconceptions amongst businesses is that their engagement with their implementation partner finishes with the deployment of Salesforce. The truth however is quite to the contrary. Post implementation, your project will enter a phase where you will need expert support of a different kind: to drive user adoption of the platform, ensure that your platform is configured correctly after each Salesforce release, and troubleshoot all solution-related issues. Your organization is going to grow over the years, and so should your CRM. When new enhancements or customizations are needed, it’s much more efficient and easier to work with a tried and tested Salesforce partner who know your project ground up. Smart businesses today are focussed on fostering meaningful long-term relationships, that complement their core offerings with innovation. Investment in Salesforce is a huge step, and should be undertaken with proper planning. And Salesforce partnership is a handshake, where both client and partner work on common goals with shared responsibilities. Girikon, a Gold Certified Salesforce Implementation Partner, provides expert guidance and support throughout the client’s growth journey. We will assist you with your Salesforce initiative and deliver your unique CRM implementation solution working hand in hand with you Questions? Our reps have answers. CONTACT AN EXPERT

Customer-centric experiences are the cornerstone of business, and to be truly customer-centric, you have to know your customers’ preferences and the context in which they engage with your organization. Today’s CRM tools are stacked with features that foster collaboration and accessible data to drive smart decision-making. The right tool should enable companies to target diverse audiences, design intelligent automation based on a prospect’s activity, and proactively manage relationships. The advantages of CRM software are evident: It keeps all historical data in one place, making it easier to manage customer relationships. A CRM software should offer limitless possibilities to organizations to proactively engage teams, collaborate on goals and deliver powerful customer-centric experiences. Salesforce does all that for you, and much more. The Salesforce platform is a framework with amazing capabilities and virtually endless possibilities. It truly has the power and flexibility to do exactly what you want it to do. And on most occasions, effortlessly. It is only normal to be intimidated by the technology and its possibilities offered by the World’s No 1 CRM platform. Hence, it is imperative that you find the right Salesforce Consulting Partner to walk guide you on your stairway to success. Here are a few areas where the best Salesforce Consulting Partner can help you: Improve Business Performance Salesforce CRM is designed with the customer in mind, empowering organizations to break new ground with customers, address concerns, resolve problems, and provide value. Your Salesforce Consulting Partner will help you to put customer success first, and in the process, focus on your own business performance improvement. Improved customer visibility Salesforce provides a user-friendly platform for managing all of your customer-related information, thereby enabling you to prioritize every customer as though it were the only one. By understanding your customers better, you'll be empowered to better forecast their future actions. Superior time management Salesforce combines all of your agents' activities, calendars, schedules and helps make those engagements better serve customers. This means less downtime and significantly lesser deadline-related stress. More efficient sales pipeline Salesforce allows you to track individual prospects effortlessly, including their pain points, their expectations, and any other information that might be useful in working with a potential customer. You will always be able to see exactly where a lead is in your pipeline, as well as know what their next step should be. The end result is improvement in your overall sales.  Enhanced collaboration Having a cloud-based, cross-department platform means that any and every authorized user can work together to ensure customer success. With multi-device access capability, Salesforce allows your teams to access relevant data across departments, communicate efficiently, and collaborate together to provide a seamless customer-centric experience. Better support Salesforce provides excellent support, and with the entire platform based on the cloud, maintenance can be done remotely, avoiding the expensive costs associated with in-person maintenance visits. Increased efficiency and productivity Between automating time-consuming tasks, enabling collaboration, and eliminating the need for micro-management by line managers, Salesforce trims away at unnecessary processes and wasteful effort, setting up a supremely efficient system that will deliver real value to your organization and your customers, consequently driving up organizational productivity. Faster Decision Making  With Salesforce’s powerful data modeling and visualization tools like Einstein Analytics and Lightning, teams can have access to sales and service KPIs. Your Salesforce Implementation Partner can empower you with a deeper insight into market trends and opportunities. Customer analytics can help you blend science with data to make decisions that enable you to stay ahead of the curve. There are way too many features in Salesforce and it's just not possible to list them all. However, with a top Salesforce Consultant, you can maximize the use of its power and flexibility and send your organizational productivity into overdrive. Get a distinct advantage over your competition with the World’s most complete CRM platform. Take advantage of the best security, the most-effective customization options, the highest-quality apps, and the most innovative business solution, all at a cost that will delight you. Looking for more details? Contact our reps to discuss your needs today. CONTACT AN EXPERT

