Method #4: Retainer
Once you become well known in a specific vertical or horizontal domain in Salesforce, you can offer a retainer service.
When I say “vertical”, I’m talking about an industry, such as nonprofit, financial, or healthcare. For “horizontal”, it could mean a cloud specialization, like CPQ or Field Service.… Read the rest
Method #3: Managed service
A managed service is a monthly subscription-type of service. In return, you offer and fulfill a list of clearly set functions or objectives.
The main difference between this method and a productized service is that you customize the price based on the client’s requirements.… Read the rest
Method #2: Productized service
A productized service is a hybrid of a product and a service. You sell it like a product, with a fixed price. And you fulfill it as a service, with a very clear scope.
The boundaries of the scope are important here, as you don’t want scope creep.… Read the rest
There are five main ways Salesforce consultants can move away from hourly billing. Depending on whether you are a full-time employee or a freelancer, not every way will be easily available to you. The goal here is to show you the ways and then for you to determine which one or ones are best suited for your situation.… Read the rest
Just before we get into details about having fixed-prices for Salesforce work, consider the following story. This is probably not a factual story, but an allegory with an important moral.
Henry Ford of the Ford motor company had a huge machine that automated an important part of the car manufacturing process.… Read the rest
There’s a growing trend in the Salesforce ecosystem to shift away from hourly billing. It’s a trend that is more commonly found on other platforms and industries, so it’s about damn time it came to Salesforce.
When you’re starting your Salesforce career, it’s normal to only hear about hourly rates.… Read the rest
On this week’s podcast, I interviewed Pat McClellan of Proton7Group.
Pat, a Salesforce MVP, is the creator of a Salesforce-native SMS app. In short, it allows users to send SMS and MMS messages from any object It looks so integrated, it could have been built by Salesforce themselves.… Read the rest
Best practices exist because they are generally approved and recommended. In the Salesforce ecosystem, this usually means Salesforce introduced the best practice and the community agreed. Sometimes it’s the other way around; it’s community initiated and Salesforce rubber stamps it.
Does that mean you should always follow best practices?… Read the rest
There’s a method called “Spaced Repetition” that helps you remember things better and for longer. Basically, you shouldn’t cram all your studying into a single session. Instead, you’ll have better results if you space out your studying over multiple days while repeating key pieces of information each time.… Read the rest
One common scenario you need to solve as a Salesforce consultant is populating data in a new pre-production sandbox. After all, there’s not much use in developing something without testing it with some data.
You can always use a full copy sandbox each time, but prices for those are comically high.… Read the rest
Today was dreamOle in Sevilla, Spain. It was awesome to be around kindred spirits again. It’s been so long since my last Salesforce conference (*cough* COVID *cough*).
There were quite a few interesting sessions to attend. Here are my personal favorites, in no particular order.… Read the rest
Salesforce has come a long way since its debut in 1999, and its four employees.
As of March 14, 2023, Salesforce is the fifth largest SAAS company in the world, ranked by market capitalization. That’s awesome!
Plotted on a chart, this data looks like this:
It’s interesting to note that aside from MS and Google, who are leading the pack by a huge margin, the remaining companies line up nearly perfectly.… Read the rest
Salesforce has numerous conferences around the world. The most famous and largest of which is Dreamforce in San Francisco.
Not everyone has a chance to attend this event, so there are many local events around the world. Depending on your profession, there are also many industry-specific conferences and those tailored for developers, consultants, partners, etc.… Read the rest
When making technology decisions for your client, how should you consider the short-term payoff versus the long-term strategy?
In this week’s podcast, I have a wonderful conversation with Kevin Christopher-George about short vs long-term approaches, the RFP process, and avoiding the “shiny new tech” syndrome.… Read the rest
Let’s pickup from last week’s email about the New Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud (NPC).
Here are some of the reasons why Salesforce decided to bring the Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP) to the core platform:
Complex validation rules in Salesforce can be a real pain in the butt.
When it’s a single IF statement with perhaps one OR or AND statement, there’s usually no issue. But when it’s a nested statement if ORs followed by ANDs, things can escalate quickly.… Read the rest
Salesforce made a huge announcement yesterday regarding the Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud.
Until now, if a nonprofit organization used Salesforce, they typically installed a managed package called Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP). This is a mature product, evolving for more than a decade.… Read the rest
Yesterday I published a podcast episode with Julia Devine of Devine Parker.
Julia and her colleague Catalina help nonprofits determine a technology strategy. This means assessing a client’s current state and building a plan to get to the target state.
They also help determine which CRM is the best fit for their clientele.… Read the rest
Last Friday, my colleague told me about a head-scratcher moment that he had with his Salesforce client.
The client had an old Salesforce instance, and there were too many “cooks in the kitchen” over the years. Sometimes these were internal people, other times it was external Salesforce agencies.… Read the rest
Let’s pickup from yesterday’s challenge. The conceptual answer is to create a state machine.
What is a state machine?
According to Wikipedia, “A finite-state machine (FSM) … or simply a state machine, is a mathematical model of computation. It is an abstract machine that can be in exactly one of a finite number of states at any given time.… Read the rest
Recently, a client approached me with a more complicated requirement than usual. I love a challenge, so I listened with great enthusiasm. The scenario below is a simplified version of the issue.
In Salesforce, the contact object had a field called “Status”.… Read the rest
By now, most of you are aware that TrailblazerDX 2023 is currently underway. This three day conference focuses on Salesforce technical developments. The target audience are developers and architects, although all disciplines can benefit from learning what the “shiny new tools” look like.… Read the rest
A handful of years ago, I was hired as a Salesforce consultant to help a very large organization with their Salesforce implementation. They were overhauling their partner web portal and wanted to have tighter integration with their Salesforce instance.
The project was impressive because it’s not often when an enterprise has the foresight and drive to overhaul a system.… Read the rest
A couple of years ago, I noticed a need in one of my clients. There was a gap in functionality between the Salesforce platform and all available packages. This includes all official apps on the AppExchange and unlisted apps, which only Google knows about.… Read the rest
There’s a perception in the general public that consultants don’t stick around to see the client’s end results. Instead, they come into an organization, give direction and advice, and then leave before seeing the true impacts of those decisions.
While this may be true for management consultants, I don’t believe this is true for Salesforce consultants.… Read the rest
Recently, there are a few popular threads on LinkedIn discussing Salesforce certifications vs experience.
One scenario that was mentioned was an individual with 10 certifications and only 1 year of experience. That definitely seems odd, and may indicate the person is using exam dumps.… Read the rest
Did you know, in addition to writing this weekday email, I also host a weekly podcast?
It’s called, “Agents of Nonprofit”. The name is a derivative of the tv series, “Agents of Shield”, as I’m a big Marvel fan. Side note: although the tv series started strong, I felt it lost its way after a few seasons.… Read the rest
Last week, a student of mine told me about a situation with one of his Salesforce clients.
It’s a small client, with two main user groups: an executive team and the end users.
The executives are the product sponsors and they are paying the bills.… Read the rest
Here’s my solution to yesterday’s challenge.
The goal is to automate everything and not make any assumptions. We also need to take into consideration exam creations, updates, and deletions.
To calculate
Here’s a quick Salesforce challenge for you. This scenario was the current state of a recent client project. I’ll share my solution tomorrow, but in the meantime, I’m curious to know what your approach would have been.
Simplified data model: