Salesforce Hiring Edge

How to Choose the Right Salesforce Partner (and Protect Your Career Doing It)

• Josh Matthews and Josh LeQuire • Season 3 • Episode 72

Share episode

Send us a text

Welcome to the Salesforce Hiring Edge, hosted by Josh Matthews and co-host Josh LeQuire. In this powerful episode, we break down exactly what it takes to hire the right Salesforce SI (System Integrator) partner — and why making the wrong choice could cost you your career.

From uncovering the #1 factor in Salesforce implementation success (spoiler: it’s client engagement), to red flags in partner pitches, to protecting your investment through smart, small-bite projects — this conversation is a goldmine for any leader navigating the Salesforce ecosystem.

👉 Whether you’re running a Fortune 100 or a 5-person startup, this is required listening before you sign another consulting contract.

💼 Links & Resources:

🔗 Ccurrents.com – Proven Salesforce SI partner delivering enterprise results with startup hustle.
🔗 TheSalesforceRecruiter.com – Your source for Salesforce recruiting and talent acquisition across the ecosystem.

Timestamps:
00:00 – Why Client Engagement Trumps Everything
01:00 – Navigating the 2,000+ SI Partners on AppExchange
03:00 – What Salesforce AEs Won’t Tell You
07:00 – Why Most Implementations Fail
10:00 – How to Vet Partners (Questions That Matter)
14:00 – The Power of Weekly Status Reports
18:00 – Root Causes of Technical Debt
21:00 – Bite-Sized Projects to De-Risk Big Decisions
23:00 – Final Thoughts: Protect Your Career First

Listen in, take notes, and remember: a good partner tells their story. A great one tells yours. Subscribe now to never miss a brutally honest take on hiring within the Salesforce ecosystem.

Josh LeQuire:

The biggest factor of success in a Salesforce implementation is client engagement. That is the one constant, biggest, most heaviest weighted variable in my experience. If a client is heavily engaged, providing feedback, participating even part of the team sitting in the stand-ups, the planning, the grooming, your odds of success and your implementation go exponentially higher.

Josh Matthews:

Welcome to Salesforce Hiring Edge, the show for leaders who want to hire smarter and scale faster with Salesforce.

Josh LeQuire:

Whether you're building a team or bringing in a consulting partner.

Josh Matthews:

We're breaking down what actually works in the real world. All right, let's get into it. Welcome to Salesforce Hiring Edge. I'm Josh Matthews, I'm joined by my co-host, josh LaQuire, and today we are talking about Salesforce SI partners. What should you know about selecting the right SI partner for your business? And, josh, there are literally, I think, like 2000 of them now.

Josh LeQuire:

Yeah, I think you're right, josh. If you go to the AppExchange you can search for Salesforce consultants and I think if you just do an empty search it's going to return thousands of results. And what's interesting about the market is you have the big four Accenture, capgemini, all those and then you have thousands of small shops, probably anywhere from 10 to 50 employees.

Josh Matthews:

Josh has actually agreed to, once a month, really explore how to hire the right Salesforce partner for your company and that could be a Fortune 100 company or it could be just you're a mom and pop shop and you need a little quick start. Let's start at the beginning. Let's assume someone is listening to this. They know that they need to select a partner. There are really two ways, right, they find the partner on their own or they call Salesforce. Maybe you can just give us the quick 101 lesson on what that looks like.

Josh LeQuire:

Your Salesforce account executive will likely have good partners they've worked with. You can go to the AppExchange, as I mentioned before, to find a consultant. You can do some Googling or you can have a friend or a referral and, honestly, a lot of my business at Seacurrents is referral business. I get referred by my clients, which I think is the best way. Sure.

Josh Matthews:

I mean network network, right? A quick note on AppExchange. Everyone's got four or five stars so it's pretty difficult to tell. What would you say for a customer who has never implemented any Salesforce product? Is it most likely that they'll contact Salesforce and then be introduced to partners?

Josh LeQuire:

I believe it's safe to say 90% plus of people implementing Salesforce the first time get introduced to their first partner through Salesforce. I think that's a true statement Okay.

Josh Matthews:

And now I have talked to a lot of account executives over the years area vice presidents, RVPs leaders. They are not all built the same. True, Very true. Some of these AEs are earnest, kind, they're trying to do the right thing, but three months ago they were selling printer cartridge ink or printer ink cartridges, right, yes. Or they were selling whatever cell phones at the AT&T store. What can a potential Salesforce customer expect from an AE? You know, depending on their size and on their industry and, let's face it, how many licenses or how many products they're going to buy, Can we assume that they're going to get a higher quality AE or even AVP or RVP access if they're a larger client there?

Josh LeQuire:

are a couple of ways to look at that. One is Salesforce slices up their books of accounts by. You could call it size of the client and that's measured in revenue or number of employees. They have small business growth, commercial, mid-market enterprise.

