Category: Podcast

In this video, we will reveal the secrets to successful Salesforce implementations. By the end of this video, you’ll know exactly what to do to ensure a successful deployment! If you’re considering implementing Salesforce or currently are struggling, this video is for you! By the end of this video, you’ll know what to do to make your Salesforce implementation a success. From planning to execution to post-implementation support, we’ll cover it all in this video! Join us in this captivating podcast episode, where we converse with Kristian Jorgensen, an accomplished Salesforce professional and author of the ‘Salesforce End-to-End Implementation Handbook.’ Kristian offers invaluable insights and knowledge about Salesforce implementation and project management, making this conversation enlightening and informative.

Connect with Kristian: https://linkedin.com/in/kristianjorgensen/

Salesforce End-to-End Implementation Handbook: https://amazon.com/Salesforce-End-End-Implementation-Handbook/dp/1804613223/

00:00 Intro to Implementing Salesforce Projects
03:36 Journey into the Salesforce Cloud
05:15 Shifting Landscapes in Salesforce Implementations
07:05 Salesforce Governance and Control
08:57 Striking the Balance
12:22 Harmonizing Salesforce Vision and Structure
13:23 Balancing Inclusion and Technical Integrity
14:50 Strategically Streamlining Salesforce
16:05 Guiding Success to Salesforce
18:07 Steering Clear of Salesforce Pitfalls
19:32 Unveiling the Salesforce Customer 360° Reality
26:21 Unlocking Salesforce Value
31:17 Reviving Salesforce Projects from Chaos
35:25 Empowering Salesforce Implementation
40:15 Harnessing Past Wisdom

Transcript

Francis Pindar (A2A)
Hello, my name is Francis Pindar, and you are watching or listening perhaps to the Salesforce posse podcast, where I speak with Salesforce industry influencers so we can gain a better understanding of how to excel in a career path from a Salesforce admin or developer, to an architect. But before we start, I’m on a bit of a mission to prove that there’s an inner Salesforce architect in all of us, because for me, a Salesforce architect is all about design. But not all design is architecture. So I think of an architectural decision as something that’s gonna be hard or expensive to change in the future. So if you create an object in Salesforce, but flows, put reports on it, do integrations link it to other objects, this is going to be hard to change in the future. But I’m also trying to debunk the myth that Salesforce or an app at Salesforce architect is all about understanding the technical aspects of Salesforce, which is really not the complete case. So if you head to Salesforce AdminToArchitect.com/scorecard, you can score yourself against a free scorecard that measures yourself against the key skills that a Salesforce architect needs to be successful, and also gives you personalized feedback at the end. And you may be a little bit surprised by the results. But back to the show. And in this conversation, I’m going to be talking to Kirsten Johansson, who is a solution architect and now Team Lead at wag an IBM s company. And he is a fountain of knowledge around making Salesforce project successful. So I wanted to pick his brains around the things that you should be focusing on to really delight your users and customers that interact with Salesforce. He’s also written a fantastic book, the Salesforce end to end Implementation Handbook, which really is that end to end picture of how to deliver superior business outcomes using the Salesforce platform. So if you’re interested in understanding how to link the visions and goals of an organization to a Salesforce implementation, or want a demo to want to really show the demonstrate the value of Salesforce, or struggle to do that, or how how to manage everyone wanting a bit more than Salesforce, I’m really not knowing where to start. Or even just understanding the common traps that people fall into running Salesforce projects or agile programs, then I think you can get a lot of value out of this conversation with Christian. So without further ado, let’s go. I guess Welcome to the show.

Kristian Jorgensen
Thank you so much. Great to be here.

Francis Pindar (A2A)
So yeah, so I wanted to kind of get you on the show because you were kind of all things, you know, project manager and project creation and getting the best practice out of Salesforce implementations, and making sure it’s done the right way. But before we kind of get all into that, what was your history? How did you get into Salesforce originally?

Kristian Jorgensen
Yep. Great question. So I think it was about 10 years ago, I was working with a company that was going to replace both the billing platform and the CRM in one go, going from on prem to the cloud, Salesforce, and that’s where I first heard of it. I was in a in a channel management function, supporting sales directors and contact center managers in how to keep track of their business and control it. So I was an SME in the Salesforce project from the customer side. And then some, some years later, I moved over to the to the consultant side with the same company that was that was helping out.

