Understanding your specific business or your industry can significantly impact how well your Salesforce partner designs your Salesforce system and how smoothly the project will run. That is why it is ideal for your partner to have experience in your business or industry type.
Your business
Businesses can have varying levels of uniqueness and complexity, from a relatively generic one-size-fits-all business model to a company in an industry with little similarity to any other (e.g., medical devices, immigration law, etc.). Depending on your industry’s attributes, such as highly regulated, will determine how much experience your partner needs.
Salesforce expertise is essential but may not be enough. Industry and business function areas that you may need your partner to not just understand, but have experience with, can include government regulations and compliance, privacy, security, warranty administration, logistics and global support.
Value-add of business and industry experience
Partners with significant experience with a particular industry will build on a stronger foundation of understanding to accelerate the design process and have an overall better solution. They will better understand your:
- Business model
- Ecosystem
- Industry dynamics
- Jargon and lingo
- Industry drivers
- Industry best practices
Instead of just collecting information from you about your business, they will be able to ask targeted questions specific to your business type and provide suggestions and best practices based on the success of other similar companies. Like RSM with our extensive user-story library, you can expect the right partner to leverage their industry and business function expertise to not only improve the design but, ultimately, the end-user experience and operating results.
RSM has worked with a wide variety of businesses and industries that required specific expertise in areas such as government regulations and compliance, privacy, security, logistics and global operations. In growing that experience, we have built extensive resource libraries cataloging all types of use cases in many business situations and are familiar with the industry-specific tool sets and associated technology that need to be integrated into your Salesforce system. This expanded knowledge is especially helpful in providing our clients with best-practice examples that illustrate the potential of Salesforce for their business.
In absence of experience
Should you be considering a Salesforce partner without specific experience in your business type or industry, be sure to ask for examples of other successful projects they delivered in a similar situation. If they have a significant number of past projects (at least 500), they should be able to provide multiple examples. An excellent source to verify their number of projects is their AppExchange page.
The bottom line—do not dismiss the value of experience (and associated customer satisfaction).
