Salesforce can be a powerful platform for building more meaningful and lasting relationships and connecting with your customers across sales, customer service, marketing, communities, apps, analytics and more. But as any technology consultant knows, without the right people behind the wheel, the technology will never go anywhere near its full potential.
When considering a Salesforce consulting partner, ask the following questions:
- Is your team Salesforce Certified?
Salesforce certification is the easiest way to validate that your consulting partners have the Salesforce knowledge and experience necessary to handle your implementation. It’s also a great way to make sure that the individual is up-to-date on the most recent Salesforce releases. Releases come out three times a year (winter, spring and summer), each with new system feature updates, so these certifications become increasingly more crucial all the time.
The Summa Answer: From sales to marketing to operations, our Salesforce experts can help you transform how you engage with your prospects, customers and partners. In addition to our expertise in Sales, Service and Marketing Clouds, we are one of a select few partners with the Salesforce.org, Data.com, Pardot, Steelbrick and Heroku Partner distinctions. Tip: You can use this Salesforce Certification verification tool to help determine whether a consulting partner (individuals, not teams) are certified.
- Are you a Salesforce Gold Partner?
Partners that maintain a certain number of certified individuals (Sales Cloud Consultant, Service Cloud Consultant, Platform Developer I & II and Technical Architect) and uphold Salesforce’s metrics for customer satisfaction, successful projects and depth of knowledge are awarded status levels.
Gold Partners meet qualifying criteria for number of specialists, sales performance and customer satisfaction. Gold partnership criteria includes metrics associated with successful projects (Summa’s CSAT score is 9.44), the expanse of knowledge, and more.
The Summa Answer: The Gold Partner recognition complements Summa’s 2015 win of the Salesforce.com Partner Innovation Award for Non-Profit Success, which we earned for our work innovating new fundraising, donor and volunteer management solutions for The United Way of Southwestern PA.
- Is your firm on the AppExchange? If yes, what is the CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score) on the AppExchange?
The AppExchange helps you to instantly validate and compare the statistics between different Salesforce consulting firms. Obviously a higher CSAT is better.
The Summa Answer: We’re proud of our current 9.44/10 CSAT score, and our AppExchange profile is available here.
- How many Salesforce Projects has your team done?
Salesforce is constantly changing and evolving. It’s important to work with Salesforce consulting partners who know Salesforce inside and out and are consistently focused on it. For instance, some enormous consulting firms have a very small Salesforce practice.
The Summa Answer: Summa has executed over 500 successful Salesforce.com projects, including multiple global rollouts in the last year, and has over 100 certifications.
- What distinguishes your Salesforce consultants from the rest?
Certain critical features should come standard with any Salesforce consulting partner—competency, knowledge, experience, skill.
But other answers to this question may be more subjective. The only blanket answer here is that the right partner should be versatile and able to configure the Salesforce environment to your organization’s specific needs and to support end users with the outputs they need in an ever-evolving work environment.
The Summa Answer: Summa’s agile approach, focus on human-centered design and integration expertise help us stand out among other Salesforce.com partners. Our record of successfully strategizing, designing, implementing and integrating Salesforce.com, as well as other custom software solutions, for a variety of industries proves our technical skills and gives richness to our expertise.
Bottom Line
When considering a Salesforce consulting partner, consider Summa. Summa boasts deep experience in creating fast, flexible, reliable and secure connectivity between cloud, on-premises, new and legacy core applications, as well as IoT and mobile devices. As both the implementation partner and the customer engagement solution architect for our clients, we achieve business results using Marketing, Sales and Service Clouds and other platform components of Salesforce.com. In 2015, we won the Salesforce.com Partner Innovation Award for Non-Profit Success for our work innovating new fundraising, donor and volunteer management solutions for The United Way of Southwestern PA. Plus, Salesforce.com is one of Summa's fastest-growing practice areas. As Gold Partners, we're excited to do more, excel more and produce more transformative solutions for our clients.