Francis Pindar (A2A)
Okay, cool. So how long have you been in kind of in it, I suppose for

Kristian Jorgensen
Could you repeat

Francis Pindar (A2A)
that? How has it How long have you been in it kind of the IT industry before kind of moving into Salesforce? Yeah,

Kristian Jorgensen
absolutely. So it would be around five years now. First Four Years at Capgemini. And then now about a year at Wake which is a specialized Salesforce boutique company within IBM.

Francis Pindar (A2A)
Okay, cool. So how like, I think the so set the way Salesforce is implemented, I think is kind of starting to change, hasn’t it? Kind of we’ve kind of we’re seeing this shift in projects. Do you have kind of any insight in that and what you’re seeing currently in the industry?

Kristian Jorgensen
Yes, sure. And maybe it’s helpful just to go a bit down memory lane, even before I was part of the ecosystem, right? Because Salesforce started out as this with only Sales Cloud, right? That’s what it was helping out sales organizations, you know, better than me from back in the day. And it’s then evolved, right, with the both organic expansion product development. So Service Cloud, and then now spends marketing, commerce, field service, you know, integrations, analytics, so many things, and companies also leveraging and taking use of all those great innovations in the portfolio. Right. And, and that’s, I think, is what you’re asking, implementations have they also, yes, they have also seen a massive increase in complexity, technically, business, you’re talking to so many different parts of the organization now that you weren’t back then in the early days, right.

Francis Pindar (A2A)
I think also people, I think it almost get the right people are more aware of Salesforce, I think now. And it’s almost like, you know, you’re in when you’re even within your company, you know, people go, Oh, we got Salesforce. Now I you know, can we do this, this and this. And suddenly you’re kind of the scope of work kind of increases, I suppose, across across the project. So how, you know, when you’re first implementing a project, it’s kind of like, it’s always Greenfield very easy, right? So as the honeymoon, you know, this honeymoon period, I know, you talk about is kind of like these a bit of a start, and then you start maturing, and things get more complex, how do you see, you know, putting kind of governance and controls and things in a project, you know, what are the kind of key things you find people mistakes that people make going along that road?

Kristian Jorgensen
Sure. So I think, if we just go back to that, that Greenfield implementation, right, just just a little bit, because that’s really interesting, because it’s not all, all honeymoon, as a child that they’re the people you’re interacting with. On the customer side, may have heard of Salesforce or other CRM, but they there are so many things you need to introduce terms, best practices, what comes out of the box, what’s not, what does it mean configuration versus not? All these different things, is what you you need to slowly use change management for to get the insight, right. But then, yes, if we talk about the rollout, and the continuous improvement, there, you will likely have digressed or transgressed from being in this project mode to more continuous improvement of the domains you already have there. And how do you decide where to go? What what user stories or features or business problems? Should you attack an x? Right? How should you do it? Who reviews and qualifies? Do you have a design authority? If you’re working with partners, how do you structure that? Is it still statements of work? Yeah, sorry. Go on.

Francis Pindar (A2A)
Yeah, yeah. So do you even like you said, like design authority, it’s like, do you need when you know, when you need to design authority, or when you it’s a lot of complexity in that right as well. You might be in an ad stablish organization that has a design authority, but doesn’t know Salesforce? So yeah, how do you? How do you make those decisions? Right? Yep,

Kristian Jorgensen
sure. Yeah, for sure. I think if you know, in the traditional waterfall, you would have these gates along the way. Other business requirements understood and detailed, check. Okay, then go into design phase is designed to live up to and so on. So there you had it built in sort of, sort of, where if you’re going anything that looks like agile or hybrid agile, where you don’t do all of that architecture upfront to the detail, then you need to have regular points throughout with a regular cadence where someone with experience assesses proposed solution designs, and that may be at a mid mid level or it might be at the at the user story level.

