Secrets from the Industry - Red Flags When Selecting Salesforce or Business Software Consultants

Are you in the process of trying to find a consultant to tackle some of the hardest problems with your business software? Perhaps you have used consultants in the past, and your experience might not have been positive.

With decades of experience in this space, and from working at many firms that cause their clients to fall into this trap, we want to help you avoid the pitfalls of selecting a partner.

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1. Billable Hours

To set the stage here, I want you to think about why you would hire a partner. How do you measure success from a project? Is it how many hours the partner bills to the project? No, of course not. You have a set of core business outcomes you want to achieve. Why would you sign a contract for a bucket of hours that doesn't guarantee any of your outcomes?

Put yourself in the shoes of the partner. Do they truly care about their own efficiency or your outcomes? If you signed a contract for 400 hours, their goal is to bill you 400 hours. In fact, it is even BETTER for the partner to not achieve what you want in those 400 hours, because once you run out of hours, guess what's coming next? A change order for additional hours.

Takeaway: Look for partners that don't focus on hours and instead focus on guaranteeing that by signing a contract with them, your business outcomes will be achieved. Ask for completely fixed-bid contracts.

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2. Charging You to Do Discovery

A common trap we have observed is the "paid discovery" model. Here's what that entails:

When you first start talking to different consultant firms, you will be introduced to their sales team. They will tell you, "Of course we can do this project for you, but to give you an accurate estimate on how many hours you will need to buy, you will need to sign this paid discovery engagement so we can have technical architects do discovery and create a proposal."

Let me ask you a question. Say you are being charged $80,000 for a partner to do discovery. What are you getting in return for your investment? A slide deck with another proposal for how much the project will actually cost. What if their actual proposal is absurd and out of your price range? Did you just waste $80k on a slide deck?

This is all intentional. Consultant firms are banking on the sunk cost fallacy. Once you spend money on that discovery period, you don't want that $80,000 to go to waste, so you will feel like you have to sign their proposal to do the actual work, no matter how absurd that proposal may be.

Takeaway: If a partner is as experienced as they claim, and has done "many similar projects," have them give you an estimate for the full project up front. Have the partner take on some risk, not you as a potential client.

3. Can't Tell You Who Is Working on Your Project

As mentioned previously, in the sales process you will meet members of their sales team, and maybe even more technical resources. You might get introduced to an experienced technical architect, but who is actually working on your project?

A sneaky sales tactic is often deployed: the ol' switch-a-roo. You may really like some of the more technical people you meet up front. But when it comes down to actually doing the work laid out in your contract, you may find that the majority of your project team are junior resources, and that technical architect you met initially—the one you liked so much—is not the one leading your project.

This also ties into the billable hours. Put yourself in the shoes of the partner once more. Would you rather have a senior engineer do a task in 2 hours, or a junior in 20 hours? Taking longer to do the task means more hours billed, and more money for the partner.

Takeaway: Ask up front who will be working on your project. Who is leading the project? What are their certifications and experience level? If a partner can't tell you that, run away.

4. Not Standing Behind Their Work

In the software space, bugs happen. Sometimes the implementation doesn't meet all of your use cases and needs adjustment. That is just the reality of software projects.

Here is a little secret, though. Partners do not care about the bugs they introduce. They don't even care if their solution doesn't meet all of your requirements. Because guess what—to some partners, that just means more hours to bill you. This even ties into having junior resources do the work. The reality is junior engineers will introduce more bugs.

You didn't introduce the bugs, though, and you laid out all of your requirements. So why are you being billed more hours?

Takeaway: Ask for warranties on all of the work output the partner produces. Have them stand by their work, instead of adding more risk to you as the client if the partner does not do a good job the first time.

Final Thoughts

We hope that as you undergo this business software journey, these tips can be valuable to you in finding the right partner. The single biggest takeaway from this article: Protect yourself and your company. Have the partners take on more risk if they truly are experts, instead of putting all of the risk on you as a client.