Josh Matthews:

So what are some of the disadvantages or things that a new Salesforce customer might need to investigate about the AE that has been assigned to them, particularly if they are on the growth side or a smaller organization? How do you make sure that you're not being introduced to the wrong SI partners?

Josh LeQuire:

I think that's a tough one, josh. I would say that you can't really change who your AE is at unless something egregious or terrible happens at AE, something very uncouth. I will say that not all AEs are the same. Some come with great experience, some don't. Some come with years of sales experience, some are brand new. It's kind of luck of the draw for who you might land as your account executive, and I can also tell you that account executives are constantly vetting partners like Securrent and like every other partner in the ecosystem and looking for good ones. Some AEs select partners who help them sell, some AEs select partners who help them build long-lasting, fruitful client relationships, or some find both right. Good partners can sell and good partners can also build trust with clients and develop long lasting relationships.

Josh Matthews:

Would you say that this is where the potential Salesforce customer really must advocate for themselves. We are a nonprofit please, we only want to talk to companies that specialize in nonprofit. Or we are a healthcare device company. That's different than health insurance. So how does that work? I mean, do they, do they communicate that early on to Salesforce and then are assigned the AE?

Josh LeQuire:

So when you come in through the channels of Salesforce to eventually land in a conversation with an AE, you are being very heavily profiled and placed into a combination of industry and sub-industry and Salesforce, like every large company, has its matrix of industries and sub-industries and how they view the world and classify industry. Then they're also looking for if you're interested in sales, cloud, service cloud AEs generally quarterback, other they call it core. You know sales and service cloud are core but sometimes they'll bring in a marketing cloud AE. That's not core. They'll bring in a experience cloud specialist or other types of AEs or engineers that know products, but your AE is the quarterback effectively.

Josh Matthews:

Sure and I've experienced that myself with Salesforce Like well, here's a solutions engineer or a customer success person who's very knowledgeable about recruiting and staffing and headhunting, and so they can bring in a little bit more technical guidance around which partners to consider.

Josh LeQuire:

Of course yeah, and AEs typically have a network of other AEs and engineers who can say I've got a client who wants to build a customer portal or I've got a client who wants to pull medical device data that they're sending to the cloud into Salesforce and have that set off alerts or inform people when there's something wrong. Right Partners do. When I'm a partner pitching AEs at Salesforce, I'm not pitching the wide array of the universe of what I can do. I'm usually pitching one very specialized thing, like I'm showing a case study. For example, you said med device earlier.

Josh LeQuire:

I've got a med device client and I've had others in the past where we take readings off these devices and put them into charts in Salesforce. Or if a device has an issue it sends a message to Salesforce and that alerts somebody when something's gone wrong. I've pitched that very use case to Salesforce and I've gotten calls saying, hey, I got a client who does that thing and, candidly, that's actually a good sales tactic for a partner and if partners are listening to the show and taking notes, they know this. Right, we're not ever going to get traction with Salesforce being the jack of all trades. We're going to show something we do really well, and hope that that's a niche of a niche of a niche.

Josh Matthews:

That when you're screening, when you're screening your partners, you're hiring an entire team, right? That's different than I'm hiring an architect or I'm hiring an admin. There's going to be different levels of consideration. And had a fellow on our show last night, mike Marochka, and he was talking about how the vast majority of poor hires are because, one, the wrong people are doing the interviewing, and he in fact said you know, I've never met someone who does interviewing for a company who didn't think they were great at it, and that's been my experience too.

Josh Matthews:

Now there are people out there I mean lots of friends with companies that have worked in Salesforce and implemented Salesforce and they tend to think that they're experts at determining what vendor is best for them or what consulting partner is best for them. They've did it three times in the last five years, right, or even 10 times in the last two years, and they think that they're pretty awesome. But the problem is, is a lot of these decisions that they've made, it's going to be another 18 months till they realize that they really screwed up. Do you know what I mean? You can hire the wrong person and you can know in three months like this was not good. You can know that.

Josh Matthews:

But when a vendor's got a six month project or a 12 month or a two year project, it's sometimes really hard to tell soon enough. So you've got to arm yourself with how to be really good at investigating this. What would you tell people to do? To start? We've talked about AEs great but now they need to really make sure that these partners are going to be aligned with them. Let's say they have three, that they're talking to five, sometimes it's one. What are maybe two or three questions? Just just to start with that. They should be asking and vetting the responses to ensure that this company is aligned with what their goals are.

Josh LeQuire:

I think the first most important question to ask is and to have the candidate partner respond with the appropriate responses.