Francis Pindar (A2A)
Okay, so going back to the greenfield site, if I’ve kind of like done initial implementation, relatively small, but it’s really successful. And now it’s kind of been socialized within the organization of people to kind of get They want to see what Salesforce can do. And everybody’s wanting a part of it right? And want to bring their their changes in. You know, adoption is high, and it is things are going are going well, but how do you manage that? How do you kind of make sure you’re doing the right thing? And you’re not kind of death by backlog almost. Yeah,

Kristian Jorgensen
absolutely. So I think they’re the whole concept of the product owner really plays a big, big role. Some Greenfield implementations are sort of hybrid, agile or more agile, meaning they definitely need to have a product owner part of the development team. And ideally, that person with all that knowledge that they have built up, should continue being part of the Salesforce team. And, and would also know how to qualify any requests that come in, right. But you need to have a forum where you review these types of things. What, what should be assessed against other product goals, which should be aligned to the overall vision and strategy of the company. But there’s there of course, needs to be the synthesis of what’s expected and desired by the organization and users of the solution, versus what’s the overall business strategy. So that’s, that’s where the rubber meets the road for whether this whole setup is really working, right? Because it’s sometimes two different things. Sometimes it’s aligned. And that’s great. But you need to have some some guidance there.

Francis Pindar (A2A)
Okay, and how does that work with so? So you got the product owner, who is kind of the responsible party, making sure that what he’s getting built is relevant for the values and the goals of the organization? But how do you kind of balance that with, like, the architectural and technical goals, like maybe the project’s been around for a lot longer? And there’s a lot of a lot of tech debt in there. And actually, it’s always constantly just swept under the carpet, because you’re focusing on the backlog and the business change. Right? So how do you manage that?

Kristian Jorgensen
Yeah. So ideally, the product owner is experienced, because it is a senior role, you are making big, big decisions within your organization. So the person should be experienced knowing there is something called enablers, or technical enablers that need to be in place for the fun, functional features to be able to be developed for the benefit of users. It needs to be a close cooperation between the architect and the platform architect or the team of architects and the product owner or product owners. So it’s a it’s a marriage, you could say, because fulfilling a long term roadmap takes a takes both views.

Francis Pindar (A2A)
So how do we get so it’s really just making sure everybody’s included? And those technical elements are thought of as we’re kind of rolling through through the change? Yes, yeah, exactly.

Kristian Jorgensen
And if you were asking, so how do you do that? Specifically, concretely, practically. I think there are different models, right? Maybe the more DevOps see is to say, we do a continuously in every sprint, we will also have some time allocated for technical debt or refactoring, continuous refactoring. For some organization that works for others, it’s to say, every four or eight sprints, we will have a dedicated sprint just for refactoring. I think there are pros and cons to each way of doing that. The latter may seem less Devoxx II or less agile. But if you have that concretely on your on your plan, you know, okay, every two months, we have a sprint dedicated to that, then it actually gets done. So yeah, better to have something that actually gets done than something that is, we’ll do it within the sprint. But

Francis Pindar (A2A)
yeah, I tend to prefer that as well. Because it also you can kind of like, get the stats out of what are the slowest running processes? What are the things that actually you want to focus on during that sprint? until you’re ready and prepared for it rather than, Oh, we’ve got 10 story points we need to use on technical debt this month. I’ll just tidy this up. Or whatever.

Kristian Jorgensen
Yeah, exactly. So if you’re, if you’re not doing anything to alleviate technical debt or continuous refactoring, maybe start with that latter approach where you save, dedicate a space And or some time at certain increments, but then have the ambition to go to the more correct or DevOps the way of doing it continually, right. Yeah,

Francis Pindar (A2A)
absolutely. I think yeah, I think and also it kind of comes down to like the level of technical debt, your as well, I think, a real problem for you for delivering change. Based on you know, which approach you take, which I think is fine. Yeah. So also, there’s a thing called the Center of Excellence, right? And you’ve actually just written the book, the Salesforce end to end Implementation Handbook, which is fab. Yeah. And in there, you kind of talk about the center of excellence and the importance of a center of excellence. Can you kind of describe basically what it is? And but also, why is it important when at what point should this start to become kind of brought into an authorization? Yeah, I think yeah,

