A few years ago, "a solid Salesforce admin" meant someone who could manage users, build a report, tidy up a page layout, and keep the lights on day to day. That's still a real and valuable skill set. It's just no longer the whole job, and in most organisations, nobody's told the admin that the goalposts moved. The job changed faster than the job description did Salesforce today is a genuinely different platform to the one most admins were trained on. Flow has replaced half a

Every Salesforce project has a finish line. A go-live date, a sign-off email, a small celebration in the Slack channel. Somewhere around that point, most organisations file the system under "done" and move their attention to the next priority. That's the moment the real cost starts building, quietly, and rarely noticed until someone asks why the system that was supposed to solve everything doesn't feel like it's solving much anymore. Implementation and optimisation are not th

A few weeks into a recent subcontract with a boutique, under-ten-person Salesforce consultancy, the pattern became obvious. The team were genuinely excellent, sharp, hard-working, technically strong. But every project was being delivered on the back of that talent, not on anything the business had built to make results repeatable. Good outcomes happening in spite of the system, not because of one. Occasionally, that gap showed up as cost overruns. Good outcomes happening in s

Eight months ago I received a call from a client who was desperate. They had invested in Salesforce and other related products but were just not using them. Their words were "we know we have a Rolls Royce in the garage but have no idea how to drive it." The reality, once I got in there, was worse than that. It wasn't that nobody knew how to drive it. The sales team, the one team the whole implementation had been built around, had quietly stopped trying. And when the team the

The objection to commissioning a Salesforce audit is almost always the same: it's an added cost, on top of a system you've already paid to build, to tell you things you'd rather not know. That's a fair objection on its face. It's also the wrong way to frame what an audit actually is. The audit isn't the cost, it's the discount An audit doesn't create problems in your org. It finds ones that are already there, quietly costing you before anyone's looked closely enough to notice

There's a particular moment that comes up again and again with clients: they're about to sign off on a new phase of Salesforce work, a new integration, a new module, a bigger licence commitment, and something feels off about doing it on top of what's already there. Usually that instinct is right. The pattern I keep seeing New work gets scoped against what the org is supposed to do, not what it actually does. Nobody goes back and checks whether the foundations can carry the ex

Most Salesforce health checks I've seen follow the same shape. A consultant runs through your setup, screenshots everything that looks slightly off, and hands it back as a deck with forty or fifty findings, ranked by nothing in particular. It reads as thorough. It's actually the opposite of useful. More findings isn't more value A long list of issues does two things, neither of them good. It overwhelms whoever has to act on it, so nothing gets prioritised and most of it never

Every so often a client asks their implementation partner to "take a look" at why adoption is low, or why the reports never quite balance, or why the sales team has quietly gone back to spreadsheets. It seems efficient. The partner already knows the org. They built half of it. Who better to diagnose the problem? The trouble is that whoever built it has an obvious interest in the answer. If the diagnosis is "your requirements changed and nobody scoped for it," that's an uncomf

Last week I spent a few days with the South African sales team of Esse Skincare. The reason for the visit was to showcase the realignment of their Salesforce system, work I've been doing over recent months alongside their Director of Sales, and to gather feedback before we go live. I came away with four reflections. None of them are revolutionary. But the longer I do this work, the more convinced I am that the unrevolutionary things are the ones worth repeating. In-person sti

Long before I wrote my first formula field, I spent years on factory floors watching what separated efficient operations from chaotic ones. The pattern was always the same. The best plants weren't the ones with the most expensive equipment, they were the ones where the people running the machines could find what they needed, when they needed it, without thinking about it. That's 5S. And after years of implementing Salesforce, I'm convinced it's one of the most underrated fram

When Salesforce adoption is low, the diagnosis is almost always the same: users aren't engaged, the team needs more training, or leadership needs to enforce usage more consistently. More training gets scheduled. Maybe a new dashboard gets built to make things feel fresh. Adoption stays low. This cycle repeats itself in organisations of every size and sector. And it repeats because the diagnosis is wrong. Users are not the problem When a tool genuinely helps people do their jo

The fractional model has become an increasingly common way for Salesforce partners and organisations to access senior expertise without the overhead of a permanent hire. Done well, it's one of the most efficient ways to add capability to a team. Done poorly, it creates more coordination overhead than it solves. If you're evaluating fractional Salesforce resources, whether to cover leave, add project capacity, or bring in specialist expertise, here's what to look for. Genuine

Presales is where deals are won and lost. A prospect who leaves a discovery call feeling genuinely understood, and a demo that speaks directly to their specific situation, converts at a dramatically higher rate than a generic product walkthrough. Most Salesforce partners know this. Most also don't have the headcount to do it consistently well. Here's how to approach presales without a dedicated solutions engineering team — and where the leverage points are. Discovery is the w

Every Salesforce partner has experienced it. A project accelerates unexpectedly, a key consultant goes on leave, a new opportunity comes in before the current engagement is finished. Suddenly the team is stretched, timelines are at risk, and the commercial pressure is significant. The instinct is to manage through it, ask existing consultants to carry more, delay non-critical deliverables, hope the client doesn't notice. Sometimes this works. More often, it costs more than th

My first career had nothing to do with software. I spent years in production and manufacturing environments, working out why processes weren't hitting their targets and designing systems that worked better. It was hands-on, detail-oriented work, the kind where the gap between theory and reality is immediately and expensively obvious. I didn't know it at the time, but that experience shaped everything about how I approach Salesforce implementations today. Waste is waste, where

Selecting a Salesforce implementation partner feels like it should be straightforward. You issue a brief, partners respond with proposals, you pick the one that looks best. In practice, it's one of the decisions organisations most frequently get wrong, and the consequences take months or years to fully surface. I work with organisations at both ends of this process: before they've chosen a partner, helping them evaluate options clearly, and after an implementation has underde

Early in my career I worked in manufacturing. Not in an office managing manufacturing, on the floor, in the detail, figuring out why a production line wasn't hitting its targets. What I learned very quickly is that when something isn't working, the instinct to fix the machine is almost always wrong. Most of the time the machine is fine. The problem is in the process around it, the sequence of steps, the handoffs between people, the decisions being made without good informatio

Most Salesforce problems get solved by building more. Another flow. Another dashboard. Another custom object. And most of the time, that's the wrong answer. In my experience, organisations that keep adding to a Salesforce org that isn't working don't end up with a better system, they end up with a more complicated broken one. The underlying issues don't go away. They just get harder to find and more expensive to fix. Before you invest in the next phase of your Salesforce jour

Contracting an experienced Salesforce resource is one of the smartest ways to add capacity without the overhead of a permanent hire. But like most things in consulting, the outcome depends heavily on the setup. A contracted resource who is well-integrated, well-briefed, and well-managed will outperform their day rate significantly. One who isn't will cost you more in coordination overhead than they save. After working as a contracted resource for Salesforce partners across mu

Most organisations that invest in Salesforce don't get what they expected. The system goes live, the implementation partner signs off, and six months later the team is back to spreadsheets, the data isn't trusted, and leadership is quietly wondering whether it was worth it. This is more common than the industry likes to admit. And in the majority of cases I've seen, the technology isn't the problem. The real reasons Salesforce implementations underdeliver The most common caus