Josh LeQuire:

Do you understand what I need to have done? There are a lot of really good salespeople out there who can talk the talk and sing the song and make you fall in love with them and you think that they are the coolest, greatest thing since sliced bread and they can do anything the coolest, greatest thing since sliced bread and they can do anything. But when it comes down to it, you need to be having conversations with your partners about the problems very specifically you're trying to solve, the opportunities very specifically you're trying to achieve, and that partner should play back to you as if it sounds like they work inside your business and know your business through and through, what those things are. So it may sound very basic, like oh, just tell me what I said, right?

Josh Matthews:

No.

Josh LeQuire:

I mean when somebody, when you ask somebody, help me understand. You know, do you understand what problems I'm trying to solve and explain how you're going to solve those, that response from the partner is going to reveal quite a bit about whether or not they actually understand what needs to be done and they actually have the knowledge and expertise. Because, especially if you hear that across three partners, you're going to see variations and responses very quickly.

Josh Matthews:

Isn't it true that there are a lot of companies out there that don't actually understand what their goals are? They just know that what they're working with isn't working, that they heard there's this magic software that if you spend anywhere from $20,000 to $2 million, or even more, it'll solve all of your business problems?

Josh LeQuire:

Your consultant should focus on process first. They're not talking solution jargon and beating you up with you know all these things that don't make sense, trying to sound smart. They talk about your process and what a given context of a process is trying to achieve. We're trying to increase leads, we're trying to increase revenue, we're trying to increase customer satisfaction. That partner needs to very clearly state those objectives back to you that you've stated to them in your language, meaning your business, your needs, your problems, your opportunities. Not in grand statements like oh yeah, we have a thousand certifications and we know this product. We're so cool, Look at me, Look at me. No, it's not about the partner, it's about you If your partner's not talking about you.

Josh LeQuire:

That's a red flag, that's a major red flag.

Josh Matthews:

A good candidate tells their story and a great one tells yours, and it sounds like that's very similar to what you're talking about right now.

Josh LeQuire:

Yeah, that's exactly I would say that's a huge parallel.

Josh Matthews:

Yeah. So let's get granular for the last few minutes of this little program until we're back next week. I want you to imagine for a moment that there's someone out there and they're going to make a decision on a partner this week or next week. They've gone through everything. They like all of them. This one they feel a little more connected with emotionally. There's a little bit more rapport with the lead person. They're going to interact with this other one. They just seem to know their industry just a little bit more and they need to make a decision. They can ask a single question to make the determination. Let's say the budget's the same. What's the question that they should ask these people to absolutely and as much as possible, not have the most fun on the project but de-risk it so they're not knocking on your door or my door in six months or two years saying we've got a nightmare of an instance and nobody's using it. What's the question they should ask?

Josh LeQuire:

How often will I get a status report and what will it contain? There you go and what's a good answer? Weekly, you're going to see your budget and burn. We're going to talk about milestones in the project and whether or not we've achieved those. We're going to talk about risk that we've identified and how we're managing those. We're going to talk about prioritization of the work and whether or not we're focusing where we need to focus for what needs to get done. And we're going to get a pulse check from you as a client on your level of satisfaction.

Josh Matthews:

I love it. How critical is it to have an internal project manager, a stakeholder, who can help with this project? Let's just say a mid-sized project, let's just say it's a 100K deal, like our 100 to 200K project. When the CEOs are the stakeholders and they're trying to run a big company, they never have time and then things drag out and things can get kind of weird. How important is it to assign someone to really manage this from the inside, and what kind of background does that person typically have for a relatively non-technical company?

Josh LeQuire:

I'm going to answer that from the perspective of the client and the vendor. Okay, First, the client. It is 1000% important you have somebody dedicated or allocating a significant amount of their time proportional to the risk and the size of the project at your company. The biggest factor of success in a Salesforce implementation is client engagement. That is the one constant biggest variable in my experience. If a client is heavily engaged, providing feedback, participating even part of the team, sitting in the standups, the planning, the grooming, your odds of success and your implementation go exponentially higher.

Josh Matthews:

I'd say 30 to 40% of my clients are Salesforce customers and about 60 to 70% are Salesforce partners of all sizes. When they get clients that have a bad setup, a bad Salesforce org that needs significant repair and it needs it immediately it feels like half the work out there is fixing half the work out there.

Josh LeQuire:

I can't remember the last time I've gone into one of my clients' Salesforce orgs and we didn't come across something significant in terms of technical debt, and technical debt is not something anybody ever wants to pay for, but it has to be fixed and done kind of getting a little tangential, but with the technical debt.

Josh Matthews:

How much of the technical debt was the fault of the implementer or the SI partner versus a lack of maintenance, updating, training, requiring teams to utilize it? How much of it is the customer, how much of it is the implementation?