Kristian Jorgensen
absolutely. So I think, maybe we can say, well, what it’s not right. So it’s not a management or that type of body. It’s a Governance Forum, a structure to guide a team or teams of people working on the Salesforce platform. Right? And, and when should it be there? So if you consider before you even buy Salesforce licenses, right, you will likely have a team of people in your organization who are assessing what should we do we want a CRM or a new CRM, okay, let’s go with Salesforce. And then they’re looking into what capabilities should be supported the business case, all of this, those people are likely some of the good people that are going to be part of the implementation as well. And on an ongoing basis. And likely, it needs to require both business and technical and project or PMO. Delivery people, because it’s really those three aspects that you want to put some governance in place around. So both business technical governance and delivery governance. Why? Because it lowers risk. If you have, if you have guidelines and structures and guardrails in place, then it just lowers risk, risk that you built the wrong thing that you don’t deliver according to your your plans, and so on.

Francis Pindar (A2A)
And you’re continuously maturing, rather than doing the same old, same old versus well.

Kristian Jorgensen
Absolutely. Yeah.

Francis Pindar (A2A)
So when you’re kind of working in Salesforce change projects, what are the kind of common mistakes you see happening when I try to manage a project?

Kristian Jorgensen
Yeah, I think let’s just highlight two or three of them, right? So I think it’s typically that end users or the target users of your solution, have not been involved or not enough, are not early enough. And that’s really a big risk, right? If you, you can sit and you can have workshops with yourself or some other parts of the business and say, Hey, we really need this. But it’s not really until you go to market that you see if what you’re thinking of actually meets meets the goals, right. The other is that it’s a siloed organization and what you’re doing in the corner, let’s say it’s an IT lead project. It should ideally be both IT and business altogether in some symbiosis. But if it is just isolated, and you don’t have anyone from the business or from senior management, sponsoring, and being part of the conversation, you risk that you’re building something that isn’t really in line with the overall business and business strategy. Right. So that’s, that’s probably the second one lack of executive sponsor involvement. Because if you don’t have that continuously throughout that, that that’s a big risk.

Francis Pindar (A2A)
So what would happen if you’d if you didn’t for some examples? Sure.

Kristian Jorgensen
So if you don’t have, let’s say, the alignment to the overall business strategy, and you have little engagement with executive sponsor, sometimes people leave the company. So let’s say you, you, someone else joins to take the role of executive sponsor, look at the project and see Oh, but what you’re doing here is not aligned to the business strategy, let’s discontinue it, or let’s go the other direction. So it’s really there. So lack of continuity if you don’t have all those things in place.

Francis Pindar (A2A)
Yeah. And I think I’ve Yeah. And also, I’ve kind of been on the projects where it’s a kind of a lift and shift technical fix side where it’s kind of like we’re replacing this with Salesforce because Salesforce is so much better. But they’re just lifting and shifting all that bad practices and everything into the new system value. And it’s not linked to any strategy or goals or anything approach that they’re trying to go to. And you just

Kristian Jorgensen
Conway’s Law, right? Where, if you’re designing it within the context of your own organization, and you don’t have external input or inspiration, right. Yeah. And

Francis Pindar (A2A)
I think this is where Yeah. And is that kind of the is that pull tug, I suppose between getting external people in to implement Salesforce versus the implementation yourself, or trying to do it in a hybrid way? And what level of engagement that has as well, I think, because even when you’re working at a consultancy, I think I’ve been in projects where it was almost like, they let the consultancies just do everything, right. And they had they really kind of as a hands off approach, and you’re kind of consultancy, you’re trying to, you know, deliver a result. But then they’ve got nothing to go on. They’re not listening to any goals or anything, or strategic vision. And yeah, again, it’s like, doesn’t give good positive outcomes.

Kristian Jorgensen
Absolutely, yeah. You got to have Yeah, sorry. No, go on. I was just gonna say, I completely agree. Right? You You need to have someone to interact with to understand the context and the users and the business. Absolutely. It’s key.

