As a Salesforce consultant conducting a technical discovery session, you need to ask a lot of questions.
Having a handy reference guide to keep track of key topics to discuss is useful, so below is my checklist.
You’ll notice they mostly consider Sales Cloud. So if you’re doing a CPQ, Field Service, or other clouds, be sure to insert additional topics. And of course, not all of them will be applicable to every discovery, but this serves as a good starting point.
“What are your …” / “Do you have any …” / “Tell me about …”
- Current System Architecture
- Current Data Model
- Business Processes
- Payment Processing
- Webforms
- Surveys
- Event Management
- Websites/Landing Pages
- Experience Cloud
- Marketing Applications
- Legacy Systems
- Middleware/Integration Layer
- Other Connected External Systems
- Mass Emailing
- Accounting Software
- Email/Calendar Connectivity
- Document Generation
- eSignature Management
- Files & Documents
- External Documents
- Approval Processes
- Record Augmentation
- Address Validation
- Record Duplication Management
- Multi-Language & Multi-Currency
- User Provisioning
- Support Processes
- Backup & Restore
- Source Code Repository
- Deployment Processes
- Profiles & Permissions
- Reports & Dashboards
- Mobile App
What topics would you add to this list?
The takeaway
Checklists are a great way to make sure you cover all important topics. As you do more and more discoveries, keep the list updated. It’s easier to start from a massive list and descope topics than the reverse.