Josh LeQuire:

There are two root causes of technical debt. One is lack of client engagement in building the solution. So sometimes it's not even the technical team at all, it's the client not paying attention, signing off on things and realizing once the solution is deployed and live, it's not going to work because they didn't tell the team what to build, they didn't test, they didn't train and they don't want to spend any more money and they think it's you know, if you build it they will come field of dreams. Now I'll say, the majority of the time it is an implementation partner following terrible practices, and by terrible practices I mean clicking and configuring everything you know under the sun, when a lot of that shouldn't be click and configure, when a lot of that shouldn't be click and configure. Following bad what we call DevOps development operations, not doing a good job, just managing changes in Salesforce in general and just not understanding the platform. There are consultants out there who have an admin certification but don't know a lot more than that and portend to know a whole lot more.

Josh Matthews:

There appears to be a significant lack of responsibility on the part of a lot of Salesforce customers that, just you know, they bought the fig tree and never watered it and they wonder where the fruit is.

Josh LeQuire:

It is rampant. I can't begin to tell you how many firefighting rescue missions I've been on. I'll never forget flying down to Houston, texas, to meet with a client and he had a terrible Salesforce implementation and he said this was the CEO of a very large company looked at me straight in the face and says Salesforce is nothing but a bullshit pipe dream. I hate it and it's like it's not. You just had a really bad partner and implementation and betters in implementation can really just. I mean, he was looking at getting off the platform Fast forward. We came in and made some improvements. He was very happy with the changes, but not without a significant investment. He paid the licenses the first implementation, the second implementation and then the third for me to clean it up and he still needs to make it. That's a lot of money.

Josh Matthews:

Oh, it's a lot. This is the Salesforce hiring edge. That includes hiring consultants, hiring contractors, hiring SI partners, employing ISV partners for managed packages where and when necessary, like all that stuff. Plan is to cover that on this show, but it's a little segment so we can't cover it all, and what we're going to be doing is, at least once a month, josh LaQuire and I are going to have a conversation specifically for those of you out there who need to make decisions about do I keep the partner that I'm working with? How do I hire a new partner? Should I do this on my own?

Josh Matthews:

We're going to be exploring all of these things and helping you develop, over the course of the next year, a really broad and hopefully a deep understanding of how you can protect your company, protect your investment and I'm just going to say this as the Salesforce recruiter protect your freaking career, because you start making bonehead decisions.

Josh Matthews:

If you're the person who and you're not the owner, but you're the person who rubber stamped a terrible implementation, if you're the person that never even asked for those status reports and you keep rubber stamping every add-on and the budget goes to hell and then the product doesn't work, it's not going to reflect very kindly on you when it comes to promotion time, getting a raise, potentially getting a pink slip and advancing your career. If you want to protect your career, you actually have to do a really incredibly good job at least better than 50% of the world minimum, ideally better than 90% and we believe if you continue to listen to this program and explore some of the past episodes that we've developed over the last three years, you will absolutely protect your career, make better hiring decisions and truly have a fighting chance at having the career that you really want as a leader, as a manager and somehow inside the ecosystem of Salesforce. Josh, any final words for our guests before we bail.

Josh LeQuire:

Yeah, there was something you said earlier from a previous interview and something I think that's going to help people to find the right partner. Actually, two things I'd like to say. Your partner should be talking from the first moment you meet him or her or them, about what value we are driving with an implementation. What's that metric we want to change right? That revenue metric, that cost metric, that effectiveness metric, that customer satisfaction. That needs to be front seat of the conversation. That's one thing I didn't mention. I wish I'd said earlier in the conversation.

Josh LeQuire:

I think the other piece that goes in line with that too is bite off small chunks of a project. Don't go for the gold-plated million-dollar project out of the gates if you're trying to vet a new partner we had talked about this last night, about new hires and it's something like the one-month project or the one-month hire I think we talked about Do the same with your consultant. Bite off a. You know, if you're not sure you got three, josh, you'd asked me earlier. I have three partners. They look the same, same budget, everything else You're still not sure. Pick one, do a small piece and if it works, do another one, and if that works, continue to go. I do that with my clients because I know it's hard to pick a partner. And I tell them look, start small. And guess what? I'm still vetting my clients within the first month or two of the project.

Josh LeQuire:

Do I want to work with them.

Josh Matthews:

Look, you fire clients every year. I fire clients every year, and it's not just about is it a good fit, it's like are you sane or not? This is the help me, help you, jerry Maguire thing all day long. The customer is not always right, but they are always in control, and the more you arm yourself with really good knowledge, the better decisions you're going to make and you're going to get what you want. Arm yourself enough so that you can tell good from bad and guess what? Ai is your friend, and so is this show. Josh, thanks for those final words. Thank you, we'll be back next week. Thanks everybody for joining us. Have a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful week. Bye for now.

People on this episode

Head Shot

Josh Matthews

Host
Head Shot

Vanessa Grant

Co-host