Francis Pindar (A2A)
Yeah. And communication as well. But it’s happening that, you know, that people are aware of it, that people engage with it to kind of get the buy in and get the adoption and get the kind of the quick wins and what’s in it for me. You know, how but yeah, absolutely. Okay, so Salesforce is all about, like, the customer 360. And I think, yeah, I think we’ve all been there where it’s like, yes, we want a 360 degree view of the customer. But what are the kind of realities? When so if you’ve got a project that is, yeah, we want a customer 360 degree view of the customer go? The realities around that? Yeah.

Kristian Jorgensen
No, I, I’ve heard and seen many different impressions of what that actually means, right? From account page layouts with everything on it, and endless scrolls. So yes, there you have it, all the information you want it about your customer, but is that in a meaningful way? Right. And then also, just to the, to the completeness of it, I think, yes, it should be perhaps the ambition, right. But also important to think of in the context of the specific user. So for a salesperson, the 360 means one thing, right? It’s things that are key and important to know, same for a customer service, same for a field service person, many different types of roles. And then I think secondly, the, it should be the ambition to get there. But it’s okay to start with one ad or to 90 customer view. As long as that’s the the ambition, right? Cuz she didn’t want to.

Francis Pindar (A2A)
Yeah, it’s kind of had the right data at the right time for the right role. Exactly. Yeah. Which is always tricky. And some organizations I remember, I was working for a insurance company. And actually, they were like, hey, Les. Yes. Because insurance is very siloed. Yeah, where you’ve got, you know, the organization sells many different types of insurance, but it’s all very separate. Yeah, life insurance is one department, you know, home insurance is another but they don’t really talk to each other. Like, they bring everything together. But then they started kind of coming across the challenges with that. So I remember there was an incident where there was, you know, rocking up to their customers houses and saying, Hey, look, here, we want to talk about your, you know, your life insurance and stuff like that. They’ve combined life insurance policies and home insurance together. And, and did have challenges where, you know, the people in the house, didn’t want the other people to know what insurance policies they’d had on them, right? Because they don’t want to get bumped off by their wife or their husband or whatever. And actually bringing all these policies together as a family unit, actually, Stein, oh, it’s challenges even just bringing data together, isn’t it? And wanting that 360 degree view and actually, he’s still going to have these kinds of firewalls and visible The key rules and stuff in place. So that not every, you know, yes, it’s tied together. But in some cases, not everybody can see everything. For the record seeing it for the right reasons.

Kristian Jorgensen
Yep, that sounds a bit more like also organizational business change. Challenge, right. For the insurer, right. Yeah. Yeah. With different divisions at the same time for the same customer segments. And so that

Francis Pindar (A2A)
yeah, and they know that they’ve got to connect together. But then yeah, it is finding that that approach that allows them to market right, but not Yeah, yeah, it’s challenging space. So if how would you go about if you were like, I know, there’s value in using Salesforce? Yeah, I know, the organization can really value on doing some processes or doing something in the Salesforce. But I know, obviously, I’ve got to get a budget for it. I’ve got to prove that it’s worth doing. Yeah, how do I get a case together to actually pitch it to say, hey, look, I think this is going to be a good piece of work to do.

Kristian Jorgensen
Yeah. So let’s say you, for example, that you are a business person within the company, right? Let’s say you’re working in sales as a sales manager or sales director, you will likely have seen that it works Salesforce works for you, or it has worked for you in in another company previously, so you want to interact with the executive sponsor, you want to get someone in senior management who can be part of that journey to convinced the organization to go for this right? You need someone from it like an Enterprise Architect, or some someone who can who can talk about, okay, system landscape, how’s it looking? What capabilities are supported by what what’s the roadmap? Where would Salesforce fit into that? Because you also need the buy in from the IT organization typically. And then you need this, this driver, it can either be yourself, or you can have someone from like a PMO. Organization, if you have that. And then you need to go, you’d need to do the work, right? You need to interact and understand those capabilities. Let’s say its sales, its account management, lead management, opportunity, quote, management, all of that you need to understand not in the detail, but you at least need to understand what what what are the processes? What are the pain points? Because if they’re on pain points, what are you really trying to do, right? So that that work you need to do and then look at the KPIs look, look at where you’re, where you’re tracking. Now, if it’s a, let’s say, sales domain project, you need to see okay, is it our order value that’s lacking? Is it our hit rate? Is it how long it takes for us to close our opportunities? So you need to look at what what factors within revenue is that that you can change and want to change with your with your project. And then you can build a business case around that together with someone from finance, and then present that business case and get get funding. So it sounds really linear and simple. But oftentimes, you have to go several loops. And that’s all right.

