If you’ve been in the Salesforce consulting game for a while, you know that “simple projects” are not always simple. Even more importantly, a “simple” org can be filled with hidden complexity that results in a variety of hurdles that Solution Engineers and sales teams have to work through. Trying to classify that hidden complexity and communicating with clients to understand their technical challenges is an even greater endeavor.
Looking to better equip their team to provide exceptional Salesforce solutions to their vast range of enterprise customers, Traction on Demand, a Salesforce Company (ToD) enabled their Solution Engineers with Hubbl Diagnostics, a Salesforce org intelligence product that accelerates the technical understanding of how any Salesforce org was implemented, allowing the team to trade in hours of tedious manual org inspection with a single scan initiated in seconds.
The bumpy road of Pre-Sales: estimating the unknown
Prior to acquisition by Salesforce, ToD was the largest dedicated Salesforce consulting and application development firm. ToD’s Pre-Sales team worked with a vast variety of organizations, across multiple industries and clouds — all with unique complexities.
For ToD, this meant their Solution Engineers were challenged with:
- Manual org inspections: The team often spent a ton of time and effort manually identifying what was happening under the hood of their clients’ orgs.
- Building trust from the start: The team often felt like they had limited visibility when it came to kicking off discussions with a new prospective client. Finding a way to understand their clients’ orgs from the start was essential.
- Understanding the whole picture: Solution Engineers need to uncover the client’s goal, both from a technical and business perspective. Often, client conversations are focused on a specific business unit interested in working with a subset of functionality, making it difficult to gain a holistic view of the entire Salesforce org.
- Accurate estimates and account escalations: Solution engineers must balance the client’s goals, timelines, and technical solution while estimating the effort required to complete a Salesforce project. Gaps in understanding due to juggling this variety of inputs often leads to bad assumptions that can cause hiccups during the implementation.
De-risking Salesforce project estimates with Hubbl Diagnostics
In order to enable the Pre-Sales team to overcome these persistent challenges, ToD utilized Hubbl Diagnostics to:
- Gain full visibility into any client’s org: With one scan, ToD’s Pre-Sales team was able to gain a holistic view under the hood of any Salesforce org. This empowered the team to classify org complexity and provide more accurate timelines and estimates—leaving less room for surprises. The metadata scans include results and insights on: object and field usage, automation by object, risky profiles and permission sets, code quality, rules, security, workflow, and more.
- Build trust through transparency: With Hubbl Diagnostics' easy-to-read visualizations, the Pre-Sales team was able to showcase their clients’ orgs improvements during check-ins, showcase the most critical information clients need to know, and showcase side by side comparisons of their org optimization efforts allowing them to build a deeper level of trust with their clients.
- De-risk project estimates: Salesforce Consultants know the difficulty that comes with justifying project costs, especially when working with a client who doesn’t understand the time and manual input required for a project. With Hubbl Diagnostics, ToD was able to communicate where issues were arising in their client’s orgs, what actions were necessary, and how much time they needed to complete the project. Clients were able to visualize the amount of work needed and see improvements as the project progressed through pre and post-project scans.
Saying goodbye to manual work: a nonprofit case study
ToD’s team ran Hubbl Diagnostics on the Salesforce org of a large federated nonprofit. This global organization worked in the children’s health and wellness space, and was looking to merge their local and global org to have all their data in one place. However, without an in-depth view into the health of both orgs, the team was apprehensive to begin the project. It was difficult to identify pitfalls in their org, making the potential merge a risky endeavor.
“Without Hubbl Diagnostics, the team would have had the tedious and time-consuming task of clicking through hundreds of setup screens to review details on how the solution was configured and coded.”
—Adrienne Cutcliffe, Nonprofit Solutions Lead, Traction on Demand
100 hours of manual review replaced by 1 scan
To prepare for the merge, ToD’s team deployed the first Hubbl Diagnostics scan to give the client a holistic view into their local org. The org was over 10 years old and the scan quickly identified areas of concern and opportunities for improvement.
“It helped make the organization a lot more confident in us. We were able to call out specific areas that other partners in the past hadn’t been able to do”
With a new understanding of their org, they were able to set a clear route to optimization. The first track of the project was focused on cleaning up the technical debt that had accumulated over the years, deleting unused customer types, and removing expired packages. Once the team got the org into a healthy state, another scan was run before the merge. This enabled the team to benchmark the health of the org after their remediation efforts.
“The client had signed up for a managed services engagement, and after the second scan, it was clear that there was 12 months of work due to what was uncovered through the Hubbl Diagnostics scan.”
With Hubbl Diagnostics, the Pre-Sales team was able to:
- Provide data-driven estimates: The team is able to justify their costs with quantitative and objective data.
- Increase project visibility: The dashboard produced through the scan made it simple to report back to the client what was truly happening within their org.
- Position cross-selling opportunities: Their remediation efforts continued with ongoing support from the ToD Managed Services team.
- Build trust: By exceeding client expectations with a proactive approach, ToD was able build trust throughout the project to create a genuine brand champion.
