The wide range of customer relationship management services offered by Salesforce has made it every business’s favorite. In fact, with the annual revenue of Salesforce reaching a record high of 17.1 billion U.S dollars in its 2020 fiscal year, Salesforce consulting has become the tech industry norm for sure. After all, the businesses today understand the importance of impeccable customer service in creating a brand and are therefore keen to hire a dedicated team of Salesforce certified specialists.
Whether a business is starting from scratch and looking for a Salesforce expert for carrying out the onboarding process or searching for an expert to customize a critical project or take care of their email marketing campaign, a Salesforce firm can do it all seamlessly.
So, are you a marketer looking forward to leveraging Salesforce for optimizing your business? You can make your journey towards Salesforce and CRM smooth by hiring a Salesforce marketing cloud expert; just keep the following essential points in mind:
1.Salesforce Marketing Cloud certifications
A Salesforce consultant must possess certain certifications in order to work efficiently for any business. With a variety of Marketing cloud certifications available, you can easily choose a Salesforce consultant whose certification suits your business requirements. All you need to do is enquire about the kind of certifications your potential Salesforce consultant has earned to prove their proficiency in their field of expertise. Here’s a look at a few of the important certifications essential for most of the projects:
- Marketing Cloud email specialist
- Marketing Cloud consultant
- Marketing Cloud developer
- Pardot specialist
- Certified Pardot Consultant
2. A thorough understanding of the client’s business
The main goal of any Salesforce email specialist is to solve problems in an organization by providing the best possible solution. So, it is critical that they are able to understand your business’s goal. To put it in other words, it becomes imperative for them to get hold of what your company is trying to achieve in the terms of the project assigned or a task that’s been given to them while getting to the core of the problem and providing the most complete solution.
3. Past work experience and references
Just as while hiring an employee, the employer asks for their previous job and work experience, you should also ask the Salesforce specialists to give references and examples of their previous projects. This would not only help you get an insight into whether their experience is going to assist your company’s specific project or not but also give you a chance to strike a conversation with references and question them about their experience working with the prospective Salesforce partner. Remember, if they do not have any previous clients ready to discuss their work, it might be a red flag.
4. Project Management Methodologies
You must understand the project management methodology of your Salesforce email specialist. It would help you get a clear picture of the amount of input you will be able to put within the project. Further, you should even ask them to give a demo of the completed project beforehand. It would help you learn how the overall system works and guide it towards success with your inputs.
5. Seamless orientation process
The entire orientation or onboarding process should be clear and structured right from the beginning to the end. Therefore, the Salesforce consultant should lay out a well-defined process that covers each step. So, do not hesitate to ask questions related to the same to your prospective Salesforce client. Here’s how the whole onboarding process should look like.
- Initial engagement will include defining objectives, success criteria, and communication frequency
- Collection of requirements
- Control process change
- Delivery of solution and testing
- Documentation and training
- Going live process and support
- Transfer of knowledge to the internal team
- Measurement of success
- Ongoing support
6. Critical thinking and problem-solving capacity
Solving complex problems through critical thinking is one of the finest abilities of a Salesforce marketing cloud expert. In short, they should be able to customize through creative problem-solving. Every company’s issues are different from others. Therefore, it becomes critical that Salesforce professionals have a unique approach while dealing with your company’s issues. In addition, their capabilities in the following areas should also be analyzed:
- They should have a comprehensive and integrated approach in problem-solving while taking into account the investments in your existing systems and applications
- Despite Salesforce being a huge platform, it can’t solve all the problems. So, the consultants must have the ability to explore different options and integrate them with Salesforce to deliver impeccable solutions
- The solutions provided should be reasonable and cost-effective. Hence, you must look for the right balance of management and technical expertise to ensure that they have the right breadth and depth to provide an optimum solution
7. Ongoing support and long-term relationship
While looking for the right Salesforce specialist, it is important to make sure you find someone with whom you can work for the long-term. This wouldn’t only help you have a long-lasting relationship with them but also make them a trusted advisor of your company. In short, a long term Salesforce partner can be your ongoing and trustworthy support who can provide you with practical solutions for any Salesforce related issues.
While you might start out with a single project, as your business scales up, you will be handling more and more projects. This is where your long-term and trusted Salesforce partner would come in handy and deliver continuous results with your company’s expansion and growth in mind.
Wrap up
Salesforce is a powerful cloud tool that can help any organization boost its marketing activities. It provides several solutions and tools to help a business smoothen its relationship with customers. That’s the reason Salesforce ranks second in the global cloud SaaS market. And if that’s not enough, it even has a 16.8% share in the global CRM applications market. In fact, a Salesforce certified partner can assist you in building creative email templates and visually attractive HTML emails. They can even streamline your Salesforce automation workflow while managing your email campaigns in SFMC.
So, get going and find a Salesforce certified agency that best suits your needs. The above-mentioned points will definitely help you get the best of the Salesforce services.