Francis Pindar (A2A)
Yeah, I think also, it’s kind of getting their credibility, right. So once you’ve proven that, hey, look, there’s a long lead time or is a manual processes happening here and getting X amount of mistakes, which is costing this amount of money, improving it at the end of the day, once you’ve done it, hey, I’ve reduced it by this. This, and then it’s almost like, yeah, the business cases that come from Francis, Oh, it’ll be fine, then because he knows he’s done. He’s always done your due diligence on this. Right. Yeah, which I think comes into that other part of that kind of magnet project or Salesforce implementation projects, that kind of trust. And that kind of moving from that functional way of thinking of implementing Salesforce and job done, kind of moving into that kind of trusted advisor, one to becoming vital for the organization. So you can start always fine. It’s kind of like, if you’re new, you don’t actually know truly, maybe what the actual goals and the vision of the organization are. And it’s kind of building up that trust such that you are actually then start getting privy to the what actually we’re selling five different products, and five different teams all selling it. And actually we just want have, you know it’s stupid, they can all sell the same set of products. And it means we have a cost saving by reducing the T, for example. And obviously, you’re not privy to that initially. But once you start building up the draft, and you know, you’re not going to go blabbing to that those teams, but then that can really help you in the way you kind of design and architect your solutions as well. Absolutely, yeah. So if I was like, going, so say, I’m on a project, and it’s not going so well, maybe it wasn’t, you know, it was more of a Big Bang project, you know, you’re halfway through and you realize that’s probably, you know, okay, we’ve got, it was a mistake, you know, we’ve now got a lot of stuff that we need to deliver, there’s lots of issues. And you’ve got problems happening? How do you kind of take yourself out of that kind of type scenario where, or maybe you’ve kind of been brought into a project where it is a little bit chaotic? And what are the kind of first key steps or key things you think about or do to kind of try and get the project back on track?

Kristian Jorgensen
Sure. So you’re saying it’s a project that was meant to be released in a big bang, after a bunch of different capabilities should have been built? Or are being built, but have not yet been released? Something like that? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. So I think I would follow the steps. Right? So what is it really that we’re trying to achieve, but what’s really key? So going through all the things that should be done earlier in the in the pre development phase, as like, as I call it, go back to the to the business case, go back to see what were the key pain points for the capabilities that are part of the scope? And then try to work with the with the with the project team to see is it possible to chop something up in releases? Could we perhaps go live with let’s say, the sales domain or the service domain, and then add on marketing and commerce later? Is that an option? Sometimes it is, sometimes you need interim integrations, otherwise, people will need to work in two systems. So there are of course, trade offs. That’s what being an architect is about is sharing the options, but highlighting the trade offs with with either one, right? Yeah. So I think, be clear on what what the goal is, see if you can chop it up. So it doesn’t become sort of much as a big bang. And maybe go with more of a pilot approach, and then roll out in waves. That that set of functionality. And then you can always add, add more later.

Francis Pindar (A2A)
Even Start Yeah, start small and experiment. It doesn’t have to be rolled out to everybody, maybe I think the smallest I ever did was literally account and contacts. And that was it. It was literally a company Rolodex. And that was it. It was just to prove that the integration, you know, the data migration worked to prove that, you know, they could see all the data. And really, it was all read only because obviously, we didn’t know if the data was right. So you can create any new records, it was literally a company Rolodex, but they could do a reporting, they could do loads of stuff they could never do previously, which they found really valuable. And then we just slowly iterated from there. But

Kristian Jorgensen
could they log calls and activities against those?