Today, Salesforce is the world's no 1 CRM platform, and for good reason too. Companies all around the globe are moving their business applications to the cloud and the world’s no1 CRM platform provides the power, flexibility, and intelligence that businesses need to drive productivity, efficiency, and growth. Salesforce not only eliminates the erstwhile need for maintaining expensive development and support teams but also the cost of outages due to failure at the hardware, software, or application level. And while there are thousands of organizations (whether for profit or not) who have benefited immensely from the deployment of Salesforce apps, the reality is that a high percentage of them are not getting the most out of the CRM platform. In fact, a substantial number of these projects fail. Having said that, there is one thing that all the successful ones did right. And that was choosing the right Salesforce Consulting Partner. And this is precisely what we are going to assist you with today. How do you get maximum value out of your investment into Salesforce? How do you choose the best Salesforce Consultant? And how good a fit is that choice of partner for your business? With hundreds of partners listed on AppExchange, how do you decide which one is perfect for you? These questions and many more are at top of the minds of all new adopters of the world’s no1 CRM platform. Our teams of experts have shortlisted top 8 qualifiers that will answer these questions for you and guide you on how to choose the right partner for your business. Identify needs and expectations – Let’s get one thing straight. Before looking for someone to solve your problem, you need to very clearly identify what that problem is. And once you have done that, you need to set your expectations. Identify very clearly the support goals you want to fulfill and what qualities you are seeking from your partner. Very clearly spell out the key variables – budget, results, scope, and timelines. Collaborate with your teams. There is no point in implementing a new solution if your teams are not inclined to use it and or they haven’t been involved in the whole decision-making process. Once you have your needs and expectations worked out, and your teams on-boarded, start looking. Experience – This is the most important criteria for shortlisting a prospective partner. After all, you are expecting them to re-invent your business, or at least a part of it. Find out if they have a great experience not only in the salesforce domain but have they worked with customers like you. From your industry. Solving problems and challenges like the ones you currently have. Are they Gold Partners? How long have they had a dedicated salesforce practice? How have they grown? What size are they today? Understand their journey as a Salesforce Consultant. Reviews and Feedback – A partner is doing great work if their customers are saying great things about them. There is no greater testament to success than genuine customer feedback. Salesforce AppExchange is a great place to find such reviews on prospective partners. Besides reviews, you will also get to know many other important aspects about the company like key people, experience, certifications, areas of expertise, awards, etc.  Implementation Methodology   Implementation Methodology – When you are looking to work with a Salesforce Consultant, it is important you understand the consultant’s implementation approach. Look up their website, go through white papers and case studies and understand how they approach the problem.  Choose a partner who adopts a collaborative approach with customers and is not afraid to get creative with them. Ask them specifics like what tools they use, their familiarity with the latest updates in the salesforce platform. What training approach do they adopt? And very important- What is their collaborative review and iterate methodology? Do they have a Customer-Centric Culture? Involve your key team members and request a demo of their experience and approach. Support – Like any other software, Salesforce implementation is not a one-time affair. Businesses evolve, and particularly in today's context, they are ever so dynamic. Software needs to keep up with these changing times. And your Salesforce Implementation Partner needs to stay on top of all updates. Before you sign on a Salesforce Consultant, discuss with them about how will they support your business post implementation? Your business needs a partner that can support you 24/7. Someone who treats your business like his/her own. Understand how they are providing post-implementation support to their existing customers. Ask them to share case studies. Make sure they don’t prioritize larger projects over yours. Work with someone who has a Salesforce Managed Support Program as part of their implementation methodology. Pricing Ensure that you have a clear understanding of their pricing structure. Ask them questions like What are the charges for understanding your needs and recommending a solution and designing an appropriate implementation strategy? Do your hourly rates include all charges or are there separate charges /extra fees on top of that? What are the itemized support fees? What is the fee structure for the different consultants deployed on the project? Or is it a blended tariff? Make sure the overall pricing fits into your budget and keep sufficient margins for spillovers. Passion This is a little hard to come by and perhaps even harder to quantify, but it’s important. You want your Salesforce Consultant to treat your business like their own. You want them to work in close collaboration with your teams to work towards achieving common goals. After all, once you sign up, you are all on the same side of the table. Make sure the partner is passionate about technology and believes strongly in its ability to drive performance, productivity, and growth. In short, they must see your success as their own. Location Borders are almost non-existent in the digital landscape today, especially so in today’s context where physical business meet-ups are the last resort. The world has moved to online collaboration across continents. However, providence may be in working with a Salesforce Consulting Partner that is geographically close to you. Not only will this eliminate the challenges of communicating across time zones, but it will give you the opportunity to work more closely with the consulting team. Once you have identified the right partner, work on developing a long-term engagement strategy. Collaborate actively involving your teams to exchange creative ideas and unique experiences you both have. Talk about what direction you want the business to take. Like in any other relationship, trust your partner to identify risks, establish possibilities, and envision potential. At Girikon, we strongly believe that technology is a very potent driver for growth. Using the tools and features available to us through the Salesforce platform, we can help your teams transform not only the way you manage your business but also the way you look at it.

Who is a Salesforce Consultant? A Salesforce Consultant is a knowledgeable, experienced person who helps in utilizing your CRM qualities to the fullest which will benefit your business. Finding a suitable Salesforce Consultant who can be fit for your business is never an easy task. You need to have confidence in their Salesforce experience, knowledge, problem-solving abilities.