Let’s tackle one of the biggest challenges in the Salesforce ecosystem: the lack of visibility in the consulting partner presales cycle. This issue is a key contributor to Salesforce implementation sales cycle friction, project inefficiencies and time delays. The result is buffered effort estimates, change orders and project delays that can dramatically impact customer success.
I lived this challenge every day for 10 years as a presales solution engineer helping grow consulting partner Traction on Demand from about 20 people up to a platinum partner of ~1500. I’m excited to say we have made a giant leap forward with Hubbl Diagnostics Scan Requests. Read on to learn more about this customer success paradigm shift.
The chicken & the egg: transparency vs. trust.
Many Salesforce customers utilize consulting partners or contractors to help them execute on their projects. One of the biggest challenges in engaging with a third party to do work on a Salesforce environment is getting an accurate estimate of the work to be done. But why?
The core of the challenge is that you would need to grant administrator access to your Salesforce to allow the consultant to get a sense of what has been deployed already. The roadblock there is that you’d be granting full data and code access to someone who is not part of your organization. Even worse, if they are one of many consultants you are interviewing to execute the work, they may not even work with you in the end. This conundrum causes estimates to be generated with a lack of transparency that are not built on trust.
Giving the consultant access improves the chances of an accurate estimate, but it overweights your relationships to incumbent consulting partners and makes it difficult to switch.
And even if your consultant does gain access, getting familiar with the state of your Salesforce environment takes tedious time. The average Salesforce configuration has 27,000 metadata items, so it would take 4 days of continuous clicking just to look at each item of the entire setup for 5 seconds. That’s not including the extra necessary effort it takes for analysis, resourcing alignment, and more to create an accurate estimate of the implementation effort.
It is an often requested, but nearly impossible task for consultants to provide accurate estimates for their clients when they are not able to see how things are set up inside an existing Salesforce. The result? Inaccuracy, large ‘buffers’ of hours, change orders, delayed timelines and unhappy customers, consulting partners, and Salesforce executives.
The solution to a secure audit is as easy as an email.
Hubbl Diagnostics Scan Requests offer a completely new paradigm where secure Salesforce audits can be granted by a Salesforce customer to a prospective consulting partner in a completely frictionless manner for free.
It allows a consultant access to an org,
- without installing an app in the org
- without compromising data security
- without creating a new user
- without sharing credentials
All it takes is a simple email.
Any consultant with a Hubbl Diagnostics account can send Scan Requests to an organization they are engaged with. The administrator that receives it starts the scan, Hubbl’s automated metadata analysis goes to work, and once complete, the consultant is then notified to review the results. The consultant gets the visibility, and the customer retains their credentials and security. It’s as easy as that.
What is incredible here is that the Scan Request Salesforce assessments provide deep insights into a Salesforce configuration, user adoption, and security without including access to any transactional data records (E.g., Contact record details) or visibility into the details of custom code. Scan Requests even utilize Hubbl’s recommendation engine to provide suggestions to optimize the customer’s Salesforce.
Empowering customers, consulting partners and Salesforce.
Scan Requests have found a broad user base driving customer success across the Salesforce ecosystem.
"With Hubbl Diagnostics, we've been able to gain stakeholder buy-in more effectively, foster transparent communication, and ensure alignment across teams, resulting in smoother project execution." — Shane Copeland, Project Manager, Brilliant Corners
Hubbl Scan Requests are used by:
- Salesforce customers to improve RFP responses
- Salesforce consulting partners to improve estimates and make better resourcing decisions with quantitative & objective benchmarking of prospective customers
- Salesforce consulting partners to drive org health check campaigns
- Salesforce themselves to better understand their customer’s use of Salesforce (yes, we all know about the annual Account Executive shift...)
Build pipeline, drive revenue, and secure your customer’s Salesforce.
A recent Hubbl consulting partner customer used Scan Requests to complete 40 customer Salesforce audits in a month. Based on the high severity security issues uncovered alone and assuming only 4 hours to fix each (many take 40-80 hours), this exercise generated over $2M in professional services pipeline.
“With Hubbl Scan Requests, we were able to build trust, demonstrate value that others couldn’t, and beat our competition for a 7 figure professional services contract. We have multiple other deals in progress driven by Hubbl results” —VP Sales at mid-sized Summit Salesforce consulting partner
Even small (or solo) consulting partners are driving customer success with Hubbl Scan Requests. The average consulting partner with <20 consultants analyzes 10-12 customers per year and generates >$100k in pipeline in the first month alone. And that’s just from uncovered high severity security issues, only one part of the uncovered insights from a Hubbl Diagnostics scan.
TL;DR?
Customer success in the Salesforce ecosystem no longer needs to be a strenuous process. With Hubbl Scan Requests, consultants get to build estimates faster and more accurately than ever, customers retain their Salesforce security, and the overall relationship between the two gains a whole lot more trust.