Francis Pindar (A2A)
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, even just that. And you know, it’s just kind of a revelation for some companies. On my word, we can see who’s actually contacting customers. Yeah, yeah. And I think that’s, I think, obviously, you kind of get a bit bogged. I know I didn’t, you kind of get a bit bogged down in that. Salesforce is so vast and could do so much. You think that you need to deliver a lot to get value, when actually, if you really look at it, and really kind of talk to people and users and read the the vision of the kidnappers, the strategic goals of where they want to get to, some of it is very simple, almost just get loads of value out of Salesforce by just using even just the company Rolodex and bringing that data together, right. Yeah. And so really kind of understanding that is like, absolutely key, and kind of measuring it as well. So you can see, actually, yeah, I did make a benefit, you know, did benefit the users. And they are, you know, finding it useful and now, the organization as a whole can can have a better picture of what’s going on. So you say your book coming back to your book you Why did you create the Salesforce in 20? Implementation Guide? Because yeah, it’s a lot of project management books out there. There’s a lot of Salesforce books out there. So why did you feel that you wanted to create a book on Salesforce implementation? Yes.

Kristian Jorgensen
Good. Good question. Well, I, through the years in consulting, I often wondered, there should be a structured way to do this repeatedly, just like we have best practices, and we have architecture patterns. We have development guidelines and testing guidelines. There are so many things. Ensure there is also for project management. And there is for agile, different things. But how do you mix and merge it all together in a in a Salesforce context? So I thought that’s missing. And then I frankly, just became confident enough and was pushed a little bit by by someone I have worked with previously, Tommy Berry, who I’m grateful for giving me the encouragement to pursue it, right. So it’s this, this mix of thinking, I would really have liked to have had this book when I started out in Salesforce, yeah, maybe I don’t get to work on all the different corners in the book, because it does span the entire implementation lifecycle, right. Sometimes, you’re only part of the development, sometimes you’re not part of rollout. But it’s still seeing what are the different bits and pieces involved and considerations and change management and communication and local deployments. I just think it’s a, it’s something that I would have loved to have had when I when I was starting out. And I also like to think that it’s, it can improve increase empathy. So because there are so many different people involved, it’s not just end users and developers, it’s many different parts of the organization. So if you read it, and you get to see what changes for many different parts, it’ll increase your empathy when you get to be part of projects and start to engage. That was my, my hope, at least, yeah,

Francis Pindar (A2A)
the challenges that other people have in the organization have that you can Yeah, definitely. And also, I kind of find that. Yeah, I don’t know. I feel like Salesforce is a lot more business led than it led. So it, it does have a kind of a different implementation approach. I suppose that a traditional IT project where you’re maybe thinking a lot more about the non functional requirements, so a lot more about, you know, the security implications where a lot of that is kind of taken off your hands by Salesforce. And not as the case may be. So making sure you get that balance. But yeah, it’s yeah, it’s a really fascinating book. And it’s definitely definitely worth a read. What do you think, like? Who’s the who’s the book? So you said it’s kind of like it’s aimed at like the people that you’d wish you’d had when you started? Your your Salesforce journey. But also, there’s loads of other stuff in there, like, you know, creating a CEO we creating, so it’s not just, you know, that kind of beginning journey, I feel anyway, I’m looking at it.

Kristian Jorgensen
Yeah. Yeah, for sure. So I’d say it’s a, it’s targeted at, at mainly end customers who are actually having and using Salesforce more considering implementing Salesforce in their organization. And that could be a product owner, it could be PMO, lead could be a scrum master. It could be an architect. It’s it’s really for for everyone. And then I think it’s for also consultants who are working with customers, because this really shows the considerations that companies are having to go through throughout the implementation lifecycle, right. Yeah.

Francis Pindar (A2A)
Cool. Okay, and if you have any other questions that you want to write

Kristian Jorgensen
not that I really, really can think of right now. I mean, I do know you have your last question.

Francis Pindar (A2A)
Last question. Yeah, I asked everybody. You ready for the last question? Yeah. Okay, here we go. So, yeah, so you asked it to pretty much everybody If you could wind back that clock top point in time in your past, and you could give yourself some advice, what point in time would it be? And what advice would you give yourself?

