How to prepare for your first Salesforce Advisory call

You’ve crossed your I’s and dotted your T’s with your leadership, made room in your budget, and are ready to optimize your Salesforce implementation. Now, you’re looking for an expert to help you create the optimal implementation for your business and are ready to prepare for your first Salesforce Advisory call.

Where should you start?

Step one is finding the ideal Salesforce implementation partner. You’ll need to look for one who has the expertise and experience to design an instance of Salesforce that works for your business.

We’ve talked a lot about how to choose the right implementation partner and we know that the best working relationships start with both sides fully prepared to dive in on day one.

How can you prepare for that first conversation around your advisory engagement?

We focus on three key questions when kicking off a new advisory relationship:

• What is your current problem?
• What is your current state, and what is your desired state?
• What have you tried in the past that did or didn’t work?

First, what’s your current business problem?

What are the biggest issues with your current instance of Salesforce or your CRM?

This may be a problem that keeps you up at night or is the source of all the frustration from your sales team. From automating repetitive tasks to designing the reporting dashboards that contain the insights your leadership needs, your first Salesforce advisory call can form the backbone of how you and your partner can create solutions for these issues.

What is your current state, and what is your desired state?

It’s time to think future-forward. We’ll look at the process roadblocks you’re finding as you work towards your revenue, productivity, collaboration, and sales goals. We’ll focus on what is impacting your sales team and ask questions about your sales team’s workflow and how you want to improve it.

What have you tried so far?

Be prepared to talk about what you’ve tried previously to address your current issues, including what has or hasn’t worked. Let your SI partner know if there is anything that you’ve done in the past that worked great: including in other CRM tools or previous processes. It’s crucial for your SI partner to understand if there are things that you’ve already tried so that they can create a roadmap for future ideas that do not repeat past frustrations.

And as you prepare for your first Salesforce advisory call, think about anything else that you’d like to share. This could be something that you saw on another blog post or heard on a podcast that you’ve heard Salesforce could do for you potentially or something that someone on your leadership team has brought in. It could also be something about you personally, you could want to expand your knowledge of Salesforce.

We’re happy and willing to bring all these questions and we believe that a good partnership starts with a good first call.

A final note:

A few months back, we asked ourselves, what’s the number one problem we typically solved as Salesforce consultants?

We discovered a clear trend across hundreds of completed projects: low Salesforce adoption.

Solving Salesforce adoption challenges is essential, NOT just to help get a better ROI out of your licenses, but because low adoption causes lost sales. In a low adoption environment, information slips through the cracks, and a well-organized competitor is right there to steal your deal away. We’ve curated our successes, methodologies, and resources (built from the work we’ve done across countless Salesforce projects) to help you tackle your company’s Salesforce adoption roadblocks and compiled it into a free Increasing Adoption email course.

If you’re in sales/revenue ops and Salesforce adoption issues have given you a headache in the last 30 days, sign up for our free course here.