Kristian Jorgensen
It’s a great question. Let me think. So I think I would probably go back to when I was when I started on the consulting side, like five, five years ago, and I had been doing a bunch of stuff before joining, let’s say, the IT side, I’ve been in sales. I have a degree in marketing, I’ve been in channel management, and bi and finance. So a lot of different things. And I think it’s the same story for many different people in the Salesforce ecosystem, not everyone studies, computer science, and then goes into development or architecture, right. So my advice would be, have more confidence to bring your knowledge and your context and industry knowledge to to work. And then also, as soon as I, I got the appetite to do more than, let’s say, use the story, development and so on. Just speak up and say, I have appetite. For more, please, can I be part of, let’s say, an epic or feature level? Design? And so on. So speak up and reach for the for the opportunities? Yeah, absolutely. They’re not always just given to you.

Francis Pindar (A2A)
Yeah, completely. And even like, yeah, advice on your previous experience, you can bring on board, I think a lot of people, like, a lot of my students are kind of like, I’ve come from this industry or that industry. And I think everything’s amazing. Everybody thinks it’s like a stop. And Salesforce is a completely new thing, right? But it’s not, it’s like, it’s so linked to specific industries and industry knowledge and, and things like that. And actually just, you know, you can, you know, if you’ve come from a retail background, or a finance background, or whatever it may be, all these organizations in those industries use Salesforce. So it’s, and then Salesforce is so close to the business. Knowledge is so important, and so useful in your career. So, yeah, absolutely. Couldn’t agree more with that. And also, yeah, the opportunity asked for those opportunities and find out, but like trailhead, you know, find out or more about it. So you can go and give that advice and kind of go, Whoa, have we thought of this? This could be interesting. Yeah, and asking for that. Because I think organizations aren’t really, you know, well, back in my dad’s Father’s Day, you know, the beginning training as a life career and all this kind of stuff was now it’s it definitely, you know, if you want to progress your career, you got to think about yourself, and, and learn for yourself and reach for those opportunities, because they’re not going to just come.

Kristian Jorgensen
Yeah, get a mentor, either internally, where you’re at, or externally. Or perhaps I’ve heard of this guy who, who helps admins become architects, so there are plenty of resources out there. So use them. Right, right.

Francis Pindar (A2A)
Yeah. And even like, even if it’s not a mentor, a sponsor, somebody who can actually put your name forward or really kind of go, actually, you know, I can put you in contact with people that can help your career. So it’s not even you know, it’s not kind of mentor, such, you know, it always kind of helps as well. Yeah. Brilliant. So you’ve also you’ve actually created a website called the Salesforce implementation Help Center, which is quite cool. Can you tell a bit about that?

Kristian Jorgensen
Yeah, absolutely. So it’s based off the book where I describe four phases of a Salesforce implementation, there is pre development, before you even buy licenses and provision an org, or get new licenses for a new project. Then there’s development, this rollout where you want to ensure adoption and support it. And then there’s continuous improvement, which is everything after. And for each of those phases, you typically face some challenges, some common issues, and it’s around those that I thought, hey, maybe it would be useful for people to be able to access these different issues and the underlying root causes in a sort of knowledge article. So I went ahead and together with one of the technical reviewers, Tony calm. We built this community site or experience cloud site, where you can where you can go into SF dash e to e.com. You can find out okay, what phase Am I in? What overall common issue Am I facing and then you’ll be Presented with the potential root causes, and then you can see the resolution or strategy for mitigation. So sort of like the Help Center, where Salesforce has technical how to implement Sales Cloud or digital engagement or whatever it may be, then this is more for the implementation Help Center.

Francis Pindar (A2A)
I cool. Thank you so much for being on the podcast. It’s been.

Kristian Jorgensen
Thanks for having me. My pleasure.

Francis Pindar (A2A)
Thanks for watching or listening to the Salesforce posse podcast now please, please, please, if you like, or what you see or hear then please rate this podcast in your podcast player, as it tells me that there are people out there that actually are listening to this and that it’s useful to them. Also, it helps the podcast algorithms to kind of elevate the podcast in the different podcast directories which will be really helpful for me, as well. And finally, if you do have a question that you want to ask on the podcast, then head to Salesforce posse.com/message. And maybe you will appear in the next podcast, but apart from that, thanks for listening